Poll: Is killing natural or unnatrual?

[corynski]

Do you see yourself eating your children if it came to that?

It would be impossible to know what I would do if I were starving..... It's easy to say that one would do this or that in the future, but reality is such that you do not know what you will do in the future. By definition the future is new, different, never happened before, etc. So tell me what you think of the biblical story of the Samarian women discussing eating their children during a famine?

 

[Jumi]

A wolf in nature is born with a natural instinct to kill. Are you insinuating that a newborn human baby in New York is born with a natural instinct to kill?

New York, Kabul, Stockholm... yes, but we are not carnivorous predators so it's less than a wolf's instincts by comparison.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

By killing I am referring to one person killing another person (we can surmise that self defense is not an issue, meaning that one is not fighting for his/her life).

Elaborate with responses if you choose.

Edit:
I personally believe that killing another person is unnatural. (Sorry for the misspelling in the thread title, can't seem to find a way to correct it.)

I am using synonyms for the word "natural" to make my case.

If one is to consider murder to be, common, essential, logical, ordinary, reasonable, usual, then murder is not natural despite those terms being synonymous with "natural".

Even though there is no definitive definition correlating "natural" with "good", that is how I personally interpret the word.

Therefore, to me murder/killing is not good, it is not natural.

Killing seems to be natural for humanity. The impulse arises naturally and has to be conditioned to a minimum and the residual controlled. I'm pretty sure I remember that as a young boy, I wanted to kill my little sister, and might have tried with permission.

 

[corynski]

I feel very fortunate that I've never felt a desire to kill another person. The most recent killing here locally was a neighbor who shot another neighbor in the back. An old man with some petty excuse for taking away another man's life, how tragic........ So now he's on house arrest for the rest of his life.
Well, I guess I can imagine a situation that might occur that would bring about a killing response in me. That would be a grim reality I'm sure, to be avoided at all costs.

 

[columbus]

Killing is as natural as breathing. We didn't get to be the planet's top predators by playing nice.

What's unnatural is making abstract distinctions between which killings are moral and which are not. Nature is red in tooth and claw.

Many of the best things in life are quite unnatural. Art and literature, cuisine, education, saintliness, none of those are natural. Not in the sense of "animals do it".
Immoral behavior is what's natural. Theft and impulsive sex and murder, those are all behaviors that help spread our genes. They're instinctive. Moral behavior is what people do when they realize that natural behavior doesn't usually lead to a happy and fulfilling life.
Tom

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Killing is something we are all capable of in the heat of the moment, unintentionally.

Your use of the phrase, "in the heat of the moment" suggest that what you are referring to here is second degree murder, which is defined as any unplanned but unlawful and deliberate homicide, where homicide is defined as the taking of a human life by another human being under any circumstances whether criminal or justified. Murder is any unlawful and deliberate homicide whether premeditated or "heat of the moment," and second degree murder is only the latter: not premeditated.

Unintentionally killing another person can either be a crime - manslaughter, for existence, as when killing another because of drunk driving - or considered an accident not requiring legal involvement, as when a child jumps out from between parked cars into the path of your vehicle and is killed.

Lawfully killing another person deliberately includes things such as self-defense, wartime, and if you consider a fetus a human being (and I do), abortion.

Murder is unnatural. For instance: Ambushing someone with premeditated malice. This means you thought about it before hand, planned it out, waited for an advantage to take the upper hand and/or the ability to get away with it.

This should be called first degree murder, and it seems to be pretty natural to me judging by its frequency.

Here's a beautiful song sung beautifully:

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

kill and murder are synonyms.

As I understand it, homicide is a subset of killing (if a wolf kills you, it's not homicide), unlawful homicide a subset of homicide, and murder is a subset of unlawful homicide as I just outlined. First and second degree murder are subsets of murder.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Though undesirable, I'd have to say that both killing and murder are both natural acts. They are part of human behavior and to pretend they are not robs one of the ability to see a much larger picture of the human being.

Yes, because killing other people ensures you are a human being. How many people do you kill on average in a year?

I think that you are using a different definition of natural than some others. You are using it in the sense of the opposite of unnatural, which would apply to things like necrophilia and cannibalism compared to acts that typify human existence. If you choose to include murder in that group, you would call it an unnatural act.

Others are using the word to mean not supernatural, that is, anything found in nature. Murder is as natural as supernovae by this definition.

A third meaning would be the opposite of artificial (man-made), such as sugar compared to saccharine, or an organic heart compared to a mechanical heart.

 

[columbus]

The truth is that kill and murder are synonyms.

No they aren't.
Not even close. Murder is a subjective and abstract subset of kill.
Human beings kill all the time, sometimes directly and sometimes less so.
Murder is the subset of killing that isn't legal where you happen to live, among the people who control your life.

Moses murdered an Egyptian, the first recorded deed of the Israelite people. They didn't have a problem with it.
Tom

 

[Mister Silver]

And 'deflecting' means what in this context? Perhaps you 'know' the future but I don't have that ability........ So I think it's an illusion that you believe you know now, at this moment, how you will feel, and act, in the future.

Perhaps I'm just more in tune with myself than others.

 

[Mister Silver]

As I understand it, homicide is a subset of killing (if a wolf kills you, it's not homicide), unlawful homicide a subset of homicide, and murder is a subset of unlawful homicide as I just outlined. First and second degree murder are subsets of murder.

A wolf is a wolf. This thread was in relation to human killing. I only brought up the wolf previously due to the fact that a wolf's instinct is to kill in order to eat. A human has no instinct to kill another human in order to eat; a human kills another human due to unnatural impulses.

 

[illykitty]

Natural, as in being in nature, yes. Natural by your meaning in the first post? I think it's counter-intuitive under normal circumstances, seeing as human cooperation makes life better and easier, but think about how long humanity has been engaging in wars for various reasons, including resources, territory, race, etc... I think it is part of us, we are tribalistic and eventually someone sees a "them" instead of an "us". We can recognise these things without thinking it is a good thing. All of this doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to be ethical.

 

[Enoch07]

Your use of the phrase, "in the heat of the moment" suggest that what you are referring to here is second degree murder, which is defined as any unplanned but unlawful and deliberate homicide, where homicide is defined as the taking of a human life by another human being under any circumstances whether criminal or justified. Murder is any unlawful and deliberate homicide whether premeditated or "heat of the moment," and second degree murder is only the latter: not premeditated.

Unintentionally killing another person can either be a crime - manslaughter, for existence, as when killing another because of drunk driving - or considered an accident not requiring legal involvement, as when a child jumps out from between parked cars into the path of your vehicle and is killed.

Lawfully killing another person deliberately includes things such as self-defense, wartime, and if you consider a fetus a human being (and I do), abortion.



This should be called first degree murder, and it seems to be pretty natural to me judging by its frequency.

I agree with your definitions for the most part.

But its about what is a natural. Not what is lawful.

Abortion is a sticky issue.

Intentionally aborting a fetus is not natural. The fetus was not conceived to be aborted. This goes against nature. That being said there are extenuating circumstances that I feel where abortion is not murder. If the woman and/or fetus are in imminent danger because of complications, then I feel like is not murder. Or in rape/molestation cases when a child is conceived.

Intent is the difference between natural and unnatural.

Unintended killing or in self defense/defense of ones country is natural.

Intentional killing is murder. You make the choice to end someones life.

 

[LukeS]

If you mean by natural, innate, then everyone would be killing. Maybe there is a reflex triggered in certain contexts, like war etc. especially where one's life is at stake and the hormones are running thick and fast, but even if so it would probably be overridden.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

If animals kill, we deem it to be innate...

If humans kill, we deem it to be either accidental or intentional, and instead focus on intent (self defense, war, anger/fear, etc), and assert that killing is in no wise innate in humans...(with certain exceptions...)

Humans are animals. Therefore, humans killing is innate...

or,

Humans are special animals--or are not animals at all--so what we observe in the behavior of other animals doesn't apply to us. Sure, there's accidents and self-defense (just as appears in other species)...but otherwise, human nature is not to kill, and therefore it is a learned, and therefore unnatural, behavior...