Death Note poll is gone for understandable reasons, but I had something I wanted to say about it.
The question was, if you have a Death Note, where you can kill people untraceably and without consequence, would you ever use it? And I feel like this starts running up against the Superman Problem.
Like, if you're Superman, how could you not use your power to improve things? You can save people. You can protect their rights. You can stop genocides and end wars. And with that power, how could you not use and still sleep at night?
But if you're Superman, how could you use your power like that? If you do anything, you're effectively making yourself Emperor of the World, right? If you stop wars, you're setting yourself up as an authority over governments. If you stop some wars, you're setting yourself up as an authority over governments who's okay with war. If you stop some crimes, but not others, you're tacitly endorsing those crimes; if you stop all crimes you're creating a horrifying totalitarian police state.
If you had the Death Note power, surely there would be easy ways to use it for good. There's a gunman holding a school full of children hostage; surely it's right to stop him? But then, surely Putin is doing more damage to the world than that gunman is; should you kill him too? But I'm pretty sure we'd be better off, on the whole, if Clarence Thomas happened to die of a heart attack this month.
And where do you stop?
But if you never start, then you have to sit there knowing you could have stopped that gunman from killing those kids, and you chose not to.
Why stop anywhere?
There are some practical concerns. Maybe I don't set myself up as emperor because I want to live a quiet life and not draw attention to myself. Also, the Death Note doesn't give me any special insights into guilt and innocence, or any relevant knowledge of policy, so there's a constraint on how much I can use the power to improve things. I might want to ask others for their informed opinions, but they'd eventually notice a correlation between their judgments and people dropping dead, and then they'd have an incentive to feed me information that gets me to kill the people they want.
But that aside, if I'm confident that a target is a gunman or a dictator, I'm breaking out the Death Note.
