Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
It sounds like you disagree with this claim; can you say more about why? (I’m willing to defend it, but right now I feel like someone has incredulously said to me “Wait, you’re saying humans consume organic matter for fuel?”… I don’t know where to start addressing your disagreement.)
There are also contexts in which killing people is explicitly taught, but they are relatively rare and we tend not to label them “murder” and they tend to be legal.
I guess one question is what do you mean by “natural inclination”.
Humans are clearly capable of murder. They also, clearly, engage in it quite rarely (regardless of the degree of law & order around, I might add). Evolutionary speaking, the capability to murder is beneficial, but needs very strong constraints on it—a tendency to murder those (of your species) around you is likely to wash out of the population pretty quickly.
So yes, there is a biologically hardwired ability to murder, but there are also hardwired brakes on it. These brakes are pretty powerful.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
I don’t think this is true, for most values of “natural inclination”.
Indications are that it’s very hard to reliably convince people to kill. First-world militaries base quite a bit of their training methods and tactics on working around this; training reforms suggested by S.L.A. Marshall and contemporaries took the US Army from about 25% of front-line soldiers firing their weapons in WWII (!) to a ratio of around 55% in the Korean War, and near 90% by Vietnam. But modern tactics still lean quite heavily on indirect fire and other less personal methods of killing enemies.
Even more tellingly, research into PTSD and related conditions seems to point to a stronger link with responsibility for violence than with exposure to personal danger. Granted, shooting strangers in warfare is rather different from, say, knifing someone in a bar fight; but the evidence seems to suggest that people without sociopathic traits need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before killing’s considered as an option.
Yes, I would expect that most people need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before they are willing to kill someone, especially before they are willing to kill complete strangers. If that is inconsistent with something being a natural inclination, well, OK, then I’ll agree that murder isn’t a natural inclination.
As you suggest in your first sentence, this has more to do with the meaning of “natural inclination” than with anything related to my original point.
Trying to get away from the purely semantic issue… do you disagree with any of this? If so, what?
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
Then it is very possible that we intend with “natural inclination” wildly different things. I see “natural inclination” as whatever innate impulse is strongly present almost universally in humans, such that not meeting it creates a sense of urgency and/or frustration: eating, company, sex, etc. That’s why what you say feels to me like “Of course humans eat truck tires for breakfast!” :) Do you (I hope) intend something much less… coercive.
Barring the socializing influences of culture, I expect typical humans to intermittently experience urges to eat, to socialize, to have sex with each other, and to kill each other.
I also expect that every successful human culture has established cultural norms that govern those urges so that they don’t become too dangerous to the group. Consequently we mostly don’t go around eating whatever we want, having sex with whoever we want, or killing whoever we want… instead, we follow social rules that govern what and when and how it’s OK to do those things.
In some cases we internalize such rules and adopt them as values of our own (“I respect the property rights of others and will therefore not eat food that isn’t mine”, “I respect the bodily autonomy of others and will therefore not have sex with them unless the desire is mutual,” “I respect the social rules that govern acceptable sex partners and will therefore not have sex with socially unacceptable partners whether or not the desire is mutual”, “I respect the lives of others and will therefore not kill them even when they deserve it,” etc.). In other cases we don’t internalize them, but we follow them because it’s more practical to do so.
That doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there.
That having been said… I would agree that the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not eating for a day is very different from the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not murdering someone who violates me.
But I would also say that the sense of urgency that arises from not having sex with someone really attractive is not very much like either of those, and more like the latter than the former.
Murder is very much a natural inclination of humans.
It sounds like you disagree with this claim; can you say more about why? (I’m willing to defend it, but right now I feel like someone has incredulously said to me “Wait, you’re saying humans consume organic matter for fuel?”… I don’t know where to start addressing your disagreement.)
There are also contexts in which killing people is explicitly taught, but they are relatively rare and we tend not to label them “murder” and they tend to be legal.
I guess one question is what do you mean by “natural inclination”.
Humans are clearly capable of murder. They also, clearly, engage in it quite rarely (regardless of the degree of law & order around, I might add). Evolutionary speaking, the capability to murder is beneficial, but needs very strong constraints on it—a tendency to murder those (of your species) around you is likely to wash out of the population pretty quickly.
So yes, there is a biologically hardwired ability to murder, but there are also hardwired brakes on it. These brakes are pretty powerful.
Yes, I would agree with all of this.
I don’t think this is true, for most values of “natural inclination”.
Indications are that it’s very hard to reliably convince people to kill. First-world militaries base quite a bit of their training methods and tactics on working around this; training reforms suggested by S.L.A. Marshall and contemporaries took the US Army from about 25% of front-line soldiers firing their weapons in WWII (!) to a ratio of around 55% in the Korean War, and near 90% by Vietnam. But modern tactics still lean quite heavily on indirect fire and other less personal methods of killing enemies.
Even more tellingly, research into PTSD and related conditions seems to point to a stronger link with responsibility for violence than with exposure to personal danger. Granted, shooting strangers in warfare is rather different from, say, knifing someone in a bar fight; but the evidence seems to suggest that people without sociopathic traits need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before killing’s considered as an option.
Yes, I would expect that most people need to overcome substantial psychological barriers before they are willing to kill someone, especially before they are willing to kill complete strangers. If that is inconsistent with something being a natural inclination, well, OK, then I’ll agree that murder isn’t a natural inclination.
As you suggest in your first sentence, this has more to do with the meaning of “natural inclination” than with anything related to my original point.
Trying to get away from the purely semantic issue… do you disagree with any of this? If so, what?
Then it is very possible that we intend with “natural inclination” wildly different things.
I see “natural inclination” as whatever innate impulse is strongly present almost universally in humans, such that not meeting it creates a sense of urgency and/or frustration: eating, company, sex, etc.
That’s why what you say feels to me like “Of course humans eat truck tires for breakfast!” :)
Do you (I hope) intend something much less… coercive.
Barring the socializing influences of culture, I expect typical humans to intermittently experience urges to eat, to socialize, to have sex with each other, and to kill each other.
I also expect that every successful human culture has established cultural norms that govern those urges so that they don’t become too dangerous to the group. Consequently we mostly don’t go around eating whatever we want, having sex with whoever we want, or killing whoever we want… instead, we follow social rules that govern what and when and how it’s OK to do those things.
In some cases we internalize such rules and adopt them as values of our own (“I respect the property rights of others and will therefore not eat food that isn’t mine”, “I respect the bodily autonomy of others and will therefore not have sex with them unless the desire is mutual,” “I respect the social rules that govern acceptable sex partners and will therefore not have sex with socially unacceptable partners whether or not the desire is mutual”, “I respect the lives of others and will therefore not kill them even when they deserve it,” etc.). In other cases we don’t internalize them, but we follow them because it’s more practical to do so.
That doesn’t mean the impulse isn’t there.
That having been said… I would agree that the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not eating for a day is very different from the sense of urgency that arises from, for example, not murdering someone who violates me.
But I would also say that the sense of urgency that arises from not having sex with someone really attractive is not very much like either of those, and more like the latter than the former.