Your answer is in your own question—“societies that discourage murder will probably fare better than societies that promote it. I don’t understand why murder is bad”.
Our sense of good and evil is shaped by what helped our ancestors survive in competition with other tribes. Societies with less murder—because of people who abhor murder—fared better, resulting in descendants who also abhor murder (us).
People who didn’t abhor murder didn’t form societies or formed societies that were less successful, leaving behind few descendants with those instincts. People mixed, societies formed and disbanded. Over time, people who instinctively and culturally abhorred murder relatively flourished, while those who didn’t relatively diminished.
That’s it—there’s nothing more to the story than that.
All our modern philosophy about good and evil and law is post-hoc justification, regularization, and exploitation of our instinctive disdain for murder (and other evils). Intellectuals among us try to extend our instincts and observations about what makes for successful societies (morals, ethics, law...) in a regular, predictable, and logical way, but have trouble coming up with tight, closed, well-argued positions that don’t lead to perceived absurd consequences. Because the universe isn’t necessarily compatible with our ideas of justice and morality.
Your answer is in your own question—“societies that discourage murder will probably fare better than societies that promote it. I don’t understand why murder is bad”.
Our sense of good and evil is shaped by what helped our ancestors survive in competition with other tribes. Societies with less murder—because of people who abhor murder—fared better, resulting in descendants who also abhor murder (us).
People who didn’t abhor murder didn’t form societies or formed societies that were less successful, leaving behind few descendants with those instincts. People mixed, societies formed and disbanded. Over time, people who instinctively and culturally abhorred murder relatively flourished, while those who didn’t relatively diminished.
That’s it—there’s nothing more to the story than that.
All our modern philosophy about good and evil and law is post-hoc justification, regularization, and exploitation of our instinctive disdain for murder (and other evils). Intellectuals among us try to extend our instincts and observations about what makes for successful societies (morals, ethics, law...) in a regular, predictable, and logical way, but have trouble coming up with tight, closed, well-argued positions that don’t lead to perceived absurd consequences. Because the universe isn’t necessarily compatible with our ideas of justice and morality.