michael_vassar3 comments on Belief as Attire - Less Wrong
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HA: I chose my examples carefully to to try to match as closely as possible as many of the categories, relationship types, motivations, etc as I could, and the examples I came up with are both pervasively American and truly ugly from my perspective in the closest way that I could think of (matching type of motive, e.g. content of emotional state, not degree of emotional state or degree of ugliness) to honor killings. My point was that we don't have any very close matches. Your examples still don't match the intensity of honor killings, but more importantly, the emotional quality is utterly utterly different. Anger, retaliation, maintenance of public order, prevention of repetition, deterrence, The motivations for execution are simple and easy to understand, as is the balance calculation which compares the costs and benefits implicitly, even if a more careful calculation would disagree. At the most visceral level, honor killings are not in retaliation for some harm nor are they motivated by preventing a harm. This article is probably worth looking at for everyone who is still reading this thread, by the way.
http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=1445
By the way Honor killings != state sanctioned killing.