Hello, anon! You’ve made an error that’s common among people who haven’t had training in logic or the scientific method.
In fact I did not defend—nor condemn—anyone. I made no value judgments on any of the characters in that meta at all.
You seem to have taken the lack of one as being an implied approval, but if that’s so, then you’re mistaken.
You see, logical conclusions are separate from value judgments. While logical conclusions are important in helping you to determine what moral or value judgment you should make, the logical conclusion always needs to happen first.
Obviously, you can’t make a sound moral judgment if you don’t accurately understand the situation, so first you need to apply logic from an objective standpoint in order to determine WHAT, exactly, it was that happened. In a court of law—perhaps the most relevant example here—you must establish all of the following:
1: What actually happened at the scene (which in the case of the shooting, we saw)
2: The outcome of the defendant’s actions (which in the case of the shooting, we saw)
3: The defendant’s intent in taking those actions (the point which is up for debate in fandom)
This last is particularly important in a case where someone died, because the intent of the defendant’s actions makes the difference between a verdict of self-defense/defense of life, manslaughter, murder without prior intent, or murder with prior intent.
You’ll note that only in a verdict of self-defense/defense of life will the defendant be found innocent. The others are all felony convictions, are are sometimes otherwise known as ‘murder 3,’ ‘murder 2’ and ‘murder 1.’
Now, in that meta I did not progress to the stage of declaring verdicts. I included only the logical process; the stage of objectively laying out facts and conclusions logically derived from facts.
Perhaps the foremost and most rigorous example of this art is the forensic report. A forensic report is a report that documents the examination of a piece of evidence. This report is admitted in court as part of a given piece of evidence. It includes not only the process, but all the facts garnered from a piece of evidence, as well as the conclusions that can be logically and inevitably drawn from those facts. You may also include things that can be logically inferred but not definitively concluded from the facts you garnered, but you must clearly label those as being separate from conclusions. A forensic technician should NEVER attempt to include speculations that lie beyond the bounds of conclusions or probable inferences from that piece of evidence, and they should definitely not attempt to speculate on WHY anybody did anything.
So that is where I stopped—at the point of laying out possibilities, facts, and logical reasoning that could be derived from those facts. And in fact if you read the whole thing, my conclusion was that, based on the evidence offered us in the text, it is currently impossible to determine with finality Mary’s specific intentions.
If you attempt to reason through, I’m sure you’ll see that this is objectively true. Of course, with a text it’s always true, because a text is not as solid as real life, and the vast majority of the time it will be open to alternative interpretations. That too is a fact of life.
However, if you would really like a moral judgment: if you reread my meta, you’ll note that in none of the possibilities I offered did I include a scenario which could be interpreted as defense of life. Therefore, if I were taking the next step onward to making a value judgment about Mary’s intentions and actions, my inevitable conclusion is that yes, her shooting of Sherlock was indeed an act of murder.
And as to my personal morality and how I feel about that, you will also find, if you do a bit of searching through my other meta, that I am the person who wrote the long-ass ‘Mary is a bad person’ meta.
So I hope that’s helped you draw a clearer distinction between logical conclusions vs. value judgments! Among other things, a better understanding of this will definitely help you to develop a fuller understanding of Sherlock and how his mind works!
