It depends on the situation.

First the "within your power" part has to be defined. If you are standing next to a burglar pointing a gun at your co-worker you are not in a position where you can say "it's within my power"...although technically IT IS within your power to try stop the assult, after all you could charge are the burglar. So what does "within your power" mean to you?

In the situation above I would say that they are not the same.

If the situation is something like Voodoo's scenario then yes, they are the same.

I disagree. I certainely think it would reflect poor moral character, but as bad? Not at all. Being a coward isn't a crime, just a vice. Action and possibility are quite distinct entities.

Demogorgon wrote: Voodoo wrote: Demogorgon wrote: Voodoo wrote: Demogorgon wrote: Voodoo wrote: Interesting question. If it is clearly within your power to prevent the murder, then you are in a position to decide whether or not the person dies. You have to make a choice one way or the other, so if you choose to not prevent it and you are in control of stopping it than you have passively murdered someone (my choice of words here). This is different from being the murderer. A person may not be capable of committing the murder but may be capable of passively murdering someone.

If I hire a sniper to kill someone, then I have the power to prevent the murder. The murderer is simply doing a job, whereas I am seeking a benefit that I will enjoy once this person is killed. It seems in this example that the passive murder is morally more reprehensible than the murder.

Not to drag this off onto a side issue. But killing people for financial gain and nothing else (i.e. contract killing) comes pretty near the top of the list of reprehensible crimes in my opinion

My situation is broader in scope than insurance policies, trusts, etc. I am including not only those, but hiring to kill for a more general higher quality of life not only those that involve financial gain.

We may be talking at cross purrposes here. I was saying people paid to do the killing were amongst the most dispicable around

So you are saying a murder for hire is the most reprehensible.

i'm not sure if I would call it THE most reprehensible. When you have people like Harold Shipman competing for that dubious title it's hard to say it is.

But dispassionately committing murder because someone has paid you to do it does strike me as pretty close to the worst thing a human can do.

Hiring a killer may be a bad example of a passive murder. After all, effort has been made to seek out a killer and negotiate a contract, although it is difficult to think of another situation wherein a person is in the position you describe in the initial post. If killing for any kind of gain is the most morally reprehensible than all intentional killings are going to have to fall under this category. A hired killer kills for gain, despite that being his/her 'job', the gain being the contract price which must have a benefit at least as great in magnitude as the measure of the cost (displeasure) of killing someone. The person hiring a killer has done so presumably for a benefit at least as great as the cost of the contract.

Both are for net benefits that are nonnegative. I'm actually trying to align my thoughts on your question because as I think about it a little more, I don't know if one is worse than the other, in a moral sense.

Oddly, I tend to think of killers for hire as not really being morally reprehensible , despite the obvious transgression of mores in nearly all societies.

Well in your scenario I would say they were equally bad. Killing for gain is one of the worst forms of murder. And whether you pull the trigger or pay for it you are particularly despicable.

Though I honestly do think in this particular place the contract killer is worse, simply because they are willing to kill so dispassionately and presumably atre willing to do it more than once. This I suppose is an exception to my usual view that the two would be as bad as each other.