Gingging Nava's murder an extreme act of irrationality

“It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
--Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

By Alex P. Vidal

NEW YORK CITY -- Businessman and Iloilo Press Club president Rommel Ynion has offered a reward of P100,000 to anyone who can help police investigators identify the gunmen and the mastermind in the girsly murder of Iloilo City socialiate, Mercedes “Gingging” Nava, and her companion, Erwin Fontillas, in Brgy. Calajunan, Mandurriao in Iloilo City in the Philippines on January 4, 2019.
“Beating up a minor like Joaquin Montes who is a Taekwondo black belt and an emergent psycopath is more acceptable than shooting in broad daylight with .45 caliber handgun 65-year-old Mercedes "Gingging" Nava, who was unarmed and helpless at the time of her murder. This is cowardice at its worst. I am offering Php 100,000 to whoever can lead authorities to the gunmen and mastermind of this horrific crime,” Ynion wrote in his Facebook account.
“The bounty should be higher. But, that is all I can afford for now. I would like to urge moneyed Ilonggos to help me raise the reward to Php 5 million. We need to stop these criminals dead in their tracks. This is not a laughing matter, folks. If this continues unabated, the next victim could be any of you. Lets stand up and fight this menace to our society. Please share this post. Make it viral if you can until it reaches a crescendo to awaken authorities to the urgency of this matter. Cowardice is a weakness we cannot allow to consume us. Let us fight!”

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We don’t need to be guided by any moral code to know that murder is wrong.
And the fact that the victim in the Iloilo murder was a woman supports the male warrior hypothesis, the patriarchal dominance.
Men perpetrate about 90 percent of the world’s homicides and start all of the wars because evolution has shaped men to become warriors.
We have been programmed to attack, destroy, and conquer.
We always fight to keep power once we hold it, and when we find ourselves without economic resources, we feel entitled to acquire things by force if we see no other way.
Once we have acquired absolute power, we become reluctant to give it up.
It took two world wars and a post-industrial economy for women to obtain basic rights and opportunities.
Aristotle once said actions themselves are not the source of immorality, but the character that commits those actions is.
Thus, an action is not judged good or bad based on the action itself, but rather its relation to the virtue of the person committing it.
Aristotle would give two primary reasons why the act of murder is wrong: first, it is an act of bad character, and so certainly the action is performed by a person with bad character, thus the action is not bad but it illustrates the actor’s lack of virtue, which is what we are really punishing; second, regardless of how much virtue or vice a person has, an act of murder is an act of vice, and since virtue is a habit (as is vice) committing murder brings a person’s character closer to committing murder again, since vice, like virtue, is a habit.
Thus murder is only wrong in that it shows the immorality of the character of the person murdering, and in that it increases the vice of the person murdering (since it gets them out of the habit of not murdering, and increases habit towards murdering).

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We can never think of murdering others if we only respect our fellow human beings.
Immanuel Kant said we must treat others as an “ends in themselves”, and not merely as a means.
What Kant meant was if we treat someone as a means, we are using him or her to benefit ourselves to achieve a final goal.
However, when we treat someone as an “end in himself or herself” we are giving them value for the simple fact that they are human.
Kantians believe that humans should respect other humans just on the idea of humanity as an end.
“I cannot, therefore, dispose in any way of a man in my own person so as to mutilate him, to damage or kill him” (Kant). One situation I would allow for someone to hurt or kill someone would be in the protection of oneself. If your family, friend, or even yourself is threatened by someone that you feel is going to kill you or severely hurt you if you do not act against him or her, then yeah I support the idea of using force.