The Act of Killing

Abstract

This chapter considers how we manage violence. Like other social animals, humans inhibit severe forms of violence against members of their own community. These inhibitions are needed, because social life cannot possibly be sustained if the members of a group are at each other's throats. But for most animals these inhibitions against violence do not apply to strangers. Moreover, the human aversion to harming one another is in tension with a basic condition of animal life. Animals must kill, damage, or exploit other organisms in order to live. The act of killing is monumentally important to human lives. The question of what kinds of beings are killable, and under what circumstances they may be killed, is perhaps the most basic of all moral questions. Because killing is mandatory for human survival, it is tempting to fall into the trap of hierarchical thinking, and to rationalize this gut-level bias with fancy philosophical arguments or religious beliefs.