> Ted Bundy Philosopher?
>
> Can someone confirm if the story here is true or not? Seems odd to me.
>
> http://famguardian.org/Subjects/SexualImmorality/Homosexuality/HomoAndNaturalLaw...
> I wonder if Miss Embler would find an answer to her question in the
> following transcript of a recently discovered conversation with one of
> his "victims" that Ted Bundy had taped. We will call her "Laura,"
> although that was not her real name.2
>
> Laura: Where have you taken me, Ted?
>
> Bundy: To a place where no one can follow us--or find you--at least not
> until long after I have disappeared--and you are dead.
>
> Laura: What do you mean?
>
> Bundy: What I mean is that I intend to rape and murder you.
>
> Laura: Oh, my God, my God, why?
>
> Bundy: Because, my dear, it will give me the greatest possible
> pleasure to do so.
>
> Laura: Please, please, spare me. Send for ransom, ask anything. I know
> my parents and their families and friends will do anything to save my
> life.
>
> Bundy: But you fail to understand me. I don't want anything from
> anyone else. It is raping and murdering you that I want, and nothing
> can substitute for it. By the way, unless I have lost count, you will
> be the 89th young woman--person I should say--who has been good enough
> to gratify me in this way. Believe it or not, I am very grateful to my
> victims--although I do not think of them as victims, but rather as
> those making the sacrifices necessary for my freedom--the freedom to
> live my life the way I choose to live it. Nations praise those who
> sacrifice their lives for the freedom of others, as you will shortly
> be doing. I would be glad to erect a monument to your memory--and to
> that of all the others, past and future, who have made and will make
> the same sacrifice--although I do not think it is practicable for me to
> try to do so.
>
> Laura: But Ted, how can you possibly call raping and murdering your
> "freedom"? What about my life and freedom?
>
> Bundy: I recognize that your life and your freedom are very valuable
> to you, but you must recognize that they are not so valuable to me.
> And if I must sacrifice your life and freedom to mine, why should I
> not do so? The unexamined life was not worth living to Socrates. And a
> life without raping and murdering is not worth living to me. What
> right do you--or does anyone--have, to deny this to me?
>
> Laura: But rape and murder are wrong. The Bible says they are wrong,
> and the law says they are wrong.
>
> Bundy: What do you mean by wrong? What you call wrong, I call attempts
> to limit my freedom. The Bible punished both sodomy and murder with
> death. Sodomy is no longer regarded as a crime, or even as immoral.
> Why then should murder--or rape? But, you say, rape and murder are
> against the law, and if the law catches me, it will punish me. Very
> well, and if it does not catch me, what then? After so many highly
> successful and immensely gratifying rapes and murders, I do not think
> the law has much to say to me. In any case, it can hardly punish me
> any more for what I am about to do, than for what I have already done.
> So I see little benefit for you in this argument.
>
> Laura: But surely, surely, Ted, you must see that killing an innocent
> human being is wrong. Did you, or do you not have a mother and a
> father, or a sister or a brother, or friends, in whom you recognize a
> life like your own, that should be as precious to you as your own
> life? Is there not something within you--a conscience--that tells you
> that to be a human being is to recognize that everything is not
> permitted? And that your own happiness--indeed your own freedom--depends
> upon living within the bounds prescribed either by God or the moral
> law?
>
> Bundy: Well, Laura, I am glad we are having this talk. None of my
> other victims ever asked me to justify myself as you are doing. And so
> I must tell you--and hope it will afford you some satisfaction--that you
> are if possible increasing the pleasure I am having from our
> acquaintance, short as it must be.
>
> I want you to know then that once upon a time I too believed that God
> and the moral law prescribed boundaries within which my life had to be
> lived. That was before I took my first college courses in philosophy.
> Then it was that I discovered how unsophisticated--nay, primitive--my
> earlier beliefs had been. Then I learned that all moral judgments are
> "value judgments," that all value judgments are subjective, and that
> none can be proved to be either "right" or "wrong." I even read
> somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that
> the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value
> judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself--what apparently
> the Chief Justice couldn't figure out for himself--that if the
> rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions
> would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any "reason" to
> obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring--
> the strength of character--to throw off its shackles. And I was
> assured, by what I regarded as the highest possible authority--a
> Harvard-trained philosophy professor--that,
>
> The root notion of [true] freedom is . . . the spontaneous,
> uninhibited expression of the integrated self . . . [and that] the
> absence of freedom means . . . the presence of blocks or limitations
> that prevent unfettered expressions of the self.
>
> I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to
> become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest
> obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it,
> consisted in the insupportable "value judgment" that I was bound to
> respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these "others"?
> Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a
> human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is
> our life more to you than a hog's life to a hog? Why should I be
> willing to sacrifice my pleasures more for the one than for the other?
> Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment,
> declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as "moral" or
> "good" and others as "immoral" or "bad? In any case, let me assure
> you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison
> between the pleasure I might take in eating ham, and the pleasure I
> anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion
> to which my education has led me--after the most conscientious
> examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.
>
> At this point in the tape there was a sharp scream, followed by a
> click, indicating that the tape recorder had been turned off.
>
> May I suggest that Ted Bundy is a true existentialist hero, who
> displayed a resolution worthy of the nihilist's truth that morality
> has no other support than what we will it to have. Since Bundy lived
> the doctrine that most philosophy professors only talk, it seems
> proper to suggest that there be established a Theodore Bundy Chair in
> Applied Ethics. I would estimate the cost of such a chair as no more
> than $300,000 (without the batteries). I would hope that successive
> incumbents of the chair would piously memorialize, i.e. reenact (on
> the appropriate date), the apotheosis of the original incumbent.