Hello SD. Long time no see. How's it going? I had a thought, and as I was trying to flesh it out, I hit a snag that I couldn't seem to tackle. I decided it might be a good idea to talk to other people and see what they thought, but I couldn't seem to think of a good forum. Then I remembered here, and ye raging wars of wannabe intellectualism of olde, and the environment of callous flame that surrounds it. So why not?

Ok folks, here's the problem: Why is murder wrong? I'm taking a leaf out of Douglass Adams' work here, and saying we know the answer (42) but have yet to find the question. In the same way, I don't think anyone really doubts that murder is wrong, but what is the simple justification for that fact? I'm not interested in empirical arguments ('when murder rates go down, society improves') or transcendental arguments ('god said so') or existential arguments ('everythings pretty much the same unless you're dead'), or social contract arguments ('we agree as society that murder is bad'), or even 'pure' rational A->B type arguments. I just want a simple, reasonable argument whose assumptions seem sound and seems to point to the truth. I'm not interested in petty semantics, and of course you can use elements from all the argument styles I mentioned above, I really just mean that I've seen all those core arguments before and there's something missing. If all that existed in the universe was you and another person, and you had the knife, why wouldn't you kill that person? Why would that be wrong?

Have at it.

Because you wouldn't want it to be done to you.

Given your rather extensive restrictions (perhaps even without them), this seems to be a case where any assumptions you need to make would be less likely than the conclusion itself; while it's possible to form a reasonable argument (where the assumptions are more likely than their negations), I wouldn't find it satisfying.

If pressed I'd use an argument based roughly on rule-utilitarianism/contradiction, which unfortunately may violate your restrictions on empirical/logical arguments... nonetheless:


Rule: Murder is ok in all circumstances.

As a result of this rule, everyone can (morally) murder anyone else at will (i.e. murdering over the innocuous, annoying habits of others). Generally everyone's utility is decreased (through consistently higher fear of death, requiring people to spend time (that they might otherwise not want to) defending/preparing themselves, increased anguish over lost friends/family, etc). So our rule is incorrect.

Basically, this.

I'd like to add namely it violates free will. If you assume that free will doesn't exist, I suppose then murder would be okay, because you were predestined to murder that other guy. But otherwise, if free will does exist, you determined that your free will was more valuable than their free will. It gets into a matter of ego at that point, but if you can justify indiscriminately killing others you're usually considered to have a disorder like sociopathic disorders, narcissism, or anything along those lines - something that distorts your reality, because the thought is why would someone "neurotypical" (as well as many varieties of atypical) be okay with making that judgement call, that their free will is more valuable than someone else's?

Unfortunately, given your constraints on the argument this is in my opinion a for pseudointellectual response. You have to first assume that free will transcends all these things, and then the generic claims I make are based on a social contract, which even that you said wasn't enough for our basis. The best possibly most accurate response is "because we said so," because the context of free will determines the outcome of the social contract.

ETA: I asked Berkly, and he said it's wrong because it is a waste of resources. Can't argue with that.

This is known as the Golden Rule, and it is a cornerstone in many religious and societal forms of morality. I don't think a simpler answer exists for this question.

Well you can, quite easily. Like if you know the person you're planning to murder is about to do so much greater harm to the world, then killing them is a savings of resources.

But in the general case, yes. Although if you want to get really pedantic, even in the general case you're helping to conserve the world's natural resources by killing someone (although diminishing its human resources). Although again there's the specific case, where you're killing someone who would have made a net positive impact on the world's resources, eg Elon Musk.

I didn't mean to place restrictions on the discussion, I just meant rather that I've seen most of those arguments before, and yet am not quite satisfied with their assumptions and methodology. Please feel free to argue in whatever mode you prefer. I do find it likely that the arguments we may present here will "boil down" to one of the ones I have already listed however.

This would be satisfyingly simple, however it doesn't actually satisfy my problem unfortunately. I don't want needles stuck in my body, but getting vaccinations is not wrong (oh god please no one argue this ), and it is similarly easy to come up with other examples of things I do not want done to me which are wrong. Unless you insist otherwise of course; perhaps there is some deeper truth here?

Unfortunately your utilitarian argument is just a subset of the empirical argument as far as I can tell. "If we murder, then we observe utility to decrease because of these things (fear, waste of time, etc), and decrease in utility is wrong". I do like the angle here though, I hadn't really considered generic 'utility' as a factor. Also, I suppose I ought to make my inquiry more specific: I am interested in the morality of the action, the decrease in utility it not necessarily a "wrong" thing.

Perhaps I misunderstand your wording here, but I don't see any 'violation' of free will. If an agent with free will chooses to murder another, it was merely an exercise of his will to commit the act. Maybe what you're actually arguing is that "removing free will from the world is wrong"? However, at this junction we return to my original inquiry "Why is murder wrong?" just with a different set of words. Perhaps it may be valuable to the discussion in its own right to note that murder is the intentional killing of another sentient life form, aka removing an agent with free will from the world. I'm not really interested in killing bugs and stuff.

You're correct in your assumption that I'm not interested in your argument about sociopathic disorders because they stem from the social contract. Additionally, I do not see why making a judgement call about the value of your free will against the value of another's is a prerequisite for murder. I could murder someone merely at whim, or because I found it funny (obviously a social disorder, but that's not the point). I agree murder must be a choice, accidental manslaughter is not the topic at hand, but I don't see why you require a specific valuation of free will in order to commit murder. Perhaps if you believe this is actually true you could endeavor to show that all murder must evaluate the target's free will agency before being committed?

This is an argument from transcendental authority, and as you said, is insufficient for my purposes.

I agree with Lanthanide, in that it is simple to construct a scenario in which 'wasting resources' is a good thing. Additionally, at a more fundemental level, if you wished to continue along this argument we would need to show that murder necessitates a waste of resources, and then continue to show why wasting resources is wrong. "Wasting resources" being wrong makes sense in the sort of utilitarian arguments jjf28 presented but does not seem as evident to me in a moral context.


Here is the simplest argument I have formulated to date. Unfortunately it requires us to assume that pain is wrong, whereas I can easily construct many examples where pain is a good thing. But it goes something like this: Everyone can feel pain, and pain is wrong. Murder causes pain, therefore murder is wrong. Simple, but insufficient. I was thinking perhaps there may be a way to separate "good" pains from "wrong" pains, but I don't know if pain can form a sufficient basis for the morality involved with murder.

That's a misinterpretation. The Golden Rule simply says you shouldn't administer a vaccination via needle injection if you yourself were unwilling to receive it. I'm sure you can find more ambiguous examples which make certain actions subjective in regards to morality.

The reason murder is objectively wrong is because the Golden Rule upholds for effectively every individual (exempting mental illness) across all cultures, societies, and religions. This is due to our biology, where we instinctually have the desire to survive.

The Golden Rule is not without it's problems, however.

For example, a sadomasochist could inflict pain without breaking the Golden Rule.

True, I was using a technique for ethical evaluation rather than moral evaluation.

Actions taken by free agents with a clear affect on utility (increasing/decreasing joy/happiness, increasing/decreasing suffering/pain) are the only ones to which we ascribe moral value (in secular contexts anyways). It's a leap (but one that aligns neatly with the fairly universal principles we operate on) to assign actions with obvious trends to decrease utility as immoral and actions with negligible effect or increase in utility as moral/morally neutral.

Two things:

1) I literally just said you can come up with morally ambiguous cases. This doesn't invalidate the question at hand, however.
2) Masochistic acts are to cause a pleasurable experience, not just to cause pain (this is the same misinterpretation as using needles to administer a vaccine). Causing displeasurable pain would, in fact, violate the Golden Rule.

A more interesting scenario falls along the lines of the Trolley Problem, and using the Golden Rule, you can find interesting results to where you personally stand on difficult moral questions, even though the rule itself doesn't provide an objective answer (in fact, the lack of objectivity in regards to the Golden Rule is likely the very reason the moral question is difficult). For example:

Say you had to take an innocent person's life in order to save 2 other innocent lives. Would you do it? You may reason that the net gain of saving 2 lives outweighs allowing the 1 to live: those are the cold numbers. Now say that you are the 1 person vs 2 other lives. Would you be fine with someone else killing you? Maybe I'm selfish, but I value my life over the lives of two strangers, so as per the Golden Rule, I should not kill an innocent person, even if it means two people would be saved. If I were more compassionate toward strangers, or if the number of innocents to be saved increased, my answer may change.

We could go on and on with the Trolley Problem, because opinions, biases, and emotion cause the answer to vary widely between individuals. That is why we have a hard time saying whether or not it is wrong, whereas we can confidently reply on the simple case of "murder" being wrong.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 5 2015, 7:50 pm by Roy.

It's possible to murder someone without causing pain; either to the individual, or to anyone else in the world. EG if you found a hermit who had no contact with the outside world whatsoever, and gassed them with carbon monoxide while they slept, no one would know nor (emotionally) care.

Murder is an unlawful killing and not necessarily wrong.

Or perhaps we cannot find an example without a flaw in regards to the Golden Rule. If you were willing to argue this it might form a possible basis for the type of argument I'm looking for. Can it be said that it is impossible to provide an example of "something I do not want done to me" which is "not wrong"? I see your point about the flaw in the vaccination example, it could easily be said that I do want to be immune to some disease, so I have no choice but to accept the needle. Perhaps this flaw can be found in any such argument, leaving the Golden Rule applicable?


At the same time, let's not get into describing things "objectively", there is no such thing for the purposes of this argument since I'm unwilling to consider transcendental arguments. A simple argument for why murder is wrong would have the appearance of transcendentality perhaps, but I'd like to arrive there from simplicity and not start with transcendence and go backwards to the answer. I acknowledge the irony that in my opening post I said "we all accept that murder is wrong" in a transcendental way ("saying we know the answer (42) but have yet to find the question.")

The flaw in this is the same as the flaw in my vaccination example, ultimately they are not "inflicting pain".

So I see your point here, but the basis for this example makes the concept of "wrong" into a petty thing, by way of technicality. I'm not interested in lawyering a good argument out of this, that would violate the simplicity that I'm searching. So instead I will broaden the concept of pain to defeat your example here. I think it's enough that the hermit would feel emotional pain if he knew you were killing him, which will be my qualifier for subverting this example. Unless of course, you have a real point that you'd like to argue further? Do you think the 'lawyering' of the definitions we use will ultimately prove useful in the course of the discussion? Or maybe I did not adequately capture the point you were trying to make by murdering without physical pain at all? For example, If we accept the assumption that pain is wrong as you seemed to do, and we can truly murder without any pain at all, do you mean to imply that murder is not wrong in that case?

Please provide some context and thought, statements masquerading as fact without support like this violate the terms of SD. I'm no longer a moderator here but I would have deleted this post once upon a time. If you wish to introduce some legal definitions, I would welcome your contribution, but there has already been some discussion relevant to what we are considering as murder in this thread which you should include in your arguments.

I don't believe it's impossible to find such an example. I'll give it a shot with a potential upcoming social issue:

Lots of people are opposed to self-driving cars because they personally enjoy the act of driving. Statistically speaking, self-driving cars will greatly reduce accidental collisions and deaths and improve overall commuter efficiency, so society may view it as a good thing to have a mandate requiring public roads be operated by self-driving vehicles. Those who enjoy driving, however, would very much dislike having their privilege to drive on public roads taken away from them by such a mandate, and as per the Golden Rule, they would view it as wrong to enforce it.

This is due to personal opinion and emotion. Separate societal standards may arise around these opinions, and while local laws would likely form around the Golden Rule, it certainly wouldn't be a universal truth, and future societies may have laws that contradict current ones. So why is murder different? Because it's obje-

I apologize for throwing the word out there, especially considering SEN's history of arbitrarily using these terms. I'm using the following definition regarding objectivity in my statements:



The Golden Rule doesn't hold up for certain cases (like the example I gave above) because they aren't based on definite commonalities. The statement "Murder is wrong" (or "Killing an innocent person is wrong" if you want to remove the statement from law) is based on the fact that we are biologically designed to be averse to death, so our "personal" opinion on not wanting to be killed by someone else is actually a factual one. Had we no sense of self-preservation, developing a system to prevent killing other people wouldn't make much sense, and it would require some indirect reasoning that this topic seems to be searching for (which may not even exist), such as, perhaps, that since we are a social species, it would impact our sociability if free killing were allowed.

Fortunately, however, there is a very simple reason, and it was (rather tersely) presented as the first reply to the topic.

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In summary: The Golden Rule states that murder is wrong on the principle that you should not kill someone because you would not want someone to kill you. The reason this is universally true is due to our biology.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 7 2015, 7:56 pm by Roy.

I hope I'm not merely being banal here, but wouldn't it still be wrong to kill me even if I had no sense of self-preservation? Perhaps this is not the case - for example some spiders are eaten by their young when their young are born. It seems that such a thing isn't 'wrong', though I think the lack of sentience and therefore inability to choose to kill makes it not murder.


It seems to me that the Golden Rule is a consequence of morality - not that morality is a consequence of the Golden Rule. If for example, we were biologically programmed to kill each other, the golden rule would be "Kill unto others as you would have them kill unto you", right? In both of these cases we'd be arguing that the biology is the key factor here, creating the "morality" of the golden rule based on whatever the biological case happens to be. If we suppose that people were biologically programmed to kill, would it be the case that murder is not wrong (assuming they were still capable of choosing or not choosing to kill)? Is all that makes killing wrong just the collection of negative side effects it has on our auxiliary goals in life?

If the human race lacked a sense of self-preservation, then going by the Golden Rule, there would be no reason killing someone would be wrong; it would be a victimless action. If there is no victim, is there any wrongdoing?

Though thinking more abstractly, you could argue that people would still not want to be killed by someone else without consent, because as humans we enjoy the ability to choose, and being killed takes away our choice.

It's hard for me to get in the mindset of complete apathy toward survival, because even if you didn't care strictly about living, you would likely have goals that require you to be alive to achieve, wouldn't you? (As an aside: from an evolutionary standpoint, it seems difficult to not develop a sense of self-preservation, since the species would likely go extinct without it. Skimming the web, it appears this behavior has been seen in ant workers, though I can't really find a good article on it.)

Let's assume the premise that we have an innate, biological desire to kill. This does not mean that we desire to be killed. As per the Golden Rule, we can still identify that killing is wrong because we do not want to die, even though it's perfectly natural for us to want to kill.

Some theoretical societies may allow murder for the sake of satiating our biological desires. I would imagine in this case we would still form tribes that forbid murder amongst its own members, however, because ultimately we still have the desire to survive, and this would invariably be justified as some form of a moral code.

They are inflicting pain. Why do you say they are not? I don't understand the quotation marks.

In both the vaccination and masochism examples, the pain is merely a side effect of the intended consequence. A short sting is necessary to prevent disease, and yes in the masochism example "inflicting pain" is necessary on the path to pleasure. But the intention of both examples is not to cause harm, it's to protect against disease and to cause pleasure. If you think it's worth arguing further that the side-effect pain in these two cases is actually important, I'll be happy to continue this part of the discussion, but I think it's simple to show how the goals of these actions eclipses the necessary, non-permanent damage forming pain inflictions.

So this is maybe the heart of the issue. If this is true, then murder is not innately wrong. Obviously I'm doing things a bit backwards in assuming the outcome that "murder is wrong" and trying to find justification for it, but this would seem to show that it is not always wrong. Ancient tribes had human-sacrifice, which was not considered "wrong", right? Is it only wrong today because we view it through the lens of our society and all that entails? If we assume that there was a person who truly wanted to die, but was too afraid to commit suicide and instead wanted us to kill them, would killing them still be wrong? To invoke the classical example of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, if an old louse is a drain on society with nothing left to contribute, is killing them wrong? Obviously the golden rule applies to Raskolnikov's case, but if the sacrifice perceives being sacrificed as an honor, and the 2nd person truly wants to die, doesn't the golden rule not apply if it's something they want?

As someone who has actually been in that mindset: The lack of goals in your life, or rather the perceived futility of life itself is what makes you apathetic to survival. You simply don't care what will happen or could have happened.

Despite the wording being about what you would or would not want it's actually about what they want. By that logic: No, not wrong.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 19 2015, 5:58 pm by NudeRaider.