Murder is not Wrong

[Didymos Thomas]

Your dialog exposes the most fundamental fallacies of your argument:

You say: "Why does their future matter to me? My future will go on, and they'll be dead. Why do I care if someone else is in pain?"

Yet in your introduction you say: "right being actions which benefit us or others, and wrong being actions which unbenefit us or other"

The murder is not the only individual involved - his murdering certainly causes harm to the victim, and therefore murder is wrong.

You argue that, because moral values vary and often conflict that there are no universal moral rights or wrongs. However, there does not have to be universal moral right and wrong in order for there to be moral right and wrong.

As for your claim "there are no moral values except the ones put into law", this is, on it's face, untrue - and your support for the claim is nonexistent. You go from saying that laws 'express a form of morality' to saying that laws are the only moral values. The claim is patently false because I can hold a moral value regardless of legislation - even you admit that men held moral values prior to legislation.

[Justin]

Moral or immoral what you do to your brother the world will do unto you. You treat people the way you would want to be treated. If you really desire to hurt yourself, then hurt someone else because that's exactly what will happen.

The murderer may live on but if one believes they can hurt someone else without equally balanced hurt and pain to themselves, they're seeing ghosts. The surest way to hurt oneself is to deliver hurt to another.

The naivety behind this original post is sad because there are some that actually believe this type of thing. It's no wonder this world is so screwed up with people trying to raise themselves up or lift themselves higher by pushing another down. Set all the man made laws aside so we can observe the laws of nature.

Do unto others as you would want others to due unto you. PEACE!

[Zetetic11235]

I feel that my last post was fairly thouroughly misunderstood. I simply was saying that murder is wrong because it places undue danger of pain of death and does not maximally benefit humanity in comparison to rampant murder as it deprives us of potential resources and threatens survival. Non leathal force for this reason is preferred.

The first post essentially said "Do unto others ..." but with reasons to do so and a little logical build up(albiet maybe not the clearest)

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Mephistopheles

If you grew up in Nazi Germany murder isn't bad at all. If Nazism had won the war, our world wouldn't find a problem with genocide and random murder.

That's utter nonsense that would be revealed by even the most cursory understanding of the period.

The Nazis took tremendous pains to keep their atrocities a secret even from their own people. They left very few written documents, they ensured that Hitler's name never appeared on a document related to the treatment of Jews, they burned and destroyed all of the Operation Reinhard camps (Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Majdanek), they destroyed the crematoria at Auschwitz, they killed the sonderkommando at the death camps regularly to prevent them from disseminating what they'd witnessed, and they relegated the atrocities against civilians largely to the SS (with some exceptions, especially in the occupied Soviet Union). The German populace was NEVER told of the campaign to exterminate Jews (and others), and while many suspected it it was never an openly declared policy. And at Nuremburg (and other war crimes trials) the Nazi defendants always did their best to either deny that their atrocities had happened, deny knowledge of them, or use the Eichmann defense that they were just little puppets following orders.

Sounds like a whole lot of secrecy -- and perhaps shame.

[neo-anchorite]

"Murder is not wrong" is a contradiction. Surely you mean killing is not wrong.
Walter Benjamin described what he called divine violence, referring to a spontaneous revolutionary upheaval in response to unbearable repression. According to everyday moral codes killing is wrong, but Kierkegaard was right (a line that Benjamin was following) there are times and situations in which there is an understandable (if not morally justifiable) teleological suspension of the ethical.

By the way "morality is subjective" is also a contradiction. If morality is radically subjective (i.e. "this is just what I think") there is no morality (for reasons akin to Witgenstein's argument against a private language).

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by neo-anchorite

"morality is subjective" is also a contradiction.

The terminology I've always heard, including in an ethics class when I was an undergraduate, is that morality is individual, whereas ethics are shared. People colloquially use the word "morality" to refer to ethics.

If morality is radically subjective there is no morality.

So if opinions are subjective does that mean there are no opinions?

[neo-anchorite]

Who said that morality is individual and ethics is social, and what did they mean?

They are both individual in the sense that in each case the individual needs to make a decision about what is right or wrong when they act (this is the starting point of Kant's moral theory, but it really follows from Descartes' "reminder" that all knowledge involves judgment by individuals - the "I think" must accompany every claim to knowledge).

At the same time they are both social. Firstly, they presuppose a social background of generally accepted norms (these sorts of actions are wrong and those sorts are right) - we can argue about the details of whether, for instance, abortion should be viewed as murder or as respect for the liberty of women only because we already have some general agreements (social) about what murder is and its wrongness and about what liberty is and how important it is (for us).

The big divide in philosophy between ethics and morality arose mainly with Kant. He wanted to come up with a way of being good that would be universally valid (i.e. recognisable as right not only by the members of our community (the attitude which is retrospectively read into an ancient Greek notion of the ethical) but recognisable as right by every imaginable rational agent in the universe). Kantian morality believes it has freed itself completely from dependence on local customary ideas, which is why the Kantian moral agent can be confident that it is not compromising its autonomy (and being autonomous is the core of Kant's moral theory - although we talk (according to the Kantian view of things) about the right and the good, really what we want is to make sure we are acting in a radically free way (i.e. not just doing what we want and not just following local traditions). This very negative view of local customs and traditions is one of the things that makes Kantian morality very individualistic.

Is Kantian morality subjective because it is all focused on individual judgment? No. Someone trying to be Kantian knows they must be able to justify their actions - they need to be able to say that when they went for that abortion, for instance, they were doing the right thing. This involves a claim to objectivity - it must be possible (in principle at least) for us to agree that it was right to have an abortion. There never could be any agreement if I just said: "Hey, it seemed to me like a good idea at the time" (which is what you would say if you thought it was a merely subjective issue).

In practice, Kantian morality also relies on shared norms (although Kant never admitted this and it really undermines his theory to admit it). For the reasons given above, those discussions about what is right and wrong in particular cases can never get going and could never (even in principle) come to any conclusion without a shared moral/ethical vocabulary (and those vocabularies are always local, both geographically and historically).

Conclusion: there is a useful and enlightening distinction between ethics and morality, but it still doesn't make sense to say that morality is (purely) subjective (if you mean that it is purely a private matter and discussion is pointless).

Advice: while thinking about particular moral issues it is worth thinking about how morality/ethics are social, and how they have evolved historically. A VERY thought-provoking work that takes this approach is Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" (a free e-book is available from Gutenberg and my summary can be found at philosophical anvil). By the way, for Nietzsche EVERYTHING is morality (ethics, science, politics included) because every human activity involves evaluations about what is good and what is bad. A less in-your-face book is Alisdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue".

One of the things that come into view when you look at things historically is how closely the rise of morality is linked to the rise of liberalism (the breakdown of the older, more closely knit communities that could share more fully developed ideas about the right way to live). MacIntyre talks at length about the crisis of morality/ethics in the modern world because the moral vocabulary has been diminished to such a great extent. In the past, ethics encompassed just about everything (including business, for instance). In modern liberal societies huge areas of social life come to be seen as morally neutral and morality shrinks to arguments about abortion, same-sex marriages and whether it is okay to smack your kids. Liberalism (some would say capitalism) has been eroding the social basis for morality (for a morality that our society can be unanimous about). This, though, (following Nietzsche) implies a whole set of value judgments (praising a dubious notion of individual liberty and an equally questionable notion of human equality) which deserve a ruthless criticism (a criticism which would necessarily go beyond the decadent ethic/morality of the age - hence Nietzsche's title "Beyond Good and Evil")

[Critz]

Originally Posted by Mephistopheles

We only find murder wrong because it's what we're taught. If you grew up in Nazi Germany murder isn't bad at all. If Nazism had won the war, our world wouldn't find a problem with genocide and random murder. And then there's the literary world of 1984; murder is encouraged.

I strongly disagree with this statement. If you grew up in Nazi Germany the genocide would be more then likley unknown to you. And if you did know about it, you were tauch that it was enacted on people without the status of an actual person. If I smash my computer, is it murder? No.
Likewise, Nazi Germany worked to dehumanize the people it was commiting genocide on. To the ones commiting the act, it wasn't seen as murder, no more then we see cows lined up to become steak as murder.

And the ones who disagreed? They mysteriously dissapeared at night, and it was probably best for ones health if they didn't delve too much into why this was. This isn't 'accpeting' random murder, this is the love of your life and the safety of your familiy taking premise over the death of someone you didn't know that well anyway.

So from this, I'de conclude that murder is thought of as wrong, but if you can convice yourself what your doing isn't murder, then you can convince your self it isn't wrong.