Comment by bluegatty
9 hours ago
Yes, but war is worse for all parties generally.
Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.
Primates fighting each other is not.
Murdering for acquisition of a resource is short term advantage.
We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.
I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..
How can it be that groups pay for it long term when many of the successful apex predators exhibit interspecies murder and territorialism.
Just to use your own example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapogo_lion_coalition
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
That's not a given. Look at the Old Testament, it professes that you shall not kill, but is also full of laws that are upheld by death, stories of just killings, etc and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god.
In cultures where honor is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who bring dishonor or to maintain honor.
In cultures where purity/cleanliness is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who are impure/unclean.
Not as simple as murder bad
All cultures, even it seems primates, discriminate between notions of 'arbitrary murder' and 'justice' implying different things.
And it's all roughly consistent.
Arbitrary murder is always 'wrong' across cultures.
Self defence is almost always considered reasonable and a form of justification.
Even basic cultures developed sense of 'justice' as retribution or punishment.
It gets a bit more complicated in terms of organized violence, but even there, it's generally always considered moral in the posture of defence, just as it were a single person defending themselves.
For other things, it's more complicated.
And of course 'war parties' and 'arbitrary retribution' has always been there, aka 'they slighted us, we harm them' absent true moral justification. That's always been problematic, admittedly.
Also "and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god." this is not an appropriate assertion (not nice or welcome)
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin
The idea of sin is designed to fix less than ideal human tendencies. If anything, this being the biggest sin means murder is the most inherent bad trait of humans.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
There are plenty of people who advocate for war and consider it good, and plenty of disagreements over war.
People are usually in agreement that war / killing is bad when other people do it but will find all sorts of ways to justify themselves doing it when it is to their advantage. This isn't really contradictory, from an evolutionary perspective.
> Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
Yeah, but almost all cultures consider killing people in war not to be "murder".
Plenty disagreements everywhere. Under (usually fake) ideas of not enough resources for everyone, so the strongest must survive.
Nazi planned to exterminate several whole ethnicities. If you think it was (or is) unversally accepted as "Bad" -- think again. Most developed countries had Nazi parties, including US and Canada. Some sympathize today. Several Middle East governments publicly claim that murders/rapes/kidnappings of people from another particular country is just and honorable, and will be rewarded in heavens.
Ancient Spartans (reportedly) killed their own weak children. In order to become a citizen every Spartan must have killed a man (non-citizen). It was considered good and just (by citizens).
In many cultures tribal warfare was paramount, even before states (and some remote tribes practice it even today). It was considered good and just.
And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
You're confusing interpersonal murder with tribal conflict.
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.
You are juxtaposing murder with killing. Every culture has a strong taboo against unlawful killing, i.e., murder. What counts as murder has changed, but the taboo against murder itself has not.
But doesn't that distinction kind of prove the point? Essentially killing people is fine when society approves and not fine when society doesn't implies that there is no built in norm against killing, its just society's "rules".
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder'
The quantity of murders in bad neighborhoods tends to contradict. Even seems like a matter of routine wealth acquisition. Yes, society tries to chase the murderers but, I know the figure for France, even only 40% of murders get solved.
We’ve just built a fragile social construct that not everyone recognizes, against murder, among wealthy societies mostly.
In addition to the standard cross-cultural sample, I find the Seshat database useful for checking universals. https://seshat-db.com/sc/scvars/
Sanctioned killing to defend or strengthen the tribe is generally not equated with murder.
No disagreement across cultures? That’s downright funny, there isn’t even agreement over what counts as murder. Do you think a jihadi sawing off a head thinks they’re a murderer?
Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.
I would caution against the use of "murder" so loosely. Lions don't murder their prey. They kill their prey. Murder occurs when one entity with personhood intentional kills another entity with personhood, where personhood is rooted in the ability to comprehend reality (intellect) and the ability to make free choices among comprehended alternatives (free choice). "Murder" thus has a moral dimension that mere killing does not. Personhood is the seat of moral agency; without personhood, murder simply cannot take place, only killing, and it is a category error to ascribe moral goodness or evil to an act committed by a non-person. A spider eating another spider of the same species isn't murder; it may very well be the nature of that species to function that way.
(Entailed also by personhood is social nature. So, murdering another person is bad, because it is opposed to the very nature and thus good of the murderer. It's why killing in self-defense and the death penalty for murder are themselves mere killing, but not murder. Justice is served against the injustice of the gravely antisocial.)
From a game theoretic perspective w.r.t. just resources, murder does not generally pay especially given the social nature of a species given how antithetical it is to the social, but even if it does in some constrained sense, there is a greater intangible loss for those with personhood. Speak to almost anyone who has murdered someone. They will tell you that it changes them drastically, and not in a good way.
Murder is a crime, homicide is the act. A lion doesn’t murder because it isn’t capable of breaking human law, but it can sure commit a homicide.
Not on a gazelle. The great apes are at least hominids, so I can't complain about it being called "homicide", but a gazelle gets ... bovicide?
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An act is composed of object (the act itself), intent (the purpose/end motivating the act/toward which it aims) and circumstances (the context).
Thus, murder is a species of homicide. The specific differences of murder relative to homicide is that it is voluntary, premeditated, and malicious.
The law merely recognizes this distinction. It doesn't construct some convention around homicide. Indeed, law in general is a particular determination of general moral principles within a particular jurisdiction.
So, a lion doesn't commit murder, because a lion's actions are involuntary and neither malicious nor premeditated. Also, while a lion can kill a person or non-person, it is not capable of homicide, because its meaning specifically pertains to the killing of one person by another.
It might also depend on mating dynamics. If females mostly prefer to all mate within the top few percent of males in a community, there might not be much to lose if some of the lower status males of them take their chances going on a war party to conquer/steal some females.
This is one theory for crime. You could think of crime as a high variance high risk strategy to improve mating status. You might then expect most criminals to be young men, and for the straight crime rate to be higher than the gay crime rate. And indeed both of these are true.
I think that’s too narrow. You can also advance your genes by helping your sisters or other close relatives have offspring.
Sure but you can advance your genes even more by taking a woman for yourself. And if there are already enough other males to ensure the survival of the females and children then it might be worth some of the males going to war to get some females.
At some point the marginal utility of warring is better for both the individual and the group than the marginal utility of yet another non-reproducing male hanging around "helping" out their kin while eating the resources.
>We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
We argue over it all the time by disagreeing on what counts as "murder." Taking lives in war? Not murder. Taking civilian lives in war? Well the enemy often uses civilians as cover, what else can one do? The state takes someone's life? Not murder, just the cost of civil society. Abortion? Murder, obviously. Bombing an abortion clinic? Not murder, because killing killers in God's name is justified.
So what even is "murder?" It isn't simply the taking of a human life. It isn't even the taking of an innocent human life. It isn't even the taking of a human life with premeditation. Murder is an arbitrary line societies draw between the killing they find useful and the killing they don't. It's a legal and moral fiction.
I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures and the only people who even care are the descendants of the few Natives we missed. How have we paid for that long term? We're a goddamn global hegemon and nuclear superpower that threatens to annihilate civilizations just for shits and giggles. Murder seems to be working out pretty well for us.