[harimau777]

Regardless of whether or not vigilantism is ever justified, I don't think that killing someone that has made a credible threat which law enforcement has shown they are unable to protect you against is equivalent to killing motivated by racism.

[vkou]

Lynching has always been driven by people reacting to what they believe was a credible threat, that law enforcement has failed to protect them from.

In the historic case, that 'credible threat' was 'race mixing', uppity ______s, jews that were too well off for their own good, etc.

When you let the most violent members of a small town community unilaterally decide what is, and what is not a credible threat, that is exactly what you will get.

[AndrewBissell]

Are you comparing a townspeople who faced daily threats of actual violence from a pedophile bully, and who watched him routinely evade justice in the courts, to lynch mobs who executed random people of a certain skin color for looking at someone's daughter the wrong way?

"Credible threat" has an actual meaning beyond just "whatever people think a 'credible threat' is".

[vkou]

It was credible enough to them that they would kill another human being over it.

The whole point of a lynch mob is that you get to throw out any objective standard of credible threat, and replace it with a subjective, heat-of-the-moment one, proposed by the thugs leading it, who know they will face no accountability for their actions.

That's what happens when you normalize lynching. Shitty people will happily use it as a weapon for injustice.

[AndrewBissell]

"credible enough to them" is a meaningless phrase which elides the crucial distinction at hand. The people of Skidmore were objectively justified in feeling physically threatened by McElroy. Lynch mobs were not.

If you want to argue a slippery slope exists (and I think that may indeed be the case), blurring these very different motives together does not bolster your case. I mean, the town of Skidmore didn't go on to exact this kind of vigilante justice on anyone else, did it?

[dsfyu404ed]

Exactly. Hindsight is 20-20 and with hindsight we pretty much agree this guy got what he had coming to him (even if the proper legal procedures weren't followed) whereas the people who got lynched for racial reasons didn't.

[CydeWeys]

I'm not following this logic.

You're claiming that the only reason anyone would kill is if they feel a credible threat to their own life, but this simply isn't true. People kill for all sorts of other reasons. Lynch mobs were primarily driven by these other reasons, not primarily by reasons that boil down to self-defense.

[anigbrowl]

It was credible enough to them that they would kill another human being over it.

Perhaps, but the question was directed to you, not to them.

[harimau777]

So in this case would you say that it was not a viable threat but was instead equivalent to being threatened by race mixing?

To be clear: I am not saying that their actions were right, just that its not fair to compare them to something like racially motivated lynching.

[rocqua]

The issue here is that morality is subjective. In the end, it is a group of people that decide what is acceptable. Tensions arise when different groups of people come to different conclusion. This occurs when those groups are separated by time, distance, or some form of self identification.

To compound this issue, there does seem to be some parts of morality that are near universal, and can thus almost be established as objective. However, deciding that something is objectively morally right / wrong is generally overturned later on. Certainly, there are many examples of objective moral judgements that have turned out not to be universal.

In conclusion, we should not strive towards a set of rules for deciding whether something is moral. Instead, we should try to get closer to consensus on what is moral without expecting to ever even get close.