Reply #45: and the answer is:

[iverglas]

I have no idea. I don't judge people or their actions on the basis of newspaper reports. I have no idea whether the report is accurate and complete, or she is telling the truth.

If I were to assume that the report was an accurate and complete, and she was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, my impression would be that what she did was not at all immoral. In her position, I would likely have feared for my life, especially if I knew that the individual was aware I had gone to the police.

That's the bit I'm not getting. He was "about to be charged with assaulting her a week earlier". How in the hell can this be explained?? "About to be charged"? She reported the assault within a few hours. He had a record. Why was he still loose? Police "began investigating the rape". Maybe she had not been able to identify him. I don't know. I find it odd. But I can imagine circumstances in which they took that long to identify / arrest him, I suppose.

He had said "Don't tell anybody. I know where you live".

So the landlord "repaired the window, added security devices to all the doors and, in a gesture that may have saved her life, purchased a shotgun for her". What kind of security device??

The first time this tale was told here, there was talk of breaking windows and such.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=118&topic_id=191176&mesg_id=191190
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/laworder/story/9C58494B45470714862574F3006D0CA6?OpenDocument

In the first incident, the woman heard glass breaking in her basement about midnight on Saturday. She went to leave the house, and the man attacked when she opened the front door. ...

The victim reported the crime to police, and her landlord repaired the broken window.

She was home alone again Friday about 2:15 a.m. when Preyer broke the same basement window.

Now, it's "her basement door, leading up to her kitchen, was unlocked", and the basement was where she heard sounds, in the first incident. I could easily put this down to journalistic inaccuracy.

I guess what I'm getting at is: she was assaulted, her life was threatened, she knew the individual had not been arrested; did she know an arrest was imminent?

Had it been me, I would have stayed somewhere else until he was arrested, if I knew that the police had identified him and an arrest was imminent. Obviously, not for the next six months if the investigation was going nowhere or he couldn't be found.

I might also have shot at the door as he was busting it down, rather than waiting for him to come through. I'm sure there's some gunhead reason not to do this, of course.

I don't know how many doors her dwelling had. In the first instance, she went out the "back door", evidently not the same as the basement door. Was there no front door? It took him a while to crash through the basement door; if there was a front door, *I* would have used it. Especially if I was now in possession of a shotgun. The shotgun was a last resort, because it really is not a magical cloaking device. She'd never shot it before, and there was just no guarantee that it would do the trick in the moment it was needed. Avoidance was still the most sensible course to take, if it was available, any issue of morality completely apart.

She was under no obligation to do any of those things, obviously, except avoid killing if it seemed reasonably possible somehow.

But "moral" is relative, and all that. To me, it is more moral to avoid doing harm than to do harm, even if it is not immoral to do the harm.

I can't think of when I've considered something "moral". I think in terms of immoral / not immoral. This comes up in discussions of abortion. ... Bah, I can't find an example. My position is that abortion is not "moral", it is simply neutral. I can think of "immoral" abortions (like coerced abortions). But the choice to have an abortion is simply a choice, no "moral" overtones to it.

I would say the same about the choice to use force in self-defence. It is not immoral, so long as it actually is a matter of self-defence and meets all the proper standards in that regard. It is not "moral". It just is.

It isn't "moral" for me to brush my teeth, or go to work, or eat pizza. I suppose that if someone does something that fulfils some "moral responsibility" -- I feed my cat, or hold the door for a person with a disability -- I might call that a "moral" act.

But absent some duty to be met, and absent any evidence of wrongdoing of some sort, I just don't go around passing judgment on people's actions. Very seriously. And it simply makes no sense to me to call an action that wasn't a fulfilment of some "moral responsibility" a "moral" act. It just doesn't. Quite simply.

So what she did was not immoral. It wasn't "amoral", because that makes no sense. (Look the word up.) And it wasn't "moral" because it wasn't an act that fulfilled some duty.

You asked, and that is your answer. And I imagine it's going to make everybody very happy.

So if I cook dinner tomorrow, would that be moral, amoral or immoral?