Murder seems to have two common meanings:
Criminal homicide (what Clayton said)
Immoral killing
As long as you know what the other person means, then you can communicate effectively. As to this:
If you realize that the state’s rules are based on might makes right, then it would be murder if an agent of the state unjustly killed you. After all, if it’s murder for a mugger or the mob to kill you, then it’s murder for the state to do it too.
I think it’s actually impossible for the State to act justly for the same reason the State cannot calculate economically: because it is an institution of monopolized aggression, it has no idea whether what it is doing is just an expression of its own interests or is actually just. To the extent it has succeeded in monopolizing the courts, it has squashed all possibility of knowing what is or is not just. I call it the “hot air theory of justice”… as if so much talking and debating could establish civil right and wrong any more than it can establish the correct price of oranges in downtown Mobile.
Clayton -
Nowhere is precision of language more highly demanded than in this particular area. It is amazingly difficult to meaningfully criticize the status quo legal order; to do so, you must fix your language very carefully, and stick to your conventions with discipline. Otherwise, you just end up with a morass of unjustified opinion no different from everybody else’s unjustified opinions.
Clayton -