viscousmemories

I believe, as most of the members here, that I will cease to exist when I die. As I will no longer exist, it will be irrelevant to me that I ever lived, not to mention how or why I died. Since I also don't believe that life is in itself "sacred" I don't believe that everyone has an inherent "right to live".

With these things in mind, it seems to me that there is no logical justification for not killing me based solely on how the act will affect me, but on what effect killing me will have on those who are still alive and will be affected by my death.

In other words, it strikes me that the victim(s) of murder is/are not the people who lose their lives, but the people who have an investment in the people who lost their lives. So arguments for and/or against killing another person should focus on the effect the act will have on society, not the individual.

It's early in the morning and I feel like this logic is falling apart as I write it, so I'd like to hear opinions about where it fails (as I'm sure it does).

Jamie_L

The essential premise of this line of reasoning is that a person's desires prior to an act against them are not relevant to whether or not an act is right or wrong. Only a person's state of being after the act are relevant. Thus, if the person is dead after the act, there is no state of being, thus no moral relevance. Let's examine some results of assuming this type of morality.

What if you drug someone and rape them and they never find out? The person never suffers. Was the act wrong? Of course not, because the person does not feel wronged after the act.

But, it IS wrong to kill someone if that death has an impact on others who survive him. Fine, kill off all those people and the problem is solved. Essentially, killing is not immoral as long as you ALSO kill off everyone who would be effected by the initial killing.

Furthermore, how far after the act are we talking? Suppose you torture someone continuously and then kill them. Is that okay? I mean, the fact they they were tortured doesn't bother them anymore. What if you don't kill them? Well, eventually they'll be dead anyway, and then it won't bother them.

For that matter, the people who will morn your killing victim will eventually die to. Eventually no one will remember any of you ever existed. Does that mean it's okay? I mean, no one's suffering 200 years down the road, so it's okay, right?

Any system of moral right and wrong cannot be solely based on the after-the-fact results. Otherwise, it's pretty useless.

Jamie

...

I find that line of reasoning to be positively scary. If there is no right to life, then from whence comes freedom?

You have the right to live. Killing you would be immoral, as it would violate your rights. (I do not include killing in self defence in this case, and am undecided on the death penalty.)

You mean losing the very essence of a person - all the contributions s/he would have made, all the lives s/he would have touched, etc - count for nothing? What if Einstein, Galileo or Verdi were strangled in their cribs during infancy?

It just failed. Really think about the nature of human life for awhile.

Silent Acorns

To me, the fundamental reason that killing a person is wrong is that by killing someone you are destroying something that belongs to someone else. To make matters worse, it is impossible for you to compensate them for the damage you did.

It may be irrelevant to them after they're dead, but it sure wouldn't be at the moment you killed them, and that's enough to make it wrong in my eyes.

christ-on-a-stick

My thoughts are along the same lines as Silent Acorns'.

I would elaborate but I need some more coffee first...

viscousmemories

Let me start by saying that I agree with your conclusions on the whole, but I want to clarify some things.

I don't really know how to answer the rape question. I personally believe it's wrong to drug and rape someone regardless of whether or not they ever find out, but I'm fairly certain my bias is based on my own ingrained morality rather than on some universal morality.

To me, the thing that makes drugging and raping someone morally reprehensible is the likelihood that the person will, whether they are aware of it or not, be physically and/or emotionally and/or psychologically traumatized by the event.

Unless you argue that the people on whom the death will have an impact are society as a whole, right? I mean, if the position is that society as a whole is negatively impacted by the killing of a single person, is that enough of a moral justification not to kill one person?

I think I see your point, but the point of my OP was really to try to draw out what reasons (other than "sanctity of life") people have for rationalizing that every living human has a right to life. Because if every human being has an inherent right to life, killing can never be justified unless the victims have somehow lost that right, right? Eventually I want to get to what justifications people believe their are for revoking a persons right to life, if there are any.

Makes sense to me.

Hobbs

That's precisely what viscousmemories said does count: the effect the killing has on those who are still alive and will be affected by those deaths.

As far as a right to life is concerned, what is the source of that right? What do you eat?

(I'm not going to try to argue that it isn't wrong to kill someone. In fact, even if viscousmemories is right, that still leaves the effects on those who remain alive as justification enough to argue against killing [if you want, combine that with the fact that if you go around randomly killing people, those left alive will defend themselves against you by at least permanently jailing and perhaps killing you]. But I do not think that "natural rights" actually exist or mean anything, so I don't see how a justification based on natural rights can possibly get anywhere).

Hobbs

From the fact that nothing will matter to any of us 200 years from now, it does not follow that nothing matters to us now.

Jamie_L

Actually, I'll sign on to the idea that there is no objective "right to life" that exists apart from people and society. I don't feel it's wrong to kill someone because it violates some objective "right to life." The morality of the situation is more subtle than that, I believe, and more subjective. If people have any right to life, it is only because that right is an outgrowth of some common moral framework we've all agreed to.

With that said, I'm also still muddling through figuring out what the ration foundations of my subjective morality are. So I can't personally answer your question the way you'd like. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer.

Ultimately, my morality is built on a few underlying principles from which everything flows. Those principles bascially involve causing no unnecessary harm to others. What makes those principles moral? That's the part I'm still muddling through.

Feather

Well I don't go around killing people I'd like to see dead on the grounds that men with guns will come take my freedom away.

I'd join the men with guns if somebody went around killing people, for that matter.

It's a matter of mutual benefit and probabilities. I will probably be more safe if a bunch of people agree to mutual protection (i.e. to restrict the freedom of and/or kill a person who kills capriciously) than if a bunch of people decide to just kill whenever the mood strikes them.

There's no "right" to life or any other such nonsense--that's all political rhetoric to dupe the ignorant masses into agreeing with the system that the speaker desires. And it's all empty rhetoric unless the speaker and his pals have the necessary power to back by force their desires against the unwilling.