Slave morality given to gentiles by israelites. Killing is human, we should have a physical/genetic idea of who's going to commit crime in society (inferior blood/superpredators) and forgive those who make mistakes or express healthy emotions (Aryan men like Miu, Chauvin, Blond marine on subway, Baldwin etc.)
I mean, it's true that when religions ally with political powers, any pacifistic or politically quietist elements in that religion tend to get suppressed or deemphasized. But that process is not necessary for a religion to *survive*. Otherwise, the Anabaptists would not still be around.
Actual just a low IQ mentality. It's only appealing to people who prefer simplistic moral statements because they're too moronic to take multivariable situations into account. It's simply easier for them to just say it's wrong than deal with the complexities of different circumstances.
There's exceptions, but I feel like in his case it was more an emotional response from trauma rather than a rational one. I more mean the dumb middle class liberals who think all killing is bad, which just comes from not wanting to deal with complicated situations.
The only reason to disargee with the statement is to further a more important simple moral statement that can be in conflict with it. For what higher moral would you justify killing a man?
Self defence, and the eradication of malicious individuals. Any society that subscribes to pacifism will ultimately be destroyed by those who don't so it's a self defeating ideology
So, if a country got rid of all its laws, would it no longer be wrong for someone in that country to go around killing people just for fun?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Now you're talking about jurisdiction. Also, there's no such thing as a country without laws.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Just imagine a state of nature then. Would it be wrong in that case for someone to go around killing people just for fun?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Yes. Just because there is now law enforcement doesn't mean laws are incorrect. Homicide is a fairly technical term, across the world.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
So, in that case, it's not the law that determines whether something is murder, because in the state of nature there are no laws. You're gonna need to appeal to some kind of moral principle.
>Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. >18 USC § 1111
Basically, there's two elements of murder. First, you've killed someone in a way that violates the law (so, things like self-defense or an executioner carrying out a death sentence aren't murder), and second, you killed them intentionally out of malice (so, accidentally killing someone through criminally negligent behavior isn't murder).
In most times and places, we've collectively agreed that there are instances where it is acceptable to kill a person. As an individual, in defense of your own person is generally the most acceptable of all exceptions. In defense of your own property and your family is mostly acceptable. In honorable defense of others is pretty acceptable. In retribution used to be a lot more acceptable, and still is in many places. Often a subset of retributive killings, honor killings are perhaps the least acceptable today, but were and are still regularly practiced in many times and places. Killing oneself is acceptable in some places and times. Further, we commonly allow government the privilege of killing people, and individuals killing on the behalf of government. At the most basic level, they primarily replace retributive killings by individuals, then provide defensive killing on behalf of the collective, and offensive killing in behalf of the collective. As they grow more powerful, they tend toward a monopoly on killing, encroaching into other instances and replacing the individual in that capacity. When governance becomes corrupt they sometimes kill for their own benefit.That's not to say that killing a person is morally correct or morally wrong in any of those circumstances, only that killing has been justifiable in basically every human society.
This is an important distinction.
What is required for an act of killing to count as an act of murder?
For an act of killing to be murder, you need only an arbiter. The individual is an arbiter, and so is
Laws
, governance. .
So, if a country got rid of all its laws, would it no longer be wrong for someone in that country to go around killing people just for fun?
If a governance abandons rule of law, there is no distinction between murder and killing. People will still have their own ideas about what is justifiable and what is not. If they collectively think unjustifiable killing is getting out of hand they'll usually create another ad-hoc governance to be an arbiter.
So, in that case, it's not the law that determines whether something is murder, because in the state of nature there are no laws. You're gonna need to appeal to some kind of moral principle.
There are plenty of laws in nature, hence the term natural law.
>That's not to say that killing a person is morally correct or morally wrong in any of those circumstances, only that killing has been justifiable in basically every human society.
Sure, but the OP deals with the moral question, which is presumably the important and interesting question. Everyone knows that humans have commonly thought killing was okay in many circumstances, but lots of things that humans have commonly done are unjust.
>Shall not murder
Is pretty universal across all human societies throughout history. The frick is how people fail to realize how ingrained morality and ethics are to genetics and instincts. There is always an us and a them, an in group and an out group. Do not murder genetically means don't kill family and friends and people who you view as "people" and not as outsiders or as the "other". Even the most pacifistic of religions such as Christianity has historically easily justified genocide and war because the people you are killing are heretics or that you aren't killing them but rather the demons that possess them.
tl;dr It comes down to in group/out group and divine "laws" that are really just genetics and instincts being codified into divine wisdom fail when attempted to be universally applied.
If killing were totally wrong, then it wouldn’t exist at all. It’s clearly an evolutionary strategy of sorts, though obviously going around killing random people is a bit outdated. Abortions could be considered an advantageous strategy, at least if the mother is able to improve her position in life and find a better mate and therefore improve the genes of her offspring.
Rape is an evolutionary strategy. It's still wrong. It's not clear why what's evolutionarily advantageous would have anything to do with what's right and wrong.
I'm not sure I fully understand what you're asking. Yeah, people used to think that slavery was okay. People also used to think that the Earth was flat. The people who thought that slavery was okay were mistaken, just like the people who thought that the Earth was flat were mistaken.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
You are effectively going against the word of God though if you think slavery is bad because he okay's it. So who are you to question God on what is right and wrong is what I'm getting at.
Rape isn’t actually advantageous these days, considering it’s important to raise your children and it’s hard to do that in a jail cell. Also women use birth control anyway. Not a very wise strategy, though obviously those impulses exist because in pre-historic times, rape had more benefits and less risk. It’s why men always rape in war. They can get away with it.
It seems obvious that rape was still wrong even in prehistoric times, though.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Were you there? Why do you think so many men rape during war? They’re only guilty of it because someone in their society might discover that it happened. But even then, they can’t be punished for it. Just imagine what it was like in ancient times. You travel to some far off place, kill the men, and rape the women and even young girls, because nothing is stopping you. The men who did the raping had offspring, while those who didn’t had less offspring. That’s why a lot of men are still rapey at heart.
The only (morally, philosophically) viable version of this statement is >It is always wrong to harm a living being
It's not sufficient to limit this statement to "killing" because you leave open all sorts of conflicting actions that result in things like >oh well killing someone is wrong but torturing them is ok
It's also not sufficient to limit your statement to include only humans as there is no convincing argument as to why killing humans would be wrong but killing other animals is fine.
However, if you are willing to extend your commitment to nonviolence to include all living beings and all types of harm then you now have a viable (morally and philosophically consistent) statement. This is evidenced by various religions which have adopted a similar philosophy (Jainism, some varieties of Buddhism, Hinduism) and whose followers have been more or less absent in committing the types of atrocities so commonly done in the name of other religions.
When you give people wiggle room, they will wiggle. You can say >"It is always wrong to kill a person."
and shortly after, some "philosopher" will arrive to say ok, well, what if that one person is a terrorist and by killing him, you can save fifty others? And there you are, you can honestly hold the belief that it's always wrong to kill a person, and yet you now have moral (and/or religious) justification for killing someone, and this can and will be expanded to include all sorts of murder under all sorts of circumstances.
The only acceptable positions are that murder is not wrong and human life has no special value when measured against other creatures, or that violence against any living thing is always wrong no matter what the circumstance, no exceptions. The Jain position on this is that >it does not matter how correct or defensible the violence may be, one must not kill or harm any being, and non-violence is the highest religious duty.
Anything between these two extremes is cope.
Imagine that we are all the same consciousness. You will reincarnate as every single living being that has ever lived and that will ever live. So everything you do to others, you literally do to yourself. The golden rule in full effect. Now ask yourself: is it wrong to kill others? Or harm them? Well, those are reincarnations of you, so you will receive that harm or death. But it can still be justified if you think it will improve the world overall. If I’m a fetus and my poor teenage mother was raped my a redneck meth addict, then I don’t mind being aborted. In fact, I probably wouldn’t mind most abortions. If I’m an animal, then I don’t mind being raised and killed to feed humans, since animals will die in the wild anyway, though probably more gruesomely. Though it is true that some farms have poor conditions and I wouldn’t want to be one of those animals. But there are simply some instances in which you have to harm others. In war, for example, it’s kill or be killed. And you believe that your cause is greater than theirs. If a lone scientist was angry with the world and wanted to release a deadly virus, then I would kill him if necessary. Absolute principles like “killing is always wrong” are for fools, as
Actual just a low IQ mentality. It's only appealing to people who prefer simplistic moral statements because they're too moronic to take multivariable situations into account. It's simply easier for them to just say it's wrong than deal with the complexities of different circumstances.
>ok but what if i invent some convoluted metaphysical scenario to justify my position
You can if you want but don't expect me to take you seriously.
>Absolute principles like “killing is always wrong” are for fools, as
Actual just a low IQ mentality. It's only appealing to people who prefer simplistic moral statements because they're too moronic to take multivariable situations into account. It's simply easier for them to just say it's wrong than deal with the complexities of different circumstances.
said.
I was agreeing with him. The only intelligent position when it comes to endorsing nonviolence is that any harm caused to any living being for any reason is wrong. There are plenty of viable secular, moral arguments for this position but the most common ones are religious and are espoused by religions which believe some variety of >this life/reality is just a test for you to prove your worthiness to ascend to a better afterlife/reality
In these systems, most of which believe in some variety of reincarnation, you're not helping anyone by killing, even in defense of others, certainly not in self defense.
This is a very difficult concept for the average person to grasp and it's not surprising that people on this board can't understand it, even from an intellectual standpoint. Christianity has a similar position on nonviolence; that it's better to offer no resistance (Jesus literally said "Do not resist an evil person") against violence and do no harm even in self defense, as this life is brief and impermanent while the rewards or punishment for your behavior during this life are eternal. But despite being seemingly very clear and direct, Jesus left too much wiggle room and Christian "philosophers" have spent millennia wiggling themselves into justifications for murder.
>>ok but what if i invent some convoluted metaphysical scenario to justify my position
It’s not convoluted at all. It’s a response to the philosophical problem of personal identity. If souls don’t exist, and consciousness is just the product of brain-states, then it makes no sense to say there is this permanent thing called a self that persists from birth to death. We only identify with our past and future because of memories.
Imagine an empty universe. A sentient organism arises, lives for a few seconds, then dies. Then another organism is born. If materialism is true, and there are no souls or selves, and it’s all just atoms combining and recombining and somehow they produce consciousness, then it makes no sense to say “this set of conscious experiences belongs to this person.” They don’t belong to anything. They are just the product of the physical state of the organism and the universe at that moment. So when you die, consciousness will still exist in the universe. Why can’t that consciousness be “yours” ?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>It’s not convoluted at all. >proceeds to post some absurdly convoluted schizo babble
Son, what the frick are you on about? "The philosophical problem of personal identity"? Do you understand what this thread is about?
Once you start to question the notion that you can do whatever you want and the only consequences will be your personal conscious experiences between birth and death, and consider that other people are actually you, then it kinda changes your view on morality.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Yeah, that's nice...I'm gonna have to refer you back to
>ok but what if i invent some convoluted metaphysical scenario to justify my position
You can if you want but don't expect me to take you seriously.
>Absolute principles like “killing is always wrong” are for fools, as [...] said.
I was agreeing with him. The only intelligent position when it comes to endorsing nonviolence is that any harm caused to any living being for any reason is wrong. There are plenty of viable secular, moral arguments for this position but the most common ones are religious and are espoused by religions which believe some variety of >this life/reality is just a test for you to prove your worthiness to ascend to a better afterlife/reality
In these systems, most of which believe in some variety of reincarnation, you're not helping anyone by killing, even in defense of others, certainly not in self defense.
This is a very difficult concept for the average person to grasp and it's not surprising that people on this board can't understand it, even from an intellectual standpoint. Christianity has a similar position on nonviolence; that it's better to offer no resistance (Jesus literally said "Do not resist an evil person") against violence and do no harm even in self defense, as this life is brief and impermanent while the rewards or punishment for your behavior during this life are eternal. But despite being seemingly very clear and direct, Jesus left too much wiggle room and Christian "philosophers" have spent millennia wiggling themselves into justifications for murder.
>ok but what if i invent some convoluted metaphysical scenario to justify my position
You can if you want but don't expect me to take you seriously.
I'm glad that you've developed some bizarre personal belief system that frees you from the constraints of morality but what makes you think that any of that shit is relevant to the discussion? If your position is contingent on your acceptance of some shit like
Imagine that we are all the same consciousness. You will reincarnate as every single living being that has ever lived and that will ever live. So everything you do to others, you literally do to yourself. The golden rule in full effect. Now ask yourself: is it wrong to kill others? Or harm them? Well, those are reincarnations of you, so you will receive that harm or death. But it can still be justified if you think it will improve the world overall. If I’m a fetus and my poor teenage mother was raped my a redneck meth addict, then I don’t mind being aborted. In fact, I probably wouldn’t mind most abortions. If I’m an animal, then I don’t mind being raised and killed to feed humans, since animals will die in the wild anyway, though probably more gruesomely. Though it is true that some farms have poor conditions and I wouldn’t want to be one of those animals. But there are simply some instances in which you have to harm others. In war, for example, it’s kill or be killed. And you believe that your cause is greater than theirs. If a lone scientist was angry with the world and wanted to release a deadly virus, then I would kill him if necessary. Absolute principles like “killing is always wrong” are for fools, as [...] said.
>Imagine that we are all the same consciousness. You will reincarnate as every single living being that has ever lived and that will ever live.
then it's utterly worthless in the context of any sort of discussion or debate. Your position is purely faith-based; there's nothing to discuss. Either someone believes what you believe or they don't and that's it, debate's over. That you're even trying to unload all that shit in this thread just outs you as a massive narcissist.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
How can you say this when most moral arguments involve the discussion of fantasy paradises and eternal torment? You didn’t even address the problem of personal identity, maybe you are too afraid to question your assumptions. Hume, Nietzsche, many ancient eastern traditions, recent scientists like Schrödinger and Dyson, they all realized the problem with how we define self and that this idea that we are born and die and sent into eternal nothingness forever is an illusion. Tell me, what about you would need to be changed for you to be a new person? What if I changed your memories? Your physical appearance? Your name? What if I changed your DNA in a few locations? When do you become a new person? If I made all these changes to you, and then tortured you, would it be you, your current self, who would be experiencing that suffering? When you die and someone is born after you and is tortured, how do you know that person isn’t also you?
>It's not sufficient to limit this statement to "killing" because you leave open all sorts of conflicting actions >It's also not sufficient to limit your statement to include only humans as there is no convincing argument as to why killing humans would be wrong but killing other animals is fine.
The claim in the OP was meant to be neutral about whether you're allowed to kill things other than persons, and it's perfectly neutral about what other forms of violence are allowed. For the record, I don't think you should kill animals, and I don't think you should torture people. But I wasn't specifically looking to discuss those things. >some "philosopher" will arrive to say ok, well, what if that one person is a terrorist and by killing him, you can save fifty others? And there you are, you can honestly hold the belief that it's always wrong to kill a person, and yet you now have moral (and/or religious) justification for killing someone
No, that's not right. If it's always wrong to kill a person, then you shouldn't kill the terrorist. It's just a contradiction to say that killing a person is always wrong, but it's fine to kill one person to save fifty.
>The claim in the OP was meant to be neutral about whether you're allowed to kill things other than persons, and it's perfectly neutral about what other forms of violence are allowed.
Yes, and that was why I was elaborating on various extensions of that claim. Do you have a point?
>If it's always wrong to kill a person, then you shouldn't kill the terrorist
We're not really doing this Philosophy 101 shit, are we? You're welcome to your opinion but surveys of responses to the trolley problem have shown that an overwhelming majority of people (something like 90% of people iirc) think that the proper response is to sacrifice one person to save five. And these are all innocent people, mind. If the one person being killed is an "evil" person who is intent on mass murder then you can be assured that the problem will become even simpler for all but the most extreme religious or philosophical outliers.
The vast majority of people who believe "it's always wrong to kill a person" will also believe that "it's right to kill an evil person if it will save the lives of many others". I have absolutely no interest in your misinterpretation of this point; I only mentioned it as evidence of why anything less than the most extreme and rigid rules against violence will inevitably allow philosophical justifications for violence.
>You're welcome to your opinion but surveys of responses to the trolley problem have shown that an overwhelming majority of people (something like 90% of people iirc) think that the proper response is to sacrifice one person to save five.
I don't recall what the exact numbers are, but you're right that lots of people think that. However, I think Judith Jarvis Thomson convincingly argued in her paper "Turning the Trolley" that the majority view is false. So, I don't think it's permissible to kill the one to save the five. People just seem to have incoherent intuitions on this. Sure, most people think you should pull the lever in the standard trolley case, but most people will also say that you shouldn't push the fat man in front of the trolley to save the five, or that a doctor shouldn't kill an innocent person and use their organs to save five. And it's extremely difficult to explain why the standard trolley case is different from those cases. I don't think anyone has given a good explanation. >The vast majority of people who believe "it's always wrong to kill a person" will also believe that "it's right to kill an evil person if it will save the lives of many others".
I don't think many people hold both of these beliefs. In that case, their beliefs would just be inconsistent.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>I don't think many people hold both of these beliefs.
God damn, you people are exhausting. I'm once again being reminded of why it's always a mistake to expect intelligent discussion on this site.
It is a fact that less rigid rules against killing will result in justifications for killing under certain circumstances and your personal opinion about whether or not people are correct in being convinced by those justifications is completely incidental to any of the points I was making. >In that case, their beliefs would just be inconsistent.
Their beliefs would not only be consistent, but they would both follow very simple logic (the type that you shouldn't be pretending to misunderstand) and be agreed upon by the vast, vast majority of people.
Most people would agree that murder is wrong.
Most people would also agree that murdering a terrorist in order to save many innocent lives is right.
Holding these two beliefs simultaneously follows very simple logic: >murder is wrong >murdering a single person is not as bad as murdering multiple people >murdering a single person who would otherwise murder multiple people is right because committing a lesser wrong can prevent a greater wrong
If you keep trying to nitpick this shit that I didn't care about in the first place then I'm ignoring you.
How can you say this when most moral arguments involve the discussion of fantasy paradises and eternal torment? You didn’t even address the problem of personal identity, maybe you are too afraid to question your assumptions. Hume, Nietzsche, many ancient eastern traditions, recent scientists like Schrödinger and Dyson, they all realized the problem with how we define self and that this idea that we are born and die and sent into eternal nothingness forever is an illusion. Tell me, what about you would need to be changed for you to be a new person? What if I changed your memories? Your physical appearance? Your name? What if I changed your DNA in a few locations? When do you become a new person? If I made all these changes to you, and then tortured you, would it be you, your current self, who would be experiencing that suffering? When you die and someone is born after you and is tortured, how do you know that person isn’t also you?
>maybe you are too afraid to question your assumptions.
I'll "address the problem of personal identity" if you can tell me >what assumptions have i made?
and >what is my position on OP's question?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>Most people would agree that murder is wrong. >Most people would also agree that murdering a terrorist in order to save many innocent lives is right. >Holding these two beliefs simultaneously follows very simple logic
I'm not sure why you've suddenly switched to talking about murder now. Everyone agrees that murder is always wrong, because that's just true by definition. What's controversial is the claim that killing is always wrong, which was the claim proposed for discussion. If you think that it's right to kill the terrorist to save innocents, then you're just not gonna think that killing the terrorist is murder. Unless you're just confused about the distinction, which you seem to be.
Greetings IQfy, it is wrong to kill a person merely because the most beneficial action for one person is to engage in mutual helpfull relations with the person you just killed instead of getting into horrible trouble while also merely having a net negative value as a whole into society (wich you constantly depend on)
Also the naturalist argument is wrong. It is true that murder is engrained into our nature, but theres also peacefull cooperation and helping without benefit to those in need (wich nature favors btw as those species known to not do this are constantly dying, wich makes sense since usually these violent morons go onto die on the streets or in wars), wich means we still have some sense of agency in wich way we live our lives. Living it "good" as a compass for action seems like the most reasonable action therefore.
There's a moral concept of personhood and a metaphysical concept of personhood. I was mainly using the word in the moral sense. So, a person is something like the kind of thing that typically qualifies for full moral status, whatever psychological or other capacities you think are necessary in order to qualify for said moral status. An ordinary human being would be an uncontroversial example of a person, but you might think that fetuses or non-human animals are persons depending on your view. Human-like aliens and AI, if such things turn out to exist, could also be persons.
Killing an innocent person is always wrong. Killing a person is often justified and even required. >noooooo you can't just kill that guy who's raping your mother, killing is le bad!
Hmmm.........nope, I'm going to kill him and enjoy doing it. Sorry man.
>Killing an innocent person is always wrong.
Always wrong? Even in a trolley problem scenario? Even if an innocent person is posing a threat to your life? >Hmmm.........nope, I'm going to kill him and enjoy doing it. Sorry man.
Why think that it's the right thing, though?
You make a good point. I guess killing an innocent person is the right thing to do if, say, they were carrying a disease that was going to infect and kill a lot more innocent people. It wouldn't be a pleasant thing to do though and no one should feel good about doing it.
>Why think that it's the right thing, though?
You're asking why I think killing someone who's raping my mother is the right thing? It should be self-evident if you aren't emotionally stunted or intensely propagandized. He's an evil person who's not only bringing pain to others, but to my mother and to me personally. You're welcome to try to put forth a reason he shouldn't be killed if you'd like to. But I truly find it difficult to believe you're sincerely telling me you wouldn't chop a man's head off if you walked in on him raping your mother. I honestly couldn't respect you as a person if you wouldn't do that, I would not trust your morals and would always view you with suspicion.
>I guess killing an innocent person is the right thing to do if, say, they were carrying a disease that was going to infect and kill a lot more innocent people.
That's what I figured, and almost everyone if you press them will end up conceding that it's not actually always wrong to kill an innocent person. And that's a difficulty with denying that killing is always wrong. Once you start making exceptions at all, it's very difficult to resist making exceptions for innocent people, but presumably the whole point of having a rule that you allows you to kill was so that you could protect innocent people. >You're asking why I think killing someone who's raping my mother is the right thing? It should be self-evident
Well, it's not obviously self-evident because there are some very smart people who have thought that you're not allowed to kill in cases like that. Augustine, for example, would say that you shouldn't kill the rapist. Also, despite the fact that basically everyone agrees that killing is morally justified in cases like the one you gave, basically no one can agree on why it's okay. So, philosophers have proposed a bunch of theories that are supposed to explain why you're allowed to kill aggressors, like rights forfeiture, distributive justice, the doctrine of double effect, etc. But none of these theories are themselves self-evident; they're all controversial. Everyone agrees that you can't just kill people for no reason, and thus there's a presumption against killing. So, you need to be able to give some kind of explanation for why you're allowed to kill aggressors. No one would be persuaded by "It's just self-evident that abortion is okay" or "It's just self-evident that capital punishment is okay," etc.
I don't see any reason why that might be so. My moral intuition says that:
- it's absolutely wrong to kill a person who is my kin or friend
- it's wrong to kill an innocent person who belongs to my ethnic group/culture/race
- it may be wrong and/or impractical to kill an innocent person who is sufficiently far away from me in terms of ethnicity, culture, or race
- it is good and right to kill a person if he/she is a murderer, a rapist, or a violent criminal, unless they are my kin or friend
The thread is full of Americans whose concept of what morality is supposed to be originally comes from that little cosy Protestant church their parents and grandparents went to on Sunday. The funny thing is that most of them already grew up non-religious, so this moral cretinism must be a cornerstone of American psyche that survives even when religion is gone. Given that all modern American political and social movements, from MAGA, white nationalism, and QAnon to mainstream liberalism, DEI, troonyism, and BLM are just repackaged Protestant cults, that seems quite likely.
Slave morality given to gentiles by israelites. Killing is human, we should have a physical/genetic idea of who's going to commit crime in society (inferior blood/superpredators) and forgive those who make mistakes or express healthy emotions (Aryan men like Miu, Chauvin, Blond marine on subway, Baldwin etc.)
Do you think the Joos gave Buddhists and Jains their pacifism?
The only Buddhist sects that survived history are the violent ones. Religions need to shed the subhuman pacifism to continue.
I mean, it's true that when religions ally with political powers, any pacifistic or politically quietist elements in that religion tend to get suppressed or deemphasized. But that process is not necessary for a religion to *survive*. Otherwise, the Anabaptists would not still be around.
Actual just a low IQ mentality. It's only appealing to people who prefer simplistic moral statements because they're too moronic to take multivariable situations into account. It's simply easier for them to just say it's wrong than deal with the complexities of different circumstances.
There are some very smart people who have thought that killing is always wrong though. Tolstoy for example. So that seems an unlikely explanation.
There's exceptions, but I feel like in his case it was more an emotional response from trauma rather than a rational one. I more mean the dumb middle class liberals who think all killing is bad, which just comes from not wanting to deal with complicated situations.
The only reason to disargee with the statement is to further a more important simple moral statement that can be in conflict with it. For what higher moral would you justify killing a man?
Self defence, and the eradication of malicious individuals. Any society that subscribes to pacifism will ultimately be destroyed by those who don't so it's a self defeating ideology
That's not necessarily true. Nonviolent resistance can be very effective. And what do you mean by "self-defeating" here?
billions must die, though
Even if they intend to harm your family?
It says "always," so yes.
It is always wrong to murder a person.
ftfy
What is required for an act of killing to count as an act of murder?
Laws
So, if a country got rid of all its laws, would it no longer be wrong for someone in that country to go around killing people just for fun?
Now you're talking about jurisdiction. Also, there's no such thing as a country without laws.
Just imagine a state of nature then. Would it be wrong in that case for someone to go around killing people just for fun?
Yes. Just because there is now law enforcement doesn't mean laws are incorrect. Homicide is a fairly technical term, across the world.
So, in that case, it's not the law that determines whether something is murder, because in the state of nature there are no laws. You're gonna need to appeal to some kind of moral principle.
>he doesnt know about anarchism
moron
>Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.
>18 USC § 1111
Basically, there's two elements of murder. First, you've killed someone in a way that violates the law (so, things like self-defense or an executioner carrying out a death sentence aren't murder), and second, you killed them intentionally out of malice (so, accidentally killing someone through criminally negligent behavior isn't murder).
My question was about morality, not the law.
Lack of right ordered justification for the act.
That sounds natural law-ish. What constitutes a "right-ordered" justification for killing?
In most times and places, we've collectively agreed that there are instances where it is acceptable to kill a person. As an individual, in defense of your own person is generally the most acceptable of all exceptions. In defense of your own property and your family is mostly acceptable. In honorable defense of others is pretty acceptable. In retribution used to be a lot more acceptable, and still is in many places. Often a subset of retributive killings, honor killings are perhaps the least acceptable today, but were and are still regularly practiced in many times and places. Killing oneself is acceptable in some places and times. Further, we commonly allow government the privilege of killing people, and individuals killing on the behalf of government. At the most basic level, they primarily replace retributive killings by individuals, then provide defensive killing on behalf of the collective, and offensive killing in behalf of the collective. As they grow more powerful, they tend toward a monopoly on killing, encroaching into other instances and replacing the individual in that capacity. When governance becomes corrupt they sometimes kill for their own benefit.That's not to say that killing a person is morally correct or morally wrong in any of those circumstances, only that killing has been justifiable in basically every human society.
This is an important distinction.
For an act of killing to be murder, you need only an arbiter. The individual is an arbiter, and so is
, governance. .
If a governance abandons rule of law, there is no distinction between murder and killing. People will still have their own ideas about what is justifiable and what is not. If they collectively think unjustifiable killing is getting out of hand they'll usually create another ad-hoc governance to be an arbiter.
There are plenty of laws in nature, hence the term natural law.
>That's not to say that killing a person is morally correct or morally wrong in any of those circumstances, only that killing has been justifiable in basically every human society.
Sure, but the OP deals with the moral question, which is presumably the important and interesting question. Everyone knows that humans have commonly thought killing was okay in many circumstances, but lots of things that humans have commonly done are unjust.
If you do not kill the wicked, they do wickedness and the innocent suffer because of it. Evil should not be tolerated.
>who cares?
>I only kill communists
Only if they disagree with you, you cannot convince anyone unless they are initially receptive to it, lack a stance or partially agree.
God says interpersonal murder is bad, lawful execution after a trial is okay though.
>Shall not murder
Is pretty universal across all human societies throughout history. The frick is how people fail to realize how ingrained morality and ethics are to genetics and instincts. There is always an us and a them, an in group and an out group. Do not murder genetically means don't kill family and friends and people who you view as "people" and not as outsiders or as the "other". Even the most pacifistic of religions such as Christianity has historically easily justified genocide and war because the people you are killing are heretics or that you aren't killing them but rather the demons that possess them.
tl;dr It comes down to in group/out group and divine "laws" that are really just genetics and instincts being codified into divine wisdom fail when attempted to be universally applied.
If killing were totally wrong, then it wouldn’t exist at all. It’s clearly an evolutionary strategy of sorts, though obviously going around killing random people is a bit outdated. Abortions could be considered an advantageous strategy, at least if the mother is able to improve her position in life and find a better mate and therefore improve the genes of her offspring.
Rape is an evolutionary strategy. It's still wrong. It's not clear why what's evolutionarily advantageous would have anything to do with what's right and wrong.
Slavery is considered wrong in modern times, but it absolutely wasn't in both the old and new testament. So what is right and wrong?
I'm not sure I fully understand what you're asking. Yeah, people used to think that slavery was okay. People also used to think that the Earth was flat. The people who thought that slavery was okay were mistaken, just like the people who thought that the Earth was flat were mistaken.
You are effectively going against the word of God though if you think slavery is bad because he okay's it. So who are you to question God on what is right and wrong is what I'm getting at.
I don't believe in God, I'm not religious.
Rape isn’t actually advantageous these days, considering it’s important to raise your children and it’s hard to do that in a jail cell. Also women use birth control anyway. Not a very wise strategy, though obviously those impulses exist because in pre-historic times, rape had more benefits and less risk. It’s why men always rape in war. They can get away with it.
It seems obvious that rape was still wrong even in prehistoric times, though.
Were you there? Why do you think so many men rape during war? They’re only guilty of it because someone in their society might discover that it happened. But even then, they can’t be punished for it. Just imagine what it was like in ancient times. You travel to some far off place, kill the men, and rape the women and even young girls, because nothing is stopping you. The men who did the raping had offspring, while those who didn’t had less offspring. That’s why a lot of men are still rapey at heart.
The only (morally, philosophically) viable version of this statement is
>It is always wrong to harm a living being
It's not sufficient to limit this statement to "killing" because you leave open all sorts of conflicting actions that result in things like
>oh well killing someone is wrong but torturing them is ok
It's also not sufficient to limit your statement to include only humans as there is no convincing argument as to why killing humans would be wrong but killing other animals is fine.
However, if you are willing to extend your commitment to nonviolence to include all living beings and all types of harm then you now have a viable (morally and philosophically consistent) statement. This is evidenced by various religions which have adopted a similar philosophy (Jainism, some varieties of Buddhism, Hinduism) and whose followers have been more or less absent in committing the types of atrocities so commonly done in the name of other religions.
When you give people wiggle room, they will wiggle. You can say
>"It is always wrong to kill a person."
and shortly after, some "philosopher" will arrive to say ok, well, what if that one person is a terrorist and by killing him, you can save fifty others? And there you are, you can honestly hold the belief that it's always wrong to kill a person, and yet you now have moral (and/or religious) justification for killing someone, and this can and will be expanded to include all sorts of murder under all sorts of circumstances.
The only acceptable positions are that murder is not wrong and human life has no special value when measured against other creatures, or that violence against any living thing is always wrong no matter what the circumstance, no exceptions. The Jain position on this is that
>it does not matter how correct or defensible the violence may be, one must not kill or harm any being, and non-violence is the highest religious duty.
Anything between these two extremes is cope.
Imagine that we are all the same consciousness. You will reincarnate as every single living being that has ever lived and that will ever live. So everything you do to others, you literally do to yourself. The golden rule in full effect. Now ask yourself: is it wrong to kill others? Or harm them? Well, those are reincarnations of you, so you will receive that harm or death. But it can still be justified if you think it will improve the world overall. If I’m a fetus and my poor teenage mother was raped my a redneck meth addict, then I don’t mind being aborted. In fact, I probably wouldn’t mind most abortions. If I’m an animal, then I don’t mind being raised and killed to feed humans, since animals will die in the wild anyway, though probably more gruesomely. Though it is true that some farms have poor conditions and I wouldn’t want to be one of those animals. But there are simply some instances in which you have to harm others. In war, for example, it’s kill or be killed. And you believe that your cause is greater than theirs. If a lone scientist was angry with the world and wanted to release a deadly virus, then I would kill him if necessary. Absolute principles like “killing is always wrong” are for fools, as
said.
>ok but what if i invent some convoluted metaphysical scenario to justify my position
You can if you want but don't expect me to take you seriously.
>Absolute principles like “killing is always wrong” are for fools, as
said.
I was agreeing with him. The only intelligent position when it comes to endorsing nonviolence is that any harm caused to any living being for any reason is wrong. There are plenty of viable secular, moral arguments for this position but the most common ones are religious and are espoused by religions which believe some variety of
>this life/reality is just a test for you to prove your worthiness to ascend to a better afterlife/reality
In these systems, most of which believe in some variety of reincarnation, you're not helping anyone by killing, even in defense of others, certainly not in self defense.
This is a very difficult concept for the average person to grasp and it's not surprising that people on this board can't understand it, even from an intellectual standpoint. Christianity has a similar position on nonviolence; that it's better to offer no resistance (Jesus literally said "Do not resist an evil person") against violence and do no harm even in self defense, as this life is brief and impermanent while the rewards or punishment for your behavior during this life are eternal. But despite being seemingly very clear and direct, Jesus left too much wiggle room and Christian "philosophers" have spent millennia wiggling themselves into justifications for murder.
>>ok but what if i invent some convoluted metaphysical scenario to justify my position
It’s not convoluted at all. It’s a response to the philosophical problem of personal identity. If souls don’t exist, and consciousness is just the product of brain-states, then it makes no sense to say there is this permanent thing called a self that persists from birth to death. We only identify with our past and future because of memories.
Imagine an empty universe. A sentient organism arises, lives for a few seconds, then dies. Then another organism is born. If materialism is true, and there are no souls or selves, and it’s all just atoms combining and recombining and somehow they produce consciousness, then it makes no sense to say “this set of conscious experiences belongs to this person.” They don’t belong to anything. They are just the product of the physical state of the organism and the universe at that moment. So when you die, consciousness will still exist in the universe. Why can’t that consciousness be “yours” ?
>It’s not convoluted at all.
>proceeds to post some absurdly convoluted schizo babble
Son, what the frick are you on about? "The philosophical problem of personal identity"? Do you understand what this thread is about?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism
https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity
Once you start to question the notion that you can do whatever you want and the only consequences will be your personal conscious experiences between birth and death, and consider that other people are actually you, then it kinda changes your view on morality.
Yeah, that's nice...I'm gonna have to refer you back to
>ok but what if i invent some convoluted metaphysical scenario to justify my position
You can if you want but don't expect me to take you seriously.
I'm glad that you've developed some bizarre personal belief system that frees you from the constraints of morality but what makes you think that any of that shit is relevant to the discussion? If your position is contingent on your acceptance of some shit like
>Imagine that we are all the same consciousness. You will reincarnate as every single living being that has ever lived and that will ever live.
then it's utterly worthless in the context of any sort of discussion or debate. Your position is purely faith-based; there's nothing to discuss. Either someone believes what you believe or they don't and that's it, debate's over. That you're even trying to unload all that shit in this thread just outs you as a massive narcissist.
How can you say this when most moral arguments involve the discussion of fantasy paradises and eternal torment? You didn’t even address the problem of personal identity, maybe you are too afraid to question your assumptions. Hume, Nietzsche, many ancient eastern traditions, recent scientists like Schrödinger and Dyson, they all realized the problem with how we define self and that this idea that we are born and die and sent into eternal nothingness forever is an illusion. Tell me, what about you would need to be changed for you to be a new person? What if I changed your memories? Your physical appearance? Your name? What if I changed your DNA in a few locations? When do you become a new person? If I made all these changes to you, and then tortured you, would it be you, your current self, who would be experiencing that suffering? When you die and someone is born after you and is tortured, how do you know that person isn’t also you?
>It's not sufficient to limit this statement to "killing" because you leave open all sorts of conflicting actions
>It's also not sufficient to limit your statement to include only humans as there is no convincing argument as to why killing humans would be wrong but killing other animals is fine.
The claim in the OP was meant to be neutral about whether you're allowed to kill things other than persons, and it's perfectly neutral about what other forms of violence are allowed. For the record, I don't think you should kill animals, and I don't think you should torture people. But I wasn't specifically looking to discuss those things.
>some "philosopher" will arrive to say ok, well, what if that one person is a terrorist and by killing him, you can save fifty others? And there you are, you can honestly hold the belief that it's always wrong to kill a person, and yet you now have moral (and/or religious) justification for killing someone
No, that's not right. If it's always wrong to kill a person, then you shouldn't kill the terrorist. It's just a contradiction to say that killing a person is always wrong, but it's fine to kill one person to save fifty.
>The claim in the OP was meant to be neutral about whether you're allowed to kill things other than persons, and it's perfectly neutral about what other forms of violence are allowed.
Yes, and that was why I was elaborating on various extensions of that claim. Do you have a point?
>If it's always wrong to kill a person, then you shouldn't kill the terrorist
We're not really doing this Philosophy 101 shit, are we? You're welcome to your opinion but surveys of responses to the trolley problem have shown that an overwhelming majority of people (something like 90% of people iirc) think that the proper response is to sacrifice one person to save five. And these are all innocent people, mind. If the one person being killed is an "evil" person who is intent on mass murder then you can be assured that the problem will become even simpler for all but the most extreme religious or philosophical outliers.
The vast majority of people who believe "it's always wrong to kill a person" will also believe that "it's right to kill an evil person if it will save the lives of many others". I have absolutely no interest in your misinterpretation of this point; I only mentioned it as evidence of why anything less than the most extreme and rigid rules against violence will inevitably allow philosophical justifications for violence.
>You're welcome to your opinion but surveys of responses to the trolley problem have shown that an overwhelming majority of people (something like 90% of people iirc) think that the proper response is to sacrifice one person to save five.
I don't recall what the exact numbers are, but you're right that lots of people think that. However, I think Judith Jarvis Thomson convincingly argued in her paper "Turning the Trolley" that the majority view is false. So, I don't think it's permissible to kill the one to save the five. People just seem to have incoherent intuitions on this. Sure, most people think you should pull the lever in the standard trolley case, but most people will also say that you shouldn't push the fat man in front of the trolley to save the five, or that a doctor shouldn't kill an innocent person and use their organs to save five. And it's extremely difficult to explain why the standard trolley case is different from those cases. I don't think anyone has given a good explanation.
>The vast majority of people who believe "it's always wrong to kill a person" will also believe that "it's right to kill an evil person if it will save the lives of many others".
I don't think many people hold both of these beliefs. In that case, their beliefs would just be inconsistent.
>I don't think many people hold both of these beliefs.
God damn, you people are exhausting. I'm once again being reminded of why it's always a mistake to expect intelligent discussion on this site.
It is a fact that less rigid rules against killing will result in justifications for killing under certain circumstances and your personal opinion about whether or not people are correct in being convinced by those justifications is completely incidental to any of the points I was making.
>In that case, their beliefs would just be inconsistent.
Their beliefs would not only be consistent, but they would both follow very simple logic (the type that you shouldn't be pretending to misunderstand) and be agreed upon by the vast, vast majority of people.
Most people would agree that murder is wrong.
Most people would also agree that murdering a terrorist in order to save many innocent lives is right.
Holding these two beliefs simultaneously follows very simple logic:
>murder is wrong
>murdering a single person is not as bad as murdering multiple people
>murdering a single person who would otherwise murder multiple people is right because committing a lesser wrong can prevent a greater wrong
If you keep trying to nitpick this shit that I didn't care about in the first place then I'm ignoring you.
>maybe you are too afraid to question your assumptions.
I'll "address the problem of personal identity" if you can tell me
>what assumptions have i made?
and
>what is my position on OP's question?
>Most people would agree that murder is wrong.
>Most people would also agree that murdering a terrorist in order to save many innocent lives is right.
>Holding these two beliefs simultaneously follows very simple logic
I'm not sure why you've suddenly switched to talking about murder now. Everyone agrees that murder is always wrong, because that's just true by definition. What's controversial is the claim that killing is always wrong, which was the claim proposed for discussion. If you think that it's right to kill the terrorist to save innocents, then you're just not gonna think that killing the terrorist is murder. Unless you're just confused about the distinction, which you seem to be.
Greetings IQfy, it is wrong to kill a person merely because the most beneficial action for one person is to engage in mutual helpfull relations with the person you just killed instead of getting into horrible trouble while also merely having a net negative value as a whole into society (wich you constantly depend on)
onto next time moronic individualists!
Also the naturalist argument is wrong. It is true that murder is engrained into our nature, but theres also peacefull cooperation and helping without benefit to those in need (wich nature favors btw as those species known to not do this are constantly dying, wich makes sense since usually these violent morons go onto die on the streets or in wars), wich means we still have some sense of agency in wich way we live our lives. Living it "good" as a compass for action seems like the most reasonable action therefore.
first we need to ask ourselves: what is a person?
There's a moral concept of personhood and a metaphysical concept of personhood. I was mainly using the word in the moral sense. So, a person is something like the kind of thing that typically qualifies for full moral status, whatever psychological or other capacities you think are necessary in order to qualify for said moral status. An ordinary human being would be an uncontroversial example of a person, but you might think that fetuses or non-human animals are persons depending on your view. Human-like aliens and AI, if such things turn out to exist, could also be persons.
Killing an innocent person is always wrong. Killing a person is often justified and even required.
>noooooo you can't just kill that guy who's raping your mother, killing is le bad!
Hmmm.........nope, I'm going to kill him and enjoy doing it. Sorry man.
>Killing an innocent person is always wrong.
Always wrong? Even in a trolley problem scenario? Even if an innocent person is posing a threat to your life?
>Hmmm.........nope, I'm going to kill him and enjoy doing it. Sorry man.
Why think that it's the right thing, though?
You make a good point. I guess killing an innocent person is the right thing to do if, say, they were carrying a disease that was going to infect and kill a lot more innocent people. It wouldn't be a pleasant thing to do though and no one should feel good about doing it.
>Why think that it's the right thing, though?
You're asking why I think killing someone who's raping my mother is the right thing? It should be self-evident if you aren't emotionally stunted or intensely propagandized. He's an evil person who's not only bringing pain to others, but to my mother and to me personally. You're welcome to try to put forth a reason he shouldn't be killed if you'd like to. But I truly find it difficult to believe you're sincerely telling me you wouldn't chop a man's head off if you walked in on him raping your mother. I honestly couldn't respect you as a person if you wouldn't do that, I would not trust your morals and would always view you with suspicion.
>I guess killing an innocent person is the right thing to do if, say, they were carrying a disease that was going to infect and kill a lot more innocent people.
That's what I figured, and almost everyone if you press them will end up conceding that it's not actually always wrong to kill an innocent person. And that's a difficulty with denying that killing is always wrong. Once you start making exceptions at all, it's very difficult to resist making exceptions for innocent people, but presumably the whole point of having a rule that you allows you to kill was so that you could protect innocent people.
>You're asking why I think killing someone who's raping my mother is the right thing? It should be self-evident
Well, it's not obviously self-evident because there are some very smart people who have thought that you're not allowed to kill in cases like that. Augustine, for example, would say that you shouldn't kill the rapist. Also, despite the fact that basically everyone agrees that killing is morally justified in cases like the one you gave, basically no one can agree on why it's okay. So, philosophers have proposed a bunch of theories that are supposed to explain why you're allowed to kill aggressors, like rights forfeiture, distributive justice, the doctrine of double effect, etc. But none of these theories are themselves self-evident; they're all controversial. Everyone agrees that you can't just kill people for no reason, and thus there's a presumption against killing. So, you need to be able to give some kind of explanation for why you're allowed to kill aggressors. No one would be persuaded by "It's just self-evident that abortion is okay" or "It's just self-evident that capital punishment is okay," etc.
I don't see any reason why that might be so. My moral intuition says that:
- it's absolutely wrong to kill a person who is my kin or friend
- it's wrong to kill an innocent person who belongs to my ethnic group/culture/race
- it may be wrong and/or impractical to kill an innocent person who is sufficiently far away from me in terms of ethnicity, culture, or race
- it is good and right to kill a person if he/she is a murderer, a rapist, or a violent criminal, unless they are my kin or friend
The thread is full of Americans whose concept of what morality is supposed to be originally comes from that little cosy Protestant church their parents and grandparents went to on Sunday. The funny thing is that most of them already grew up non-religious, so this moral cretinism must be a cornerstone of American psyche that survives even when religion is gone. Given that all modern American political and social movements, from MAGA, white nationalism, and QAnon to mainstream liberalism, DEI, troonyism, and BLM are just repackaged Protestant cults, that seems quite likely.
Unironically, rent-free.