If legalizing murder reduced murder rates so much that the public agreed it is a better moral stratagem for reducing murder (which is still an immoral thing) then yes, there's nothing bad about legalizing it.

The morals we base laws on a are particular moral positions which generally stem from shared values amongst the populace (yay democracy!). We all want to not be murdered (the value, which is generally contained in constitutional precepts of liberty and happiness), and police forces which try to prevent murder reduce overall murder rates (the moral stratagem), therefore we should make a police force to do so (the legal-moral foundation).

It might seem counter-intuitive to make murder legal because in thought experiments you're left wondering "is murder moral now?" or "what's stopping me from doing murder or someone from murdering me?", but if you think about it, A) murder is still something people consider immoral, and B) however legalizing murder works to prevent it, that's what stopping you from doing murder or being murdered. If the hypothetical were true, then a society where murder is illegal would have fewer barriers between you and murder.

In both cases we're still trying to reduce murder, which is the thing we agree is immoral and provides the justification for some of our laws, it's just that in one situation letting people sort it out themselves is the best strategy and in another policing people happens to work better.

P.S You're right about punishment for the sake of punishment serving no justifiable purpose. I hold it to be quite immoral; it's akin to revenge. Being severely punished to serve as an example/deterrent is not a role anyone wants to find themselves in.

If 'murder' is made legal, then it is no longer murder, per se.

We can define it as the immoral killing of someone though...

I wonder how that would work. Something that is immoral, known to be immoral, is made legal seems to me to be some sort of contradiction., if by 'legal', just and fair are meant.

Think of it like this: not-illegal

Legal just means whatever the laws are. If something is not criminalized/made illegal by them, then it's legal.

We want our laws to be fair and just, that's true, but if we lived in a world where making murder illegal actually caused more murder to occur, we would think such a system to be less just or less fair (or at least less desirable to live in, perhaps).

It is difficult to know to what extent, and why, punishment works or fails because:

A known percentage of inmates are released, commit new crimes, are arrested, and after conviction, are imprisoned again. These are the share of recidivism that is easiest to count accurately.

Inmates released from prison may violate parole terms and be re-confined. They are part of the recidivism stats, but they didn't commit a new crime.

An unknown percentage of inmates are released, commit new crimes, but are not caught; and an unknown percentage of people without a criminal record commit crimes, but are not caught or are not convicted. We know that that this really happens, but we have no reliable way of tying these crimes to particular perpetrators.

Because the real crime rate is unknown, we have no way of measuring the overall effectiveness of punishment as a corrective or as a deterrent.

We want our laws to be fair and just, that's true, but if we lived in a world where making murder illegal actually caused more murder to occur, we would think such a system to be less just or less fair (or at least less desirable to live in, perhaps).

Yes, far less desirable to live in any such world, if life has no value, or say it has merely pragmatic value, and pragmatism is morality. Then I think, we need to ask if such a world could possibly exist, if it's a possibility, and not a logical/existential impossibility. Can pragmatism encompass morality?

Can pragmatism encompass morality? — Cavacava

It can in the sense that societal laws are bargains we strike (bargains which we want to work and be mutually beneficial/practical). If laws are indeed moral stratagems then they need to be pragmatic to some degree else they wouldn't serve their founding values.

Pragmatism doesn't have much to do with founding moral values, but when it comes to assessing how to promote these values across different and changing situations and environments, pragmatism is indispensable for differentiating between competing moral stratagems.

So if it makes good pragmatic sense to harvest the organs of a healthy young person in order to to keep 5 rich old geezers alive, that is moral? Or is there something about the quantification of what is moral or immoral that misses the concept of what it means to be moral, and pragmatism is all about quantification. I think moral value is a quality & not quantity.

on purely pragmatic, consequentialist grounds, we ought to focus on rehabilitating criminals so that society benefits in the long-run. — monad159

Yes, let's rehabilitate the criminals!!!! (This is a bigger task than it might seem, because it requires some changes in society as a whole, not just in the released inmates.

Various reform movements (such as the Quaker "penitentiary"--a place for the penitent to engage in self examination and correction) have been tried.
Vocational training and education have been laid on.
Severe punishments have been tried -- it keeps prisoners in line.
Solitary confinement has been tried -- it tends to drive people insane.
Kind and gentle treatment has been tried.
Farm work has been tried (like at the Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana)
Factory work has been tried (license plate city)
Psychological therapy has been tried (may or may not work; depends on too many factors to make generalizations.

Unfortunately, rehabilitation is expensive. It requires trained staff, as opposed to lots of tough guards. It requires a social commitment to rehabilitation, rather than a "make 'em pay for their crimes" approach. It requires a clear understanding of the differences among prisoners: some prisoners criminal careers began at home (bad parents, bad environment, head injuries, etc.) and some prisoners turned to crime as adults. Differential approaches would be needed.

Even if prison rehabilitation is superb and quite successful, released inmates need on-going support and assistance. In the US, people with a criminal record have a very hard time re-integrating into society because they can't get appropriate jobs.

Released prisoners who return to their crime-ridden, poor, deteriorating former neighborhood are likely to be sucked back into criminal behavior.

So if it makes good pragmatic sense to harvest the organs of a healthy young person in order to to keep 5 rich old geezers alive, that is moral? Or is there something about the quantification of what is moral or immoral that misses the concept of what it means to be moral, and pragmatism is all about quantification. I think moral value is a quality & not quantity. — Cavacava

Well in some situations quantity is all we can achieve. Economic theory is a good example of how we orient parts of our society around what we think will result in the most profit for the most people.

But in this case, it's not as if not criminalizing murder is to sanction murder. The pragmatism we're looking for in such a situation is how well murder is reduced by the two stratagems. Pragmatism as a broad end goal in and of itself is a bit misleading because we often disagree about specific end goals; we can only look for pragmatic solutions in regards to those values we share and are trying to preserve or promote.

Even if the geezers are O.K with the butchery of the young to preserve their own skin, the young person would still deem it immoral on the basis that their life is arbitrarily being sacrificed against their will; the young person would never agree to such a moral supposition. A moral system which arbitrarily sacrifices certain lives is unappealing and hard to agree to, and in such circumstances morality tends to break down and gives way to conflict.

Edit: pragmatism isn't meant to encapsulate or outline morality with any good degree of precision or specificity, but in some moral contexts utilitarian approaches are the best we can do because of complexity. Harvesting youth organs for a few geezers can be crossed off the moral list because it crosses certain lines of personal rights that we all agree we ought to have. Give me a moral dilemma too complex to solve otherwise though (i.e, the whole world dies unless we harvest this one individual), and I'll anesthetize them myself, but I prefer to think of such situations as a breakdown of morality rather than murder being moral...

This is a good question and the answer is not so obvious, unless you take certain positions for granted, such as utilitarian ethics. This is a good case not so much to come up with answers as to examine our assumptions and prejudices and the role they play in the search for answers - which is what I think philosophy is good for: not to supply answers but to ask good questions, critically examine our thought process, and broaden the inquiry beyond the familiar and the banal.

A better example would be a real case though, and we can find such cases. Laws are not always passed solely for the sake of improving the lot of as many as possible. Religious laws, for instance, though they can be framed in utilitarian terms and are sometimes justified by genuinely utilitarian considerations, nevertheless are primarily motivated by non-utilitarian principles.

Or take ostensibly secular laws, such as prohibition on alcohol consumption that has at various times been put in place in secular democracies. Although health and public safety considerations were important in promoting prohibition, it cannot be denied that there was one other, and in the end perhaps the most important principle in play: this is immoral, and therefore should be illegal.

A similar battle is even now waged in the West over recreational drugs. Although utilitarian arguments have been mounting in favor of lifting the prohibition, i.e. it has been argued that prohibition is less favorable in terms of achieving the greatest good for the most people, resistance to lifting the prohibition is still strong, especially in more conservative societies, where moral prohibitions carry more weight than utilitarian benefits.

Perhaps instead of pragmatic effect of making murder legal, which strains current conceivability this argument might be applied to pornograpthy, where its proliferation may conceivably reduce the occurrence of overtly illegal sex acts. Do you think that pragmatism justifies the proliferation and legality of all kinds of porn, even kiddie porn, assuming there is a strong correlation.

We are entering into a virtual reality state of technological development where artificially generated virtual humans will be indistinguishable from the organic version. This means that moral arguments that generate around the disposition or degradation of porn actors will become meaningless. If so then the fantasy of porn, is just that a prurient fantasy.

Pragmatism seems to me to be the basis of technological morality. If x is more productive than y [and x meets all normative criteria otherwise], then x. The quantification of x can be measured, and morals becomes a kind of normative epidemiology.

I don't agree with this direction because, in my opinion, it conflates utility with goodness. I am not saying that pornography is wrong, but that the basis upon which we decide what is right or wrong is normatively skewed in the wrong direction. As a society we may achieve our pragmatic goals and reduce sexual crimes, but there are costs involved, costs that change us, our outlook, what we consider beautiful, terrifying, mysterious...