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Interestingly, avoiding this is one of the reasons that the United States Constitution provides means for legal impeachment of the president.

Dr. Franklin was for retaining the clause [on impeachment], as favorable to the executive. History furnishes one example only of a first magistrate being formally brought to public justice. Every body cried out against this as unconstitutional. What was the practice before this, in cases where the chief magistrate rendered himself obnoxious? Why, recourse was had to assassination, in which he was not only deprived of his life, but of the opportunity of vindicating his character. It would be the best way, therefore, to provide in the Constitution for the regular punishment of the executive, where his misconduct should deserve it, and for his honorable acquittal, where he should be unjustly accused

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, debates in the Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 20, 1787.—James Madison, Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Jonathan Elliot, vol. 5, pp. 340–41 (1845).

In addition to the practical and moral reasons which have been raised by other answers, assassination deprives the targeted politician of the chance to clear their name and it deprives the public of the chance to learn, in a fair and just manner, if the charges were justified or not.

The question is whether the politician is corrupt or the whole society is corrupt. Often most corrupt politician belongs to corrupt societies. Therefore, if you kill a corrupt politician, another corrupt will take its place.

Same thing happens with drug traffic. Whenever a cartel falls, another one takes control of the vacuum left, because the demand of drugs does not fall because a cartel in power is gone.

If people accept death of the corrupt politician, maybe few people would like to be polician, but the ones who take that path would be more corrupt than ever, because they must accept the risk of being a politician. Hence, they need to profit faster to take the risk.

What would happen with your hitman? if society accept that death, then your hitman would be hired to kill other people, because death by assasination would be nice for many.

Suppose, as per the premise of the question, that the public is fond of sponsoring assassinations. A clever corrupt politician could use that to his own advantage, and the nation's detriment:

• A politician could weaponize the state's propaganda system to mold public resentment toward prominent reformers, so that the gullible public could be wrongly persuaded to fund assassins to murder the reformers themselves.




• Organized assassination markets would justify using emergency powers to create a temporary, or even permanent, police state, which could be used to crush such markets, and oppress and murder reformers.




• Since it's an assassination market system, it would favor buyers with more money. So a wealthy criminal would have money to spend, whereas the honest poor would not. Therefore such a market would tend to best reward assassins employed by the ruthlessly wealthy to murder reformers.

Apart from whether your approach would be conducive to justice or a better political system or even just any improvement whatsoever — it will not work.

1. Do you think you are the first one who has the idea to kill the president or other politicians? They are quite well protected, and after the first few incidents the protection will be watertight.



2. 
   

   But the most important obstacle to your strategy is that a change in leadership in a democracy does not have a great impact.¹ In fact, this is a simple and effective litmus test for a true democracy: Does a change in leadership trigger a systemic crisis? We don't know what will happen in North Korea when Kim-Jong un dies in office(s). By contrast we know quite exactly what will happen in the U.S. when Trump dies in office: The vice president will become president.²Nothing much will happen, and certainly no systemic crisis.

   
   
   

   A system with properly working political institutions and true elections will simply replace the leader according to the lawful rules and procedures, and go on with business.

   
   
   

   If you want a quip: In a democracy, functions are filled with people. In a dictatorship, people are filled with functions.

   
   



3. The politicians have been voted into office by free elections; they are in office because many people wanted them to be. What makes you think the next election will suddenly result in a fundamentally different leadership? To change the general make-up of the political class, you must change the outcomes of elections; to do that, you need to change public opinion.

_{¹ Whether through violence or election. The latter has been a sometimes painful experience for members of either big political camp after their respective candidate had become president. A president is less important than some people, including the presidents themselves sometimes, tend to think. Cynics say that's because the real power lies elsewhere anyway; I'd argue that the balance of power and the legal framework limits what can be done by an activist president; and when one steps back one sees that the positions are not very extreme to begin with. That's not too surprising given that a large part of the population voted for them.}

_{² Thanks to nasch for the correction.}

Letting aside the ethics, who gets to decide who is corrupt?

Taking the USA's political state since 2015-2016, i.e. the last POTUS election we have:

• a large proportion of US voters who believe Hillary Clinton is corrupt.


• a large proportion of US voters who believe Donald Trump is corrupt.

It could be that they are both corrupt. Or that neither is corrupt.
What would be an objective way to determine who is worthy or not? How would it fit with notions like rule of law or institutions?

What if the hit man's employer are not so much honest citizens as, say gangsters wanting to throttle an excessive anti-corruption drive? What if a prime minister/president, aware of the risks, launches very aggressive police actions, essentially to defend themselves? What if, after a successful assassination of a part-popular, but divisive, politician, his supporters riot?

Unless, of course, this decision is taken at a governmental level in which case democracies have all sorts of way to impeach or indicate a loss of confidence in a government and don't need this suggestion. Which smacks of vigilante justice.

Couple a legislated removal from office with fact-driven adversarial prosecutions of the supposed corruption afterwards and you have most of the advantages of your suggestion, in an entirely legal manner.

The question is titled:

Why is it a bad idea to hire a hitman [to kill corrupt] politicians?

Well, from a moral standpoint, it's wrong. It depends on your yardstick for corruption, but let's say as you imply it's some run of the mill embezzling/defruading the state.

You've implied a benchmark of:

whenever politicians became too shameless in their corruption schemes,

..implying financial misconduct.

That's an abuse of power and generally considering to be "wrong" (in the ethical sense). However, if we look at this on the basis of first principles: If I steal ten dollars from you, and you then come and kill me (hiring someone is more or the less ethically the same thing), who's committed the greater wrong, me or you?

I think you'd be hard pressed to find someonewho argues that stealing money is ethically worse than killing someone - it's disproportionate. The key attribute of retributive jsutice is that it is proportionate. To quote Wikipedia:

Retributive justice is a theory of justice that holds that the best
response to a crime is a punishment proportional to the offense,
inflicted because the offender deserves the punishment. Prevention of
future crimes (deterrence) or rehabilitation of the offender are not
considered in determining such punishments. The theory holds that when
an offender breaks the law, justice requires that he or she suffer in
return. Retribution is different from revenge because retributive
justice is directed only at wrongs, has inherent limits, is not
personal and involves no pleasure at the suffering of others[1] and
employs procedural standards.[2][3] Classical texts advocating the
retributive view include De Legibus (1st century BC), Kant's Science
of Right[4] (1790), and Hegel's Philosophy of Right[5] (1821).

From an ethical standpoint, it seems evident that hiring a hitman to kill a corrupt politician is both unjust and unethical - to a certain degree. There's also an inherent problem with your criterion:

too shameless in their corruption schemes

Your benchmark here is how visible this corruption is, or more precisely, how corrupt the individual is perceived to be. This is problematic. Let's discuss the ethical reasons first, then move on to why pragmatically this is even worse.

So the next question is: How shameless is "too shameless" ? What amount of money or kind of corruption schemes are objectively worth "sending a message over"? If, as I think you will agree, stealing ten dollars from the government not worth hiring a hitman over, what figure is ? Ten thousand dollars, one hundred thousand? What price do you put on a human life? Who gets to deem that the politician is too shameless?

The problem with this unilateral approach is that a lot of people might not agree with your methods, or your reasoning. Look at Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth or Mark David Chapman: Complete nutters the lot of them. How do you verify when you embark on this course of action that you yourself aren't just, yourself, a complete nutter? Unlike a functioning judicial process, there's no due process or checks and balances. Looking at today's political climate, there are probably a lot of people who would feel justified in taking that action into their own hands, even though, their criterion for action might not meet the same standards as yours.

Whilst I am no Trump fan, I certainly don't believe he should be assassinated. There are plenty of people in the U.S who do and I am certainly not comfortable with their ethical standards because if those same principles were applied, they would feel justified in killing a lot of people I would consider innocent, or at least not worthy of summary extrajudicial execution.

Can you imagine what it would be like if every SJW, right wing blogger and Youtube commenter felt they were justified in taking the lives of people who had transgressed their imaginary rulebook?

We need to also ask whilst on the topic of personal culpability, what is a politician? At the most abstract, I submit it's somebody who influences or attempts to influence the body politic. So by killing someone you perceive to be corrupt, or a lizard person, or whatever, you are in fact attempting to influence the political process. So if you hire a hitman to kill whoever, isn't somebody else justified in viewing you as corrupt and hiring a hitman to take you out?

These are just some quick moral arguments against it off the top off my head. There's a far greater problem with this notion. It doesn't really work.

First of all, let's examine your proposition:

someone hired a hitman that eliminates a few important figures,
basically sending a message that most of the people are thinking: "We
can see what you're doing and we won't just stay and do nothing"? In
my very naive opinion, this will send a warning message to any future
person occupying that role that they shouldn't fall into corruption
schemes or at least not as much.

Well, for starters, I don't think the politician in question will be falling into any corruption schemes anymore, assuming that the hitman is successful. So what message are you really sending? And to whom? The guy's dead.

So how are you getting your message across? No doubt if the politician is visibly corrupt enough, people might suspect it had something to do with it but there's no clear cut guarantee. Declaring some manifesto alongside it only increases your risk of getting caught.

Aside from your hitman probably having something to say about that; what guarantee do you have that either this corrupt cabal or the general populace is going to take you seriously? It's a nice daydream, but I don't think it really works out that way in practice.

There's another fatal flaw with your plan: Darwinism.

You see, by your stated criterion, you're only targeting the most visibly corrupt politicians. Let's assume you have a lot of money and a really good hitman. What happens in the long run? You don't kill all the corrupt politicians, you just kill the visible, and, by extension, the inept ones. That just ends up leaving the ones who excel at being corrupt. This leaves you worse off than where you started. This happens a lot in nature.

For example, we've possessed the genetic weaponry necessary to wipe out the malarial mosquito for sometime. The reason why we haven't done it, is that even though malaria kills a lot of people is that we don't know exactly what else it kills and what effects might result.

We might inadvertantly lift the lid on another disease that's even worse. One of these politicians might be corrupt but be keeping someone even worse from rising up the food-chain.

You see, for politicians to become so shameless unaccountable to their electorate, it doesn't just imply that they themselves have taken advantage of the government. What it usually means is that the institutions of government - the complex systems and ecosystems of government and governance have themselves broken down. It's quite easy for people to point to a divisive figure like say, Donald Trump, and say "It's all his fault" but the reality is that these people are the symptoms of the problem, not the cause.

The United States has had real trouble just functioning for a long time, and its democratic institutions are in many ways fundamentally broken. The causes of this are legion, but can basically be summed up with their culture and history has directly determined the outcome they have right now. Likewise, the failure of institutions and democracy in Hungary or Poland or Bulgaria (or wherever you are) aren't the result of just one person but a systemic failure. You can't cure this with a bullet - people have tried.

This leads to my last point: Unintended consequences.

We don't know what forces might be unleashed by a single assassination. Look at Archduke Ferdinand. He was killed because he was a symbol of the Austro-Hungarian domination of the Balkans. Princip believed that by assassinating him he was furthering the course of Serbian freedom. Ironically Ferdinand was a reformer, and they had a better chance under Ferdinand.

What happened instead is that the vast machinery of Europe, having almost stepped back from the brink of war, was thrown into four years of wanton and unnecessary bloodshed. The Serbian state was nearly utterly destroyed. It set the preconditions of the Second World War which was the most destructive war in history. The consequences of that single action set of a chain of events that led to the deaths of up to 100 million people.

Now maybe assassinating Viktor Orban or Justin Trudeau or whoever wouldn't set off such a conflagration, but here's the thing: you just don't know. If you paid someone to pull the trigger, all that blood is essentially on your hands.

I could go on to list all the times this hasn't worked or how internal power struggles in crumbling democracies often fail to deliver an improvement in living conditions and civil rights for the people.

The Arab Spring is a rather depressing reminder of how even well intentioned grassroots attempts at overthrowing tyranny can lead to both its entrenchment and expansion - look at Eygypt, Syria and Libya.

I think you'll also find that decapitating the leadership might effectively, most systems are somewhat resilient to it. We can look the Taliban, Al-Qaeda for examples on how despite numerous attacks/assassinations of leaders, they remain just as capable of carrying on fighting as long as their support networks are in place.

So going back to incentives. I mentioned before that in the event you described wasn't worth killing someone over. So when is it?

Let's consider briefly the Trolley Dilemma.

You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise
incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a
lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will
be redirected onto a side track, and the five people on the main track
will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side
track. You have two options:

Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main
track.

Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where
it will kill one person.

Which is the more ethical option?

Another commenter brought up the example of how members of the German military tried to assassinate Hitler (I believe they tried a couple of times) and instigate a coup.

Intriguingly, someone else brought up Duterte.

There's only an ethical and pragmatic case to kill a politician where there is a clear threat to the lives of people under the rule of that person - where you can make a clear case that intervening would stop this person killing or enacting policies that would directly and explicitly result in killing innocent people. Killing Hitler might have shortened the Second World War and prevented part of the Holocaust.

In the case of Duterte, who has openly advocated and directly enabled the extrajudicial killings of tens of thousands of people, there is in fact an ethical, and perhaps, pragmatic case to intervene. This is clear and distinct from policies by national leaders who have decided to go to war in what they perceive to be the national interest, such as Russia or the United States.

These aren't ideal either, but quite distinct from using murder as an instrument of social policy. I submit that hiring a hitman to kill a single person differs only in magnitude to these crimes however, not only is it inethical in the scenario you are talking about, but from a practical standpoint, it's likely to be ineffective - and therefore even more unforgivable.

The best way to fight corruption is to build strong and empower strong democratic institutions with respect for the rule of law. This is probably cold comfort to someone living in Eastern Europe where corruption and illiberalism has been the norm for a very long time.

N.B. Please forgive what is a rather rough draft as I am procrastinating from programming at 4am. That said, probably a bad idea to kill politicians.

First of all, what's the problem you're trying to solve?

You want better government?

Then consider that corruption may not be as big a problem as incompetence, ideology or partisanship, in some societies.

So you kill all the corrupt politicians, but leave the incompetent, ideologically-driven, hyper-partisan ones in place. You may not have solved the problem. In fact, you may have made it worse, because politicians are a mixed bag.

A politician may be corrupt and really good at constituent services. A politician may be corrupt and a staunch anti-Communist.

Also, what makes you think that a corrupt politician won't be replaced by another corrupt politician? What's the point in targeting the person if you're not targeting the conditions and incentives that enticed that person to corruption in the first place? Corruption in government is a systemic problem.

Also, what's the definition of corruption? Who sets the definition?

All big questions.

It may be worthwhile to focus on defining the problem before spending too much time on solutions. Read about the XY Problem.

To answer your question directly:

Why is it a bad idea to hire a hitman to eliminate most corrupt politicians?

People are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law (at least in the United States).

What happens when you kill a politician you thought was corrupt, and it turns out he was innocent?

That's why we have a criminal justice system.

And why limit it to corrupt politicians? Why not engage in extrajudicial killings of alleged rapists, kidnappers, pedophiles, adulterers and car thiefs?

Keep in mind that in the United States there are many people on death row who have gone through extensive police investigations and court reviews. Their appeals are exhausted and they are simply awaiting execution. Sometimes, after many years, new evidence surfaces, witnesses recant or something else happens proving innocence. The inmate wins his freedom. Other times its too late.

Imagine what would happen with fewer layers of review, less oversight and faster sentencing.

There are two obvious problems beyond the ethical ones.

1) The practical problem of cost. Nobody has enough money to get them all, even if there were enough competent hit-persons to do the job.

2) Are "corrupt" politicians really the problem, or is it the honest but incompetent and/or driven by ideology ones? After all, the corrupt politician wants to do a good enough job so that s/he can stay in office and keep on collecting money.

This would only work if you had some sort of infallible, morally pure, by everyone's standards (the disqualifying factor, right there), arbiter of right or wrong, that everyone else would defer to regarding who lives and who dies.

Otherwise, each and every political viewpoint would have their own image of who is good and who is evil, and motivated individuals would take it upon themselves to act. Conservative? Hillary deserves to die for the child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria.... that was in a building that didn't have a basement.

Wikipedia: Pizzagate conspiracy theory

Complete conspiracy nut? Bush and Cheney must die for their 9/11 hoax where they used chemtrails and nano-bots to blow up the World Trade Centers.

Screaming liberal? Trump must die for ordering Russians to throw the election to him.

All of the above scenarios are either out and out nonsense, or probably do not have the level of "Dr Evil" scheming or control as many claim.

Basically, you'd have a free for all of executions by anyone and everyone thinking they are morally upright and those that disagree with them are not. In the United States, with our insanely tribal and polarized atmosphere and a heavily armed populace, you're talking drug-cartel level violence as public policy.

This entire premise would only work if there was a way to administer the lethal justice in a fair and impartial manner, and if there was a way to administer justice like that, then those means would exist for non-lethal sanctions, as well, making the lethal answer unnecessary. It relies on an impossible or unrealistic set of conditions in order to be administered in any kind of workable manner.

Just to add to the discussion, killing a corrupt leader is a bad idea from the stand point of stable and sustainable governments to follow. Not only assassination, which is in my opinion a plan with a consensus of limited number of people & ideology and power comes from consensus of large number of people, but also killing the leader in general is a bad idea we have seen few examples of this in history.

The French revolution comes to mind first. Robespierre's head cutting spree ended with his head on the guillotine and a very bad constitution. Gadaffi's killing also threw Libya in a state of anarchy, even though in both cases there was a general consensus that leaders were corrupt and needed replacement.

When killing a leader is accepted in a society, there is no room for rule of law and society would fragment. Assassinations would lead to disagreements being settled by violence and no leader to be chosen as disagreements will always remain, society would be headless, and anarchy would prevail.

The entire idea behind presidential impeachment is to reduce the likelihood of assassination. Furthermore, the right to bear arms was intended to ensure that the government would fear the people, and not the people fear the government.

As revolutionaries, the people behind the American and French wars for independence actually did consider that assassination was a logical form of resistance.

Surprised I don't see this point made clear anywhere yet:

In the United States (a simple example, but many others have similar divides), a sizable portion of the population thinks that most democrats are corrupt and a sizable portion of the population thinks that most republicans are corrupt.

Let's say your proposal becomes reality: everyone kills everyone else, and practically no politicians remain.

You are left without a functioning state government, not with a state government devoid of corrupt politicians, and you have anarchy - which some people (not myself) would embrace.

I believe as an outsider to power, one is not qualified to make such a decision to change the balance of power. You are not privy to secret information, or classified information.
e.g. The bomb attempt on Hitler was carried out by those within a close circle of power.

Extrajudicial killings may need to be made with information that only a small group of those in power know as well as understand.

Certainly, those at the top of a hierarchy may decide that a certain member needs to be removed, but why choose such a method, when courts, shame, and infamy are just as effective. Why get one's hands bloody?

Instead of assassinating the corrupt politician(s), why not simply punish them as any other criminal? Such as with jail time.

Your answer might be that:

• He will just pay off the jailers or police or any other person in the process.

But this answer then means that this politician is not the only corrupt person - it implies that all of society is corrupt or at least that people with some responsibility and power are corrupt.

If this is the case, then alternative punishments like jail time will do nothing. Also, assassinating the politician will do nothing, because the next to take over will also be corrupt.

So, in essence, assassination will work no better than any other type of punishment. If the system / society as a whole is corrupt, then it will help nothing to assassinate just one of many corrupt politicians. And if the society is fine, then more humane and normal punishments will do just fine.

Assassinations is not an accepted punishment anywhere I know of, and so it will never be a method to use. Either use the proper punishment, or forget about punishment methods entirely (and instead work in the culture from within).

The argument that one assassination will scare off other politicians from continuing to be corrupt might only risk on a more brutal government as has been seen with tyrannical government throughout history that had to keep their people in place.