Why is murder wrong?

Which brings me back full circle:

I’m done here. It’s pointless to argue with you, man. Your truth is absolute. When I argue with you, it’s you apologizing to me your truth without even considering mine. You leave no room for error in your argument, and as such, it is pointless for anyone to have an argument with you. I question your reason for being in a philosophy forum…

I did so for the purposes of this argument. I offered up a counter-argument, not necessarily mine, that counters his argument about innate selflessness. I learned my lesson. Never argue with an absolutist, because it goes nowhere.

Who are you talking to, this quote is yours, are you confused or something?

If it was me you were talking to (who knows with that wacky post) then you forgot to counter any of my ideas of the Golden Rule or Love or show how it is only learned or is purely relative.

Were my examples of proper Love a bit tough to swallow? Can you disagree with any logic or like examples for support?

Was I too hard on you with my assertion that the majority of humans on this earth agree with about knowing something is wrong when you realize that you wouldn’t want it done to you?

Problem with you nihilist and atheist is that you haven’t actually given anything any real deep thought, your too frightened. Most of you stop or quit at the first conundrum and lazily lean on what someone wrote in a book if it’s popular enough among that pseudo intellectual.

If you had a position backed by some logic or examples I would listen, but you, like many atheist/nihilist I have discussed with simply don’t have any supported point of view at all, your whole foundation of belief is non belief and your tools to refute are contradiction and insults, how sad.

Show me your counter ideas to what Love is or how the Golden Rule is learned through teaching and show how that refutes what I said, is that too much to ask?

BTW, I’m not the only one that believes this, so its not my absolute and none of us got this idea from a silly book either, does that upset you? Does it upset so many of you here that you can’t cheat life and be lazy by steeling your answers and ideas or philosophy’s from books?

It is not friendly to the guy you kill and his friends and family. Is that not clear?

Although it isn’t my debate, this is an interesting back-and-forth!

I agree with almost everything Tristan said - after all, it’s hard to be named “Tristan” and to be wrong - but there are some things I think I can add to his points.

First of all, there’s the question of what Love is. Most think of this as either a very spiritual or a very philosophical question. It - very clearly, I think - is neither. Introspection and logical analysis don’t tell us very much about love at all. In fact, those techniques tell us so little about love that we have to invent fluffy crap along the lines of “love is the transcendence of the self”, “love is giving”, etc. Comments like that have almost zero content, and even if they are correct to any degree, they certainly do not suffice for a basic notion of love and how love works. Love is in the domain of the evolutionary psychologist, and the neurobiologist. Love isn’t transcendental, and love isn’t all you need - love is a human emotion, like any other, and so those who actively study the science of human perception are the best equipped - and often the only ones equipped - to tell us any more about it than what it feels like.

More specifically, we can draw basic scientific conclusions about love.

  1. Love, as an emotion, evolved. Thus, the emotion of love is beneficial either to the individual organism, the collective species, or, more likely, both.

So there’s an immediate question - HOW is love beneficial? Anyone who has ever experienced pure sexual attraction AND love knows that they are two different things (sorry, Tristan, but at least for me and all those I know, that’s true. The assertion that love and sex are the same is more often made by those who have never really been in love.). Sex is the drive that helps us procreate - so what purpose does love serve? Well, that’s pretty obvious, too - love encourages us to pair off, and stay together even after the children are born. And this is advantageous because two parents are more likely to raise a child to adulthood than is a single parent, especially back in the “cave man days”.

So is love selfish? Most people here will say “no”, quickly and emphatically, without actually thinking about the issue. Still a large number of people will say “yes” very quickly, because they like the notion that every human emotion is innately selfish. But let’s examine the concept a bit more closely.

First, what does “selfish” mean? An act performed exclusively because of the expectation of personal gain? That certainly seems like a reasonable definition. Well, in this sense, many things are selfish. In fact, under this definition, almost every single act of charity or kindness ever perpetrated would be “selfish”, because of the fact that most of us FEEL GOOD ABOUT OURSELVES when we do something kind. I can say with absolute confidence that very few (if any) people would help an old woman across the street, help a stranger change a tire, etc., if doing so made you feel ashamed and guilty and gave you a headache. But instead it makes you feel good about yourself, which is really why you do it. There’s nothing wrong with this - it’s a good trait to feel good about good things you’ve done - but it does qualify your generous actions as selfish, technically.

However, even under this definition, I don’t think love is selfish. After all, love is not consciously motivated - it’s an emotion. It’s generated by a nonconscious part of your brain, and your consciousness only EXPERIENCES the already-generated love, and does not choose to generate it in the first place. It seems to me that love cannot be labeled either as selfish or selfless.

So it seems that the EMOTION of love isn’t selfish, and isn’t selfless. How about the FUNCTION of love? Is love only around because of its benefit to the lovers? I think that in general the answer is no. Love is often less beneficial to the man, especially in the sort of family structure where the man will provide a proportionately larger amount of food / income / whatever than the woman. Love can be more beneficial to the woman in the sense that she can care for her child more easily with the man to help than by herself, but still, the only person who objectively benefits from the pairing due to love is the child. I think, even functionally, love is not selfish.

How about friendship? Is friendship really just buying alliance?

Well, again, it depends on motivation vs. function. Very few people approach a possible friendship thinking to themselves, “ah, this will be better for me in the long run.” Rather, most people approach friendship thinking about whether or not they enjoy the other person’s company, share similiar interests, and so on. In a motivational sense, I don’t think friendship can be called just buying alliance - although even in this sense, it seems pretty clear that friendship IS selfish. After all, you make friends with someone because YOU want to. People rarely make friends when they would rather not, and even in those circumstances, it is usually still selfish - befriending the boss’s son in the hopes that you’ll get a raise, etc.

But functionally, is friendship just buying alliance? Did the human desire for friendship, and human social behavior, evolve as a mutual-assistance strategy? Yes, without doubt this is the case. The function of friendship in a real scientific perspective is mutually-beneficial cooperation. Some assert that we make friends to fulfill a social need - this is true, but it isn’t delving deep enough. The evolutionary reason why we even HAVE that social need is because mutually-beneficial cooperation kicks ass. Both people win, neither lose. And as Tristan has correctly pointed out, this is exactly why friendships are terminated when one “renigs on his contract” - that is, when one doesn’t assist the other in the expected way, especially repeatedly, or betrays the friendship trust. We ditch friends if they treat us badly (implying that we can’t count on them in the future), if they hit on our loved one or steal our resources, or even let us pay for dinner repeatedly without ever paying their share.

The misunderstanding between Tristan and KingDaddy is really due to this difference between motivation and function. KingDaddy asserts (correctly) that the motivation to establish a friendship is usually not the desire to mutually benefit (except in an emotional sense). Tristan asserts (correctly) that the function of friendship is mutually beneficial cooperation. Both are correct, and only need be a little more careful in specifying context.

Lastly, I’ll say that, while the Golden Rule is a very good simple catch-all for saying “behave well”, it is by no means always correct. First, it fails in many obvious ways just because different people desire different things. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” implies that I should approach people talking about philosophy, because I would love it if others did that to me. But most people don’t like philosophy, so that wouldn’t really be a good strategy. But there are more complicated moral matters that are better examples. You really can’t have a human society where no one is discouraged from committing crimes - human nature really is pretty self-serving in most cases, and if you didn’t have punishments for crime, there would certainly be much more of it. But the very nature of punishment is to violate the Golden Rule. After all, I never want to be punished - therefore, if I followed the Golden Rule, I would never punish anyone. But clearly that isn’t a good idea. Even if you have problems with the prison system or the idea of punishment to deter crime, we can still agree that there are times when it is necessary to be harsh - to correct the behavior of a very bad child will require behavior that is unpleasant to the child.

These topics are interesting, but they are also more complex than they appear. Because of this, beware of overly simple answers! Saying “the Golden Rule” is more a way of getting out of a real discussion than it is a solution to the discussion. Additionally, beware of emotional attachment to certain issues. Certainly we all want to believe that humans - especially ourselves - are selfless, good, and kind - but just because we WANT to believe that doesn’t make it true. The ability to believe something undesirable is absolutely essential to anyone who wants to call themselves a philosopher - or even a perceptive person.

Sexual [attraction] is considered love. Non-sexual attraction is categorized into many other categories such as attraction, affection, neediness, attachment, but the category love is specifically sexual in attraction;

Don’t presume anything about me, Tristan. :laughing: (this will probably confuse some)

Ah ha! We meant the same thing, but used different names. I was thinking you were mistaking love for lust, if you understand what I mean. I did indeed presume! Please forgive me, Tristan.

Do you have kids?

Would you say you love them?

Is that the same as SEX?

You got serious problems if you cant see this point.

Maybe I do have kids. What’s your point? Are you going to argue semantics with me? Are you so thick that you can’t get even this simple concept?

No harm done, Tristan.

Are you not trying to demote Love to SEX only?

I’m not trying to do anything. I’m defining love as it’s defined. You may have you own definition of love, but that’s not the official definition of love, and I don’t care how you define love.
You may be attached or attached to your kids, or your mom, but you only love your wife/girlfriend.

Then show me any popular definition that described Love as a purely/exclusively sexual emotion, then you have made your point.

Interesting that you shy away from a productive example that would prove the point that Love is not purely sexual, what are you hiding, are you so afraid of being wrong that you will try and bend reality to suite you?

BTW, your answer, or should I say non answer shows that you don’t have kids, so I will write this off as stupidity from lack of personal experience or possibly the product of a defective abnormal human mind.

because its imposing one persons beliefs onto anothersw life without permission.

euthenasia is not murder because of the circumstances. self defense it not murder becasue of the circumstances. war is not murder because of circumstances.

murder is the unjistified ending of someones life. the cases where we cant find a reason to allow it.

Why is it wrong to take a knife and cut your toe off? In that case it’s not considered moral, but if all your body parts were self-aware and under the illusion that they were separate/isolated, they might become frustrated enough by the knowledge that body parts aer ignorantly cutting eachother off that it would become a moral tenet. There is only one life, and at some level we know that the loss of another’s life is our own loss. Seeing ourselves (i.e. life) in others is the entire basis of social interaction.

I was recently asked “what is life”, the essence of it. I said “I don’t know, but I am alive, and that’s what’s most important about life to me”.

I want to be alive. To me, being alive is right until I simply run out of gas and die of old age.

From what I’ve seen in life, we’re pretty much all the same when it comes to basic experiences about being alive and stuff.

So I then can’t help but conclude that, when you set aside all the superfluous “philosophising” fluff and get down to the gut-level nitty gritty, if left to our own healthy devices, everyone is just like me: they want to be alive, and being alive is right for everyone, until they run out of gas and die of old age.

I’d sure hate to be murdered, and I imagine, since we’re all the same in thinking that being alive is right until we run out of gas and die of old age, I figure everyone else would hate to be murdered as well.

So, I naturally conclude that murder, killing someone before they run out of gas and for no justified reason, is therefore wrong.

That seems to make sense, I would think.

A mother bonds with her child. A child attaches to his/her mother, not because the child was birthed from the mother, but because of what the mother provides for the child. The attraction between you and your mate, is sexual in nature. That is what’s labeled as love.
As far as I know, based on my psychology class, what my professor of psychology told me, that’s the distinction between the types of attraction. Love, attraction, attachment, bonding, etcetera. If you don’t think these are the official uses for the terms, then be my guest and find the some other forms of definitions for these terms, based on a qualified authority, such as a psychology professor. Your priest doesn’t count.

Why don’t you go fuck a priest or something. You have no place in this forum.

actually Tristan, your comment has no place in this forum.

-Imp

I hate to be the one to tell you, but your Professor is a moron, or you need your ears cleaned. Ask 1,000,000 Mothers what Love is and I bet the answers are unanimous and not one will say it’s purely sexual unless they are a deviant child molester.

Here is what the dictionary says, note the many different definitions, note how many have nothing to do with SEX.

[b]love /b n. 1. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness. 2. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance. 3.a. Sexual passion. b. Sexual intercourse. c. A love affair. 4. An intense emotional attachment, as for a pet or treasured object. 5. A person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved. Often used as a term of endearment. 6. An expression of one’s affection. 7.a. A strong predilection or enthusiasm. b. The object of such an enthusiasm. 8. Love. Mythology. Eros or Cupid. 9. Often Love. Theology. Charity. 10. Love. Christian Science. God. 11. Sports. A zero score in tennis. --love v. loved, lov·ing, loves. --tr. 1. To have a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward (a person). 2. To have a feeling of intense desire and attraction toward (a person). 3. To have an intense emotional attachment to. 4.a. To embrace or caress. b. To have sexual intercourse with. 5. To like or desire enthusiastically. 6. Theology. To have charity for. 7. To thrive on; need. --intr. To experience deep affection or intense desire for another. --idioms. for love. Out of compassion; with no thought for a reward. for love or money. Under any circumstances. Usually used in negative sentences. for the love of. For the sake of; in consideration for. no love lost. No affection; animosity.

Roger that. On my way.

Come on, guys, recognize what is going on here.

You are all disagreeing about a DEFINITION. Tristan says “love means X”, and others reply, often angrily, and say “no, love means Y”.

Wise up! There is no such thing as a correct definition. Now, it’s absolutely true that Tristan’s usage of “love” is contrary to how most people use the term. But this doesn’t invalidate his argument at all, it just changes how you have to think about it. You can argue that his usage of “love = sex” is an impractical definition, since it’s contrary to the majority usage, and I think you’d have a good argument. But I think we can see that such an argument would be 1) beside the main point, and 2) not really worth arguing in the first place. Who cares what definitions someone uses? Just LEARN the definitions so you have a common basis for communication, and then proceed to communicate!

Arguing over definitions is a little like arguing that one spoken language is better than another. Just pick one language that you can both speak, and then talk about more interesting things.

I agree =D> Arguing over definitions rather than the actual topic of the post is where many of the posts on this forum seem to go.