25 Jan '07 19:11>2 edits
Originally posted by lucifershammerKilling is natural. Murder is not. From a biological standpoint, murder
Murder is natural too (especially for humans).
is the unnecessary (e.g., not self defense) or unwarranted (e.g.,
not punitive) killing of an individual within the propinquity group of the
killer. Murder has never been tolerated within any known group of
humans because it undermines the trust, cooperation, and sense of
community which is parcel to human social evolution. Survival depends
on most humans avoiding murder most of the time. If murder became
a biological advantageous enterprise, then it would be built into our
moral code to encourage murder, and no known social group does that
(and we can see why, because a group that did encourage it would end
up killing amongst itself, limiting the expression of its genes).
The reason that killing has remained part of modern human interaction
is because we fail to define our propinquity groups broadly. In the past
and present we have seen Shiites opine that Sunnis are the 'other'
and so it isn't murder, but killing. The Crips opine that the Bloods are
the 'other,' so it's permissible. White folk label black folk as 'other,'
Germans label Jews as 'other,' and so forth. Once you dehumanize
a group of people, you cease to have empathy for them and it ceases
to be murder (socially speaking) and becomes killing.
Nemesio