Homicide in the Context of Killing (USP): Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

5. Genocide is not foreign to the human species. It can be seen as specific kind of coalitionary intergroup aggression that occurs when attackers are able to kill at high gain and low cost to themselves. Alexander Georgiev: "Consider, for example, the situation of the European colonial armies that first encountered the local populations in America, Africa, Asia, or Australia. The benefits of using violent aggression against the indigenous populations were enormous: taking away their land, their possessions, and even their people to use as slaves. The costs of the colonists’ aggression were minimal: armed with rifles, they could quickly kill large numbers of indigenous individuals at little or no physical risk to themselves. Moreover, the indigenous populations looked different and spoke a different language; it must have been quite easy for the colonists to find a psychological, political, historical, or religious justification for their violence, without suffering any consequences. These unusually high benefit/cost ratios for violent aggression against people from other countries are rare or nonexistent in animals, which may explain why large-scale aggression toward conspecifics is absent in animals, with the possible exception of chimpanzees and some species of ants and termites that stage wars against other colonies, destroying or taking away their resources and enslaving the workers."

The moral condemnation of murder can be seen everywhere. The biblical 5th commandment - Thou Shalt Not Kill - expresses condemnation with the utmost authority. Murder is followed by the severest of all punishments. In many countries, a convicted murderer will be murdered by the State, i.e. executed. In moral philosophy, there is little regret about this. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that whoever kills must die (and it is a categorical duty, not a hypothetical one) and 'no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there can be no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death. Thomas Aquinas: Criminal offenses can be broken down into two general categories malum in se and malum prohibitum. The distinction between malum in se and malum prohibitum offenses is best characterized as follows: a malum in se offense is "naturally evil as adjudged by the sense of a civilized community," whereas a malum prohibitum offense is wrong only because a statute makes it so. Murder is, of course, a malum in se.