“Please define “Depriving another person of their life”. Literally, or functionally?”
Oh, come on. We’re talking in the context of murder here. Causing someone to not be alive anymore... making them push up daisies... sending them to the great beyond... what exactly are you looking for?
“2) Please define “just cause””
Being able to demonstrate that you were within your rights in taking such an action, or conversely, not prohibited from taking such an action. In the case of murder, this pretty much boils down to asserting the right of self defense, in one form or another. You could cite a lot of other causes, but you’d have a hell of a time arguing that they were just.
“3) Please define “due process””
Due process is a panoply of legal rights and protections that are owed to a person by the state, which the state must adhere to in order to make judicial judgements against a person in a just manner. If you want a specific list of all the components of due process, well, you’ll have to go to the dictionary for that.
Now, I said “absent just cause or due process”, since one applies only to the state. You or I, as individuals, don’t have to provide anyone with due process in order to justifiably kill someone, but the state must.
>> Oh, come on. etc
Hey, I’m trying to help YOU by being persnickety about the “deprive someone of their life” thing. You’ve opened up a whole can of worms with it.
Wouldn’t locking someone away for their entire life in some sense be “depriving them of their life”?
Wouldn’t forcing a woman to cancel her plans for college in order to raise the spawn of a rapist, in some sense, be “depriving her of her life”?
If you WANT to go down that path together, fine — I guarantee it won’t bolster your argument, but we can.
Otherwise, why don’t you drop that wordy phrase and just use the word “kill”. We both know and agree what that means.
So your definition of murder becomes:
“To intentionally kill a human being, absent just cause or due process.”
OK?