Talk:Dettlaff van der Eretein/@comment-91.67.95.240-20160727084255/@comment-193.39.5.10-20190319165509

@Faul and fair a day: Any sapient being should be able to figure out alive=good, dead=bad. If Dettlaff is capable of recognising human beings as creatures with worth at all then he should be capable of understanding that killing them is wrong. And he is; Syanna obviously but even his assassinations did bother him, he mutilated himself in disgust at his actions after one of them. He knows humans matter and he knows their lives are worth preserving, he just doesn't value that above his hurt feelings. That doesn't make him above reproach for his actions, it makes him revoltingly childish, as the original poster noted.

A non-sapient being, like the griffin in White Orchard, is not responsible for it's actions as it does not and cannot know better Dettlaff does, can and have.

Also noteworthy that, responsible or not, the griffin is still killed to make the area safe. Even if Dettaff was so alien in his thinking that he couldn't understand that killing people is wrong (which he isn't) that wouldn't change how Geralt or others should respond. A mentally ill serial killer has a state of mind different to most people but is still responsible for their actions. In such a case we might treat rather than punish but we still wouldn't let them wander freely, able to kill at will, simply because they think differently to us. And treating Dettaff is not an option. As most legal codes will note, ignorance of the law is no excuse.