I’m guessing you think the problem with mass murder is the effect on society of knowing that crazy people might kill you for doing things they don’t like
Is that the only alternative to “The problem with mass murder is its effect on human population size” that you can think of? I always thought that the problem with mass murder was about the same as the problem with normal murder except multipled by a thousand or eleven million or however many victims there are.
I always thought that the problem with mass murder was about the same as the problem with normal murder except multipled by a thousand or eleven million or however many victims there are.
For a strict utilitarian, the main problem with non-torture murder can be seen as the fear it produces in the population.
Strict utilitarianism is quite common here, so guessing that wedrifid is one isn’t that much of a reach.
I don’t think “strict utilitarianism” refers to a specific, well-defined moral system, but my point still stands if you’re referring to the general class of moral systems and methods of moral reasoning that are popular here; involuntary death is bad, whether torturous or not, so killing ten million people is at least as bad as the sum of the individual badness of killing each of them. The “at least” part is to take into account any further negative effects of mass murder, such as the one that you mentioned, but compared to millions of people dying involuntarily, I really doubt that’s the dominating factor.
Well, I for one didn’t look at if from a deontological point of view. Unlike other victims of coercion, murdered people tend not to make much of a fuss about having been forced to die. However, their death tends to produce sorrow and anger on those emotionally and economically reliant on them (including their creditors, superiors, subordinates, clients) and causes the loss of a hub of social network and a repository of knowledge and skill accumulated over a lifetime. In other words, murder, for a stable, sedentary, densely structured society, is extremely wasteful and troublesome. And it leads to a shitton of paperwork. That’s for just one death.
However, from a Golden Rule/Reciprocal Altruism POV, committing murder is an extremely bad idea because, besides the aforementioned problems with each individual murder, the fact that people can get killed, for whatever reason, may make one fear for one’s safety among fellow humans ,raising stress levels to presumably unbearable heights and cause a limitless waste in resources in personal security, . Think of Israel-Palestine, where people constantly live in fear of being killed by some crazy suicide bomber or some trigger-happy teenage soldier. Despite what the actual risk of that happening might be compared to the risk of dying in a traffic accident, much more money ends up being spent on this sort of thing than on road safety. Car accidents, as the Joker would put it, are “all part of the plan”. I love how effectively that character uses The Dark Side and The Fallacy Of Grey. Does anyone know any examples of similarly eloquent villains? (Besides Nietzsche that is).
Hence why we are taught to heavily frown upon it.
A Mongol from Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde might see things differently, is all I’m saying. There are also countries like Colombia where murder is extremely common, and often absolutely senseless. Society functions, people get used to the fear. Humans can get used to a lot.
Deliberately murdering a mass of people causes the same effect
Is that the only alternative to “The problem with mass murder is its effect on human population size” that you can think of? I always thought that the problem with mass murder was about the same as the problem with normal murder except multipled by a thousand or eleven million or however many victims there are.
Is that the only alternative that you can think of?
No, of course not. I just thought it was the most likely to be the one e had in mind.
For a strict utilitarian, the main problem with non-torture murder can be seen as the fear it produces in the population.
Strict utilitarianism is quite common here, so guessing that wedrifid is one isn’t that much of a reach.
I don’t think “strict utilitarianism” refers to a specific, well-defined moral system, but my point still stands if you’re referring to the general class of moral systems and methods of moral reasoning that are popular here; involuntary death is bad, whether torturous or not, so killing ten million people is at least as bad as the sum of the individual badness of killing each of them. The “at least” part is to take into account any further negative effects of mass murder, such as the one that you mentioned, but compared to millions of people dying involuntarily, I really doubt that’s the dominating factor.
Well, I for one didn’t look at if from a deontological point of view. Unlike other victims of coercion, murdered people tend not to make much of a fuss about having been forced to die. However, their death tends to produce sorrow and anger on those emotionally and economically reliant on them (including their creditors, superiors, subordinates, clients) and causes the loss of a hub of social network and a repository of knowledge and skill accumulated over a lifetime. In other words, murder, for a stable, sedentary, densely structured society, is extremely wasteful and troublesome. And it leads to a shitton of paperwork. That’s for just one death.
However, from a Golden Rule/Reciprocal Altruism POV, committing murder is an extremely bad idea because, besides the aforementioned problems with each individual murder, the fact that people can get killed, for whatever reason, may make one fear for one’s safety among fellow humans ,raising stress levels to presumably unbearable heights and cause a limitless waste in resources in personal security, . Think of Israel-Palestine, where people constantly live in fear of being killed by some crazy suicide bomber or some trigger-happy teenage soldier. Despite what the actual risk of that happening might be compared to the risk of dying in a traffic accident, much more money ends up being spent on this sort of thing than on road safety. Car accidents, as the Joker would put it, are “all part of the plan”. I love how effectively that character uses The Dark Side and The Fallacy Of Grey. Does anyone know any examples of similarly eloquent villains? (Besides Nietzsche that is).
Hence why we are taught to heavily frown upon it.
A Mongol from Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde might see things differently, is all I’m saying. There are also countries like Colombia where murder is extremely common, and often absolutely senseless. Society functions, people get used to the fear. Humans can get used to a lot.
Deliberately murdering a mass of people causes the same effect