Weregild

Kragen Javier Sitaker, 2019-03-24 (3 minutes)

As a measure aimed at reduction of wars, we should perhaps accept weregild again. The traditional Scandinavian weregild rate was 200 solidi for a churl, the least noble category of person for which weregild was due, which works out to 900 g of gold, about US$40k at today’s gold prices. I think the current Saudi diyya is a hundred thousand riyals for the noblest category of victim (Muslim men), which is a bit less than US$30k (US$26.7k as of 2015). These prices are a bit lower than modern wrongful-death awards in US courts, which I think are commonly in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes up into the millions. Presumably the Saudi prices do not apply to members of the royal family.

In Scandinavian times somewhat larger amounts were due for nobler victims: 600 solidi for a duke or archbishop, 300 solidi for a low-ranking cleric (or 400 if they were reading mass at the time), or at another time 1200 for a nobleman, 15000 for an archbishop, or 30000 for the king. The Mercians paid a lower weregild of 110 solidi for Welshmen, or less if they owned no property.

For modern times, probably the prices measured in gold should be higher, partly since we live in a society that is much wealthier, but also because we aspire to egalitarianism; we don’t consider women to be worth half a man, as Saudi Arabia does and Iran used to, or Christians to be worth half a Muslim, or dukes to be worth three commoners. Perhaps a reasonable number would be 64 bitcoin, which is currently about US$240k, but will fluctuate with the value of bitcoin. Bitcoin is still very short-term unstable but will probably be a stabler measure of value over the next century or two than the dollar or gold.

Traditionally, wergild (and diyya, wrongful-death awards, and similar concepts) are payable to family members of the victim. Modern sensibilities would demand this to be under the voluntary control of the victim: the payment should be made to the heirs of the victim whoever they be, whether family members or not, as surely it would pile injustice upon injustice to, for example, award the wergild for a transgender hate crime victim to their disowned transphobic parents.

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