It is fascinating - and unsettling - how many people react to this on range of "ha-ha, stupid medieval idiot, deserved to be murdered" to "typical American!". I know some cultures don't value human life as high as we in the Western culture do, and murdering people for trespassing on some taboo barely comprehensible to outsiders is not very far from our culture either. But what I see is a person trying to do a subject…
Why on earth would the nationality or religion of the guy matter? Wouldn't change my view that he was an arrogant idiot choosing not to believe local custom should apply to him. Him being atheist or Buddhist wouldn't change that. He chose to follow the well trod path of believing them not "civilised enough" and wanting to force change. Doesn't really matter what change, does it? It's a shame he chose to waste his lif…
Seeing the comments, it clearly does.
> Why does whether he meant harm matter?
That's kinda how we do morals around here? We treat a person that intentionally means harm to another person (e.g. if somebody shoots another person with intent to kill) as morally negative, and we usually treat actions that did not mean any harm with much less moral scorn, even if they led to bad consequences - e.g. if a car accident happens through no fault of anybody and still there's a fatality, we treat it as much less morally repugnant than, say, unsuccessful murder attempt. Moreover, in criminal case, to prove guilt, you usually need two things - actus reus (bad deed) and mens rea (guilty mind). Intent matters there too.
> It would not matter to a crocodile had he chosen to wander into a zoo enclosure.
People aren't crocodiles though. People are subject to moral judgement. That said, if somebody wanted to feed a crocodile that he genuinely believed is starving and in dire need of food, and the crocodile killed him, I don't think the person would deserve the kind of derisive mockery we see here.
> No. He was killed subject to the laws and customs of an isolationist territory
Yes, he was murdered. If you follow your moral relativist stance, you'd very quickly arrive at the conclusion that virtually every atrocity in human history - from ancient genocides to the Holocaust - is completely fine and justified, since it was OK by the rules of whoever perpetrated it. I don't think you really believe that.