Is Murder REALLY "Wrong"??

Question

meh. we do it to animals. what say you?

I really could care less about animal safety. I just added in that animal part to be as crude as possible.
As for creation arguments, I find it a bit wack. Since you didn't create it you can't destroy it??
Interesting.................
Just cut to the case and argue why my human life is so special that no other human can destroy its dignity or whatnot. If that is not it...I suppose we can't justify destroying a chicken, or a rock for that matter. I don't think I made them either (but maybe...)

Answer 1

No it is not really wrong.
We do it to animals, animals do it to us.
Humans do it to each other all the time as well, and apparently it is an honorable thing to do(War).
So you are right, murder is only "wrong" in a very narrow set of circumstances, which our society arbitrarily chose to punish.

Answer 2

I agree with some others here that you need to be more specific as to what you mean.

Murder is homicide with malice aforethought. Since the killing of animals is not homicide, it is not murder.

Although this is the philosophy section, I don't think you're looking for arguments defending skepticism, foundationalism, etc. I think you're asserting that human beings are inconsistent opposing murder while condoning Kentucky Fried Chicken, etal.

When it comes right down to it, all of us have to kill something to live. Vegetarians kill living "beings," they're called plants. What we kill is a matter of choice, but as a society, we've decided that the unjustified (also defined by law) killing of a human being with malice aforethought is murder.

Bottom line: Murder REALLY is wrong and no, killing animals is not murder.

**Edit**
I stand corrected. The animal angle is superfluous and I'll ignore it.

When you say "REALLY" wrong, are you speaking *universally*? If so, then we'll need to know where that universal law, under which all humanity is subject, came from.

Alternatively, all laws against murder are anthropocentric. Human beings instinctively want to survive and laws against murder help protect mankind's (sorry PCers, humankind's) existence.

Of course, all of this is obvious, but it appears you're looking for more. Right? Is murder WRONG? Well, is ANYTHING wrong? Where does this concept of right and wrong come from?

I believe C. S. Lewis, former atheist, hit the nail on the head:

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

Without a theistic umbrella, murder is only wrong because it threatens the orderly existence of society.

Answer 3

Yes, it is really wrong. There are a few different ways to look at this:

(1) People have certain minimal rights that it is never right to violate, and one of those is their right to live.
(2) To kill another person is an act that lacks kindness, compassion, and humanity. These are all virtues that indicate what kind of behavior is right. To act against these virtues constitutes wrong behavior.
(3) Murder creates a great deal of undue unhappiness, grief, and loss for the loved ones of the victim, and robs the victim of any happiness they might have had later in their life had they not been killed.

As for the issue of killing animals, that is a more complicated issue because animals are not moral beings. They cannot make decisions based on ethics because they lack the intelligence to distinguish between right and wrong. If an animal kills another animal for sport, you do not regard the killer animal as a murderer, because it could not have understood such a concept, and is therefore not a moral agent. To kill animals below ourselves on the food chain in order to eat them is only immoral if we do so in a more inhumane manner than is necessary (which most slaughterhouses do, but not kosher ones). Also, to kill an animal for its fur or for sport is immoral because is shows a lack of compassion for the animal's pain, and it is selfish to hurt another living thing if survival and sustenance don't demand it.

Answer 4

As someone before me has more or less said, killing is an indisputable fact, but whether it is murder or not depends on your definition of murder, which is a social concept.

When is killing morally wrong? To answer that question, we should first examine the purpose of moral codes.

The proper purpose of any moral code is to assist in the survival of its practitioners collectively. Moral codes are not aids to the survival of persons as individuals, since the self-preservation instinct is internal and does not usually need any external reinforcement. A moral code "works" to the extent that it preserves itself, which requires that it also preserve those who practice it.

However, dysfunctional moral codes do exist. In fact, there is a broad class of moral codes which call upon their practitioners to engage in behaviors that are self-genocidal in the long term, but which inspire feelings of "warm and fuzzy" gratification in the near term. I'm sure that you can identify at least a few of these dysfunctional moralities if you will think a bit.

Humans have made a bad habit of constructing moral systems though a-priori thinking, of trying to deduce right and wrong actions by way of the moral sense alone, uninformed by experience or history. I believe that engaging in this habit allows people to feel "superior" in some way, elevated, above the herd in a good way (shepherd of the flock), and to appear suited for leadership, etcetera.

Anyway, the question of whether murder is REALLY "wrong" is the wrong question. It would be better to ask for the circumstances in which killing people is conducive to the longterm survival and empowerment of the society in which the killing is being done. There is no good and evil, there is only good and bad.

Answer 5

Murder is defined as one human killing another. Killing an animal is not, by definition, murder. Murder is a social concept.

Killing another animal for food is not murder, it is a perfectly natural act that happens in nature millions of times every day. There is nothing wrong or immoral in it. For those that think it is wrong I'd like you to define the difference between killing a plant for food and an animal. Killing is killing no matter what you are killing. You are still destroying life.

Answer 6

What we do to animals that ends their lives falls into several categories: slaughter, killing, ecosystem destruction, euthanasia, cruelty, etc, but it doesn't qualify as murder. There is a growing tendency today to use figurative language for rhetorical force, and then to confuse the metaphor with the literalism.
___Metaphor is stretched language, and is false to the extent of the stretch. Stretching the truth is allowable because literal language isn't always adequate for the tasks to which we apply it, but there's an implicit assumption in such uses that the writer and the reader both recognize figurative language, and keep in mind that it isn't, strictly speaking, true. It's like remembering that a novel is fiction.
___The linguistic difficulties of right wing rhetoric include an insistance on literalizing biblical language that was written in a time when the prevailing metaphysical assumptions were different, and "literalism" was different from today.
___It is on the left, though, that there's a lot of confusion about figurative language and literalism. Aside from resulting in a lot of falsehoods being presenteed as true, this confusion is simply bad mental-health practice, and one can observe a lot of collective and individual hysteria emanating from the left.
___Blurring the lines between truth and falsehood and between real and unreal is a dangerous practice, not only for politics but for individual sanity. It is no accident that two of the most left-leaning communities in one of the most left-leaning states in the nation have among the highest concentrations of mental-illness professionals in the nation. (Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts)
___Further, it's about time that academics acknowledged that dime-a-dozen skepticism (the claims that there are no such things as objective truth, reality, or freedom) is tiresomely conventional, with clear, explicit precedents in the early 18th century, and less disciplined strains in the 17th. Now that 7th and 8th graders spout these positions like gospel shows that the trickle down process is complete, from leading intellectuals to workmanlike academics to barely-educated schoolteachers to the masses. It has become an element of adolescent peer-pressure; the cool kids parade their skepticism with know-it-all bravado (and the very notion of know-it-all skepticism should be a warning sign).
___Skepticism is no excuse for confusing figurative language and literalism.
___Do you really wnat to go through life unable to discern what is real from what isn't?

Answer 7

Im going to go against the grain and say not always is murder wrong; Laws sometimes get in the way of morals- because I know if someone raped and murdered my child, i'd want to kill that person, and im pretty sure others would too....sometimes, when you can identify real evil in the world, those people have to be disposed of...
As for afterlife repecussions? well everybody likes to talk about sinning and God sending us to hell, but morals are on earth for a reason, there is evil for every good deed, so evil doers in some fashion, must get justic on earth....the ones we can catch should not be exempt from human retribution..

Answer 8

Well there are really two questions what is murder and what is wrong?

Let us deal with what is wrong 1st. Firstly wrong has nothing to do with emotional feelings, for example if an animal is suffering sometimes its justice to kill it, it feels bad but is not wrong.

So then what is wrong? well the only option left by eliminating emotional response is an untruth. Wrong is not a good or bad, rather a question of true or unture. Such as the case of a wrong answer on a test. When we say something is wrong I should hope it to mean, it is not true.

Let us apply this to murder and with it see what makes murder wrong, and with it I beleive will be a definiton of what murder is.

Murder is the taking of someones existence, however this is not mans place to decide who exists who whould not. Since it is most definitly not us who created man, to say otherwise is absurd, it is not TRUE to say we have that power/right.

However you may ask why is it ok to kill in certian cases and it is not considered murder. Let us take a simple case,say a terrorist, they should surely die. This case is diff, Why? Bec. here we are not saying it is our place to take place to give or take life, however it is our place to protect our own lives, to stop terrorism in order to protect ourselves. So now the purpose for the murder is not to for man to gain satisfaction by playing God, but for somethign which is within his jurisdiction, protecting his own existence. It is bec. there is an outside factor that allows murder not inherent in the killing itself

Answer 9

Seriously - as 'wrongness' is 100% unquantifiable, subjective and personal, we can't say anything is wrong more than anything else with any authority. It's the eternal problem of ethics, but doesn't relieve us of a need for a personal ethical system. What do i think personally? Life is all anyone gets, so the longer and better lives animals and people get the better, and to take them away is bound to affect your own life.

Answer 10

Yes. You are asking a semantic question. Our society defines murder as a wrong action, murder should never be done.
A different way to ask the question would be "is killing another person wrong?" To that, I say no. There are many different reason one might have, such that the "rightness" or "wrongness" of killing another person is subjective.
But murder is wrong, because that is how the word is understand in our lexicon.