Martyrdom is a status conferred afterwards by the people the death moves

The argument

Proponents of this account observe that nobody becomes a martyr by their own decision. A person may hold a conviction, refuse to recant and die for it, and be forgotten entirely; no title attaches, because titles are given rather than taken. Proponents argue that this points to where the concept actually lives, which is in the response of those who come after rather than in anything internal to the person who died. The mechanism is that the word marks a function the death performs for a cause. A death that is taken up, recounted and used becomes a reference point: it makes the cause visible, binds those who hold it, and imposes a cost on whoever brought the death about. That is what the designation records. Proponents argue this explains features the other accounts leave unexplained, including why martyrdom is always attributed retrospectively, why the same death is a martyrdom to one community and nothing of the kind to another, and why the title can be granted long afterwards to someone whose convictions are barely recoverable. Proponents add that the account is descriptive rather than approving, and that this is a strength. It does not say that such deaths are good or that causes advanced by them are worth advancing; it says what the word picks out. On this account to call a death a martyrdom is to report that a community has taken it up as advancing something they hold, which is why the term carries honour inside that community and none at all outside it. The honour is part of the conferral rather than a discovery about the person.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue the account describes how the word gets applied rather than what it means, and that the two are not the same: a death wrongly forgotten may still have been a martyrdom, which an account resting wholly on reception cannot allow. They add that it dissolves every moral distinction the term is normally used to draw, since on this reading a person who kills others in dying qualifies as readily as one who harms nobody, provided some community takes the death up. Others object that if martyrdom is whatever a community confers, then rival conferrals cannot disagree with each other, which leaves no way to say that any attribution of the title has ever been mistaken.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue the premise confuses the conditions for being recognised with the conditions for being so. A death unnoticed by anyone may still have had every feature the word picks out, and conceding that recognition is needed for the label does not concede that it is needed for the fact. [Rejecting P2] The variability of attribution is disputed as evidence about meaning. Honorific terms are applied inconsistently across communities without being constituted by the application, in the way that disagreement about who is courageous does not make courage a matter of conferral. [Rejecting P3] Critics object that the three functions named are effects of a death already regarded as a martyrdom. A death makes a cause visible and binds its adherents because they take it to have been suffered for the cause, which means the prior judgement is doing the work the premise assigns to the function.