When were duels banned in the west, and why?

When were duels banned in the west, and why?

Bonus question: do you think they should be re-introduced? Explain the answer from a moral standpoint.

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>When were duels banned in the west, and why?
Because it was bad idea to have your elites decimated because duels for every petty argument were fashionable at the time.

>for every petty argument were fashionable at the time.
for settling every...*

Interesting homework assignment desu.

When's it due?

None of my professors is nearly creative enough to give such an assignment. But nice shitpost.

>do you think they should be re-introduced?

Well, I think two consenting adults have every right to settle their squabbles in any way they please, provided nobody is forced into a conflict they do not want to a part of. And better feuds are settled with one-on-one fights to the death than with tribal blood feuds and wars on national and international scales.

What about the state monopoly on violence, as well as the sanctity of human life and bodily autonomy?

Or we could settle feuds in a court of law. If the social norm is to participate in the duel, then you can't really say that you're free to not duel.

Thanks brah. I hope to be as good as you some day.

>What about the state monopoly on violence,

If we don't have the right to throw our lives away in duels, what rights do we have?

I didn't say anything about duels being the social norm. Courts of law and other institutions can reduce these conflicts, but the point is two individuals should have the legal right to fight to death if they decide by way of mutual consent that that is the way they want to settle their differences. Also, duels were much more about personal beefs or just another part of doing business. It was something that didn't necessarily have to deal what was legal or not. You dueled a guy because you're tired of his bullshit but yet he hasn't done anything illegal. Or you duel him because he (legally) put you out of business and you decide to go for broke (and even if you lose, if he's honorable, your killer will pay blood money or something to your family). Or some guy slept with your wife, so you challenge him. Or two guys want to marry a girl and show their love for her by putting their lives on the line. Or family conflicts that went beyond legal stuff were settled without gang warfare. The law is there to settle conflicts that can be settled in court. The duel is there for problems that is beyond the court's ability to handle because the law may rule in favor of one client, but the other guy refuses to accept it.

Also

>implying you wouldn't pay to watch nobles and bourgeois shoot each other over rich kid shit.

>state monopoly on violence

That's a joke. You can use violence on self defence so why not on consent? Both self defence and consent are considered situations that remove illegality but life is excluded on consent.

Real duels usually never ended in death anyways.

How do you think a duel could be carried out? with muzzle-loading pistols and swords, or more modern weapons?

The only good arguement is the one regarding public order. And it can be settled when you require duels to be properly regulated to be acknowledged as such.
Some US states actually have mutual combat laws, which means two adult persons are free to go at each other -under certain limits - as long as a police officer can serve as umpire. I think that is a good model.

It depends on whether you want to avoid death or not and also it probably also depends on the values of the culture. Many cultures prize the sword over the gun and so prefer a sword fight either to the death or simply to defeat. While in America and Britain, it was the musket pistol.

I would prefer people duel not to the death, whether they do so with guns or not. I only think two grown men have the right to do so to the death as long as it is just them and it is totally consensual.

Also, we watch grown men beat each other to a pulp for just money and titles all the time and the amount of physical and psychological damage in MMA, boxing and other such contact sports is well known. In many cases, the competitors are throwing their health, if not their lives away. But that's totally okay in our society. At least old fashioned dueling, to the death or no, there was often a purpose or a sense of honor to it. And it'd be far more "entertaining" if I can use that word without sounding too callous, to watch two people who really can't stand each other duke it out, shoot it out or clash blades not simply for some prize money and a belt but a for a lady's hand or for each other's estates or businesses than just two roid pumped grunts do it for commercialism's sake.

Because law got secularized and stopped thinking god affects events occuring on earth.

/thread

>Because law got secularized and stopped thinking god affects events occuring on earth.

This is the real answer. The original premise of a duel is that it literally who determines who is in the right in the dispute, because God will make sure the party in the right wins. Of course people kind of noticed that it was usually the better swordsmen/marksmen who won instead...

youtube.com/watch?v=pClh25TpIp8

Duels are are basically something nobody really wanted to do, but they had to because it existed.
>you insult my honor! .... if I don't challenge you to a duel, I will lose face, so I challenge you, hoping that you will not accept
>I accept, even though i don't give a shit about this honor, and just don't want to get shot, because I have no choice
Hence the law had to step in.

You are confusing duels with Trial by Ordeal. Trial by Ordeal was banned in the 1200s, but duels continued to be legal until the 19th century.

>i don't give a shit about this honor
And this is stupid. People in the late Renaissance, early modern era gave pretty much all their shit about their honor and reputation. A man was his reputation back then, for "gentlemen" especially, letting people spitting on your name and fama was being lower than anything.
Duels didn't happened only in the 19th century...

People cared about honor but I doubt most of them wanted to escalate disputes over "honor" to a fight to death. Except they had to, since the system was in place where if you don't, you are exposed as a coward and the other guy "wins"

Sometimes confrontations would end by both participants firing into the air, or other non-lethal solutions that allowed both sides to save face. That is possibly what Hamilton was going for in his famous duel with Burr.

I'll speak about late 16th, early 17th centuries France as it's my common point of reference.
This was right after a generation of terrible wars, but I can assure you that many many people were fully ready to kill and get killed over stupid stuff (or extremely serious stuff), be them low-ranking civilian bourgeois or high noblemen.
The death of nobles were in the thousands because of duels in that period and that's why during the beginning of Louis XIII's reign, a lot of work was done to prevent more bloodshed through duels. And they more or less stopped, in the high nobility, only when they had a very high ranking noble killed for duelling (François de Montmorency Bouteville).

Fencing back then was really about murdering the other guy (Cavalcabo, Dancie) and they sure went at it (see Duel des Mignons as the "epitomic" exemple). You don't seem to understand the murderous fervor people had after something like half of a century of religious wars and several massacres. After the St Barthelemey and two kings being murdered people really didn't cared a lot about polite fighting.

duels were an excuse to remove your enemies

more importantly, killing your opponent in a duel is murder by the legal definition. suspending the law for settling a disagreement doesn't have a place in modern legal systems

We should go back to using duels for conflict resolution.

Not the medieval through enlightenment concept of a duel, though. The ancient egyptian style. The loser does not die, but is banished forever to the shadow realm.

Also known as Detroit.

I'll take the bonus question.

Duels should NOT be implemented as-is. We don't want Uwe Boll and his or her ilk to abuse duels to take out or bully his or her critics.

If we're gonna have to reimplement duels, it should be non-lethal, on something BOTH parties have little to no experience in and with an impartial referee. There should also be a grace period AFTER the duel so that both parties cannot keep challenging each other.

?

As much as I love the CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES meme and everything Yu-gi-oh, it is just one way to settle duels.

what do you mean by the "west"?

>moral

rational standpoint

It's funny, cause we often criticize places like Afghanistan for so-called "honor killings" (I think the term is sorely misused) and blood feuds, but until not too long ago, even here in the West, honor was an extremely important thing. I think in America people were still dueling one on one or having violent family feuds in 1800's.

Kek

I am absolutely pro-dueling. Also for wergild.

If two consenting dudes just have to have it out over some shit, let em. I think this would lead to a culture where fighting and killing people outside of the sanctioning of a duel (say drive bys and lynchings and sneak attack beatdowns) would be met with scorn and accusations of cowardice. All terms would have to be agreed upon by the parties and also the duel should be livestreamed on my forthcoming website, DuelTube.

I'm pro-fisticuffs. If two grown men accept the risks of a fight, then why not allow them to do so? It's not going to hurt anyone else if two people have a disagreement and decide it's worth throwing down over.

There used to be laws in the books regarding "fighting words", and how certain insults warranted getting your shit slapped. That's the kind of stuff that I believe should come back.

Schopenhauer wrote a piece on how silly the concept of honour is and why duels are not a good way to solve disputes. It should be mentioned that he lived at a time when duelling was common.

In general, he holds the opinion that the concept of honour and duelling does not civilise man, but make way for the most foul-mouthed and boorish people in the sense that it gives them a way to legitimise these ill-manners within the context of honour.

For example, he criticises the very concept that insults can only be answered with greater insults in order to clear ones blemished honour:

>To receive an insult is disgraceful; to give one, honorable. Let me take an example. My opponent has truth, right and reason on his side. Very well. I insult him. Thereupon right and honor leave him and come to me, and, for the time being, he has lost them — until he gets them back, not by the exercise of right or reason, but by shooting and sticking me. Accordingly, rudeness is a quality which, in point of honor, is a substitute for any other and outweighs them all. The rudest is always right. What more do you want? However stupid, bad or wicked a man may have been, if he is only rude into the bargain, he condones and legitimizes all his faults. If in any discussion or conversation, another man shows more knowledge, greater love of truth, a sounder judgment, better understanding than we, or generally exhibits intellectual qualities which cast ours into the shade, we can at once annul his superiority and our own shallowness, and in our turn be superior to him, by being insulting and offensive.

[continued]

continued
Another important aspect is mentioned here:

>the [chivalric] code implies that the highest court to which a man can appeal in any differences he may have with another on a point of honor is the court of physical force, that is, of brutality. Every piece of rudeness is, strictly speaking, an appeal to brutality; for it is a declaration that intellectual strength and moral insight are incompetent to decide, and that the battle must be fought out by physical force — a struggle which, in the case of man, whom Franklin defines as a tool-making animal, is decided by the weapons peculiar to the species; and the decision is irrevocable. This is the well-known principle of right of might — irony, of course, like the wit of a fool, a parallel phrase.

In essence, it makes way to the lowest form of barbarism that is practised on the streets of ghettoes and in American jail cells. People who want to see this sort of thing in the civilised world likely haven't given this a lot of thought.

>I think this would lead to a culture where fighting and killing people outside of the sanctioning of a duel (say drive bys and lynchings and sneak attack beatdowns) would be met with scorn and accusations of cowardice

One also has to wonder if getting rid of dueling has resulted in an increase of these things precisely because the person not only feels a need to a satisfy their vendetta but also a need to not get caught.

In France dueling was banned by Richelieu because it had gotten so out of hand that all the nobles and soldiers were wiping each other out.

I think Arthur kinda misses the point of insults. Insults aren't a form of argument articulated in an offensive way, it's an offense without any necessary substance behind it. What he describes fits more into the definition of libel.

This is a more valid point, but it doesn't in itself paint violence as inherently bad. All he's saying is that it undermines the primacy of intellect: well, fine. Didn't Arthur himself write a big-ass book about how reason is ultimately subservient to blind irrational will?

In Wilhelminic Germany, duelling was still fairly common, and most of the people in charge proudly wore their fencing scars in their faces.
I'm fairly convinced that the culture this gave birth to, which considered reasoning and finding a compromise to be dishonouring ("flinching") rather than facing whatever the opponent throws at you openly without giving one inch is part to blame why WW1 happened as it did.
The people in charge of the other countries were socialised similarly, and it shouldn't be surprising that they were incapable of finding peaceful solutions.

The French are the most violent race on earth. Maybe close second to slavs. They need a strong government, preferably a military one, to keep them in check, otherwise it's mayhem.

>I think Arthur kinda misses the point of insults.
I don't think he does.

You should consider that in an honour-based culture, losing ones honour is the same as being discredited. In that regard, putting your opponent's honour to the test, in insulting him, you could regain lost ground in an argument - especially if you happened to be a better fencer, a better shot with a pistol or simply a moron. If he doesn't respond with an insult of his own or accepts your challenge to a duel, he obviously has no honour and thus there's no point in listening to what he has to say.

>All he's saying is that it undermines the primacy of intellect: well, fine.
That's not fine at all, actually.

It seems to me what he's saying is that an insult is a substitute for argument, in that it attacks the validity of its receiver's judgement or reason. But this isn't how it works. I mean it might work that way socially but an insult doesn't, in itself, say anything about the validity of one's position. If I call Albert Einstein's mom a whore I insulted him, but it doesn't have any bearing about the validity of his scientific ideas.

>That's not fine at all, actually.
I didn't mean it's fine as in it's good or even that I agree. But it's not a particularly outrageous philosophical position, especially coming from the author of Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

>It seems to me what he's saying is that an insult is a substitute for argument
You're not thinking practical enough. Not everything is as clear-cut as scientific theories - especially if they're based on mathematical models.

This is not about a debate over a mathematical proof, this is about how people are interacting in daily life.

You can see this sort of culture in practice in ghettoes and prisons. In order to be taken seriously, you need to prove that you can fend for yourself and back up your arguments if need be with physical force. The concept of honour validates a boorish kind of behaviour as it attributes a lack of honour to the one who's unwilling - or perhaps unable to do that.

>But it's not a particularly outrageous philosophical position, especially coming from the author of Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
It depends on what you mean by "outrageous", as I would say making way for barbarism is fairly outrageous, a lot more outrageous than what Schopenhauer had to say.

I am for duelling but it's not a question I find important enough to ever go out and argue for. Before duelling is even on the table we need to see if we'd legalize assisted suicide.

Because Justice is a power of the king. And a duel is a way to escape justice.
So duels were banned 'cause no one can escape the king.

>why?

because half a generation of young noblemen killed each other for nothing.

That's so retarded I'm incline to think that was a strong argument for it.