[FatalLogic]

>But the idea of taking a bat to someone's head for betraying my trust in them is... Well, that's really the question to explore, right? How could someone actually do that, let alone approve of someone else doing that?

But, implicitly, you already do approve of that. Your government commits various forms of violence in your name, as all governments do - most notably in the form of military and police actions, some of which you may not agree with.

[xorcist]

> Your government commits various forms of violence in your name, as all governments do

That's why we have separate systems to keep the violence in check. Granted, it may not always work that well in practice, but it is important to the system that there are checks and balances in place. The question here regarded the moral system where someone can unilaterally decide someone else deserves to be murdered, and what makes people voluntarily choose this system.

[FatalLogic]

A more complex system, with checks and balances, seems far more robust and stable than a dictatorship, such as the Silkroad was, that is a good point. For questions of responsibility or guilt or blame, it shifts this from an issue of individual responsibility to shared responsibility, but that seems like mental trick to evade responsibility by diffusing it so much that nobody feels they are responsible.

Ironically, the operators of the Silkroad probably would have preferred to use that legal system and its checks and balances to deal with threats.

But they were denied access to "legal" methods, mainly because they were operating a market for illegal and dangerous molecules that many people like to ingest (these bad molecules should not be confused with the many legal and dangerous molecules like alcohol, nicotine, saturated fats, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, etc)

[icebraining]

If you are being targeted by the "checked and balanced" system for doing what you believe to be an harmless activity, isn't that enough to lose your faith in it?

[xorcist]

I suspect that much is true. It does not follow that it would make you prefer a completely arbitrary system, where the leader could decide you dead at any time. Murdering people without process also pretty much rules out the "harmless activity" part, by every possible meaning of the word.

[icebraining]

I think this is mixing up the timelines. He was threatened by LE to life imprisonment for the things he did before he allegedly procured murder. So that can't rule out the "harmless activity" part, because it hadn't happened yet.

As for not preferring a system where one person can decide you dead at any time, well: http://www.killedbypolice.net/