Homicide in the Context of Killing (USP)

Murder in the context of killing - and the question of genocide

1. Homicide is the most common cause of death - and one of the least common ones.

Most of what we know we do not know from our own firsthand experience, but from hearsay. Friends and family members are telling us things, news headlines pop up here and there in our electronic devices, sometimes we read a newspaper or watch television. All these things are mediated informations and not firsthand experiences. The world as we know it is largely an imaginary world. In this imaginary world, homicide is the most common cause of death. Think of the news: school shootings, massacres, the killing of hostages, gruesome family tragedies, murder trials, executions. Think of fiction: the silence of the lambs, serial killers, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, or think of the series Breaking Bad, Dexter, the Netflex series on Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar, or CSI Miami, CSI Las Vegas, CSI NY. Murder is the most common cause of death in our common nightmarish conscience collective. Why is that so and what functions does that fulfill? And does it reflect the statistical truth?

Of course not. Murder is one of the least common causes of death in the real world, the world of everyday life.

According to a WHO study concerning 2016 (in Live Science) there were roughly

• 55 million deaths in 2016 worldwide. Nearly three-quarters
• 72.3 percent of those deaths were from so-called "noncommunicable diseases," or those that cannot pass from person to person, including heart disease, stroke and cancer (9.5 million of ischemic heart disease alone - diabetes 1.4 million)
• 19 percent of deaths in 2016 were from communicable diseases, maternal diseases (which occur during pregnancy and childbirth), neonatal diseases (which occur around the newborn period) and nutritional diseases (which include nutritional deficiencies)
• 8 percent of deaths were from injuries.

In 2016, the number of deaths among children under age 5 dropped below 5 million for the first time in modern history — down from 11 million deaths in 1990 and 16.4 million deaths in 1970, the researchers said. Deaths from HIV/AIDS among both children and adults have also declined, by 46 percent since 2006, and deaths from malaria have declined by 26 percent since 2006.

In addition, since 2006, the number of deaths from conflict and terrorism has risen significantly, reaching 150,500 deaths in 2016 (which is a 143 percent increase since 2006), the researchers said. This rise is largely a result of conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East, the scientists said.

Rates of death also increased for opioid use, amphetamine use and other drug use disorders in some locations — particularly in high-income countries, the researchers said. Overall, 1.1 billion people worldwide have some type of mental health or substance use disorder, the report found.

"Yet, despite this progress, we are facing a 'triad of trouble' holding back many nations and communities — obesity, conflict, and mental illness, including substance use disorders."

A legal perspective on killing Starting from the legal perspective on killing we find the law-abiding citizen who does not pose a legal problem, at least not in criminal law, and we find the disobedient citizen who violates a law by either negligence or intent or error of judgment and whom the law tries to lead back on the right track - if necessary, by some more or less benevolent sanctions. He might also be a denizen or a non-citizen or an outright enemy bent on destroying the community. In his case, the sanctions might be really severe punishments designed to incapacitate the offender and to neutralize or eliminate the danger flowing from him.

There are, of course, a lot of behavior types defined as criminal offenses - from property crimes to murder. The act of murder has always been considered a very serious breach of the very social contract, since it always entails the risk of retaliation and a spiral of violence endangering the very foundations on which social life is built. No wonder, then, that murder has attracted much attention in both theory and practice, and that the most spectacular trials are murder trials and the most spectacular punishments have always been the public judicial executions of murderers.

From its very beginnings, criminology has also been interested in - we can even say focused on - the phenomenology of murderers. Just think of Cesare Lombroso's criminal anthropology and subsequent works of etiological criminologists all the way to Robert Ressler's work on sexual homicide and the mutual interest of criminologists and the larger public in the phenomenon of serial killers, profiling, and the like.

From the legal perspective, killing are problematic to the extent that they are illegal. For legal scholars it is evident that prevention and prosecution of all kinds of Illegal killings - from manslaughter to first degree murder - must be done, and that the prosecution of homicide has to be a priority of criminal justice. From this perspective, the human being as such is basically a good and peace-loving citizen, but there are some individuals who for whatever reasons get out of control and have to be dealt with accordingly in order to protect the public peace, law, and order. This order is seen as something inherently peaceful and non-violent.

To a certain extent, we are all jurists, and we all believe that most people observe not only the letter of the law, when it comes to killing, but also the 5th commandment: Thou shalt not kill.

A cool observers' perspective on killing A cool observer might be surprised to see that things are not quite what they seem, though. The observer may start with the assumption that human societies are rather peaceful and non-violent, because they have this double safeguard against killings: for one thing, there is the religious taboo - "Thou shalt not kill" - very strong, very clear, and quite intimidating; and then there is the legal prohibition to kill, similarly strong, clear, and intimidating, considering that the sanction for violations of this norm are the most severe ones, and in some cases it is tit for tat - whoever kills must be killed. Kant argues 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.

But how will a cool observer proceed? He will look at the exact meaning of the word "to kill", and she will then search for phenomena that fit this meaning. To kill, of course, means to put an end to the existence of an organism. We can kill humans, animals, and plants, not stones. We kill plants, like, e.g., trees, by chopping them to sell the wood and to make place for farm land, but we also kill plants by harvesting potatoes, cereals or other food-stuff. We kill animals mostly for producing food for us humans, and we kill humans for many reasons. We kill humans in self-defense and in anger, jealousy. We kill because of greed and hate, and sometimes people kill themselves. We also kill because we are told to do so, because we are members of a hierarchy, a cartel, a gang, a militia, a group of mercenaries, or regular soldiers. The most important reason, why people kill other people, is not deviance and non-conformity, it is not an anti-social personality disorder, but rather the contrary. The most important reason to kill is obedience. There are, of course, the so-called crimes of obedience (Kelman), but those only account for a minority of killings. Most killings are legal killings of obedience. From a legal point of view, they are not worth mentioning, because they are juridically unproblematic. From a cool observer's perspective, though, the legal killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians and of combatants in wars and civil strife is remarkable.

Add to this the killing of animals in slaughterhouses and the killing of trees and plants, and find out that the human animal is not as peaceful as it seems, but that the position on top of the food chain means to be a killer, a great killer.

An evolutionary perspective on killing From an evolutionary perspective, animals compete over key resources, and in group-living species groups of the same species also compete over access to resources for reproductive benefits. While aggression is commonly not lethal, species with fission-fusion grouping dynamics (which create imablances between groups), tend to show more lethal violance. This is because killings tend to occur when (numerical) advantage enables attackers to kill at low cost to themselves. Evolutionary history of intense intergroup aggression selected for psychological mechanisms such as parochial altruism and xenophobia. Reproductive benefits from intergroup aggression are high in humans, but primarily accrue to males. Human patterns of warfare, especially risk-taking, require private incentives or sanctions to solve the collective action problem. This is especially true for humans, and within human groups it is more common in cultures with greater risk-taking and elaborate cultural institutions and complex social organization. In more recent evolutionary times, variation in war practices reflects cultural group selection. Features of more successful groups spread within and between populations. Warfare can enable the rise of ultrasocial normals and complex societies. Groups that contain more individuals willing to behave altruistically towards in-group members, and act parochially towards outgroup members may achieve greater evolutionary success in warfare driving the evolution of human parochial altruism. Self-sacrificial behaviour in war is thus associated with improved group outcomes. Not all animals kill also members of their own kind, but the human animal does. In that sense we humans are "bad". But we are not the worst. A study published in the journal Nature found modern humans to be pretty dangerous, killing each other at a rate of about 13 in 1,000. At least we're not the worst. That title goes to, surprise, the meerkat. "Almost one in five meerkats, mostly youngsters, lose their lives at the paws and jaws of their own kind (José María Gómez et al. 2016). The meerkats were followed by two types of monkeys and assorted lemurs. The New Zealand sea lion, long-tailed marmot, lion, branded mongoose, and grey wolf round out the top 11. Not surprisingly, violence was more common among mammals who share territory than among loners like bats and whales.

A historian's perspective on killing Early humans killed each other at a rate of about 20 in 1,000, but got more violent during the Middle Ages when the rate shot up to 120 in 1,000. After studying 600 human populations from the Stone Age to the present day, the researchers concluded that "lethal violence is part of our evolutionary history but not carved in stone in ‘our genes,’” lead author Jose Maria Gomez tells the Guardian. Levels of violence are influenced by societal pressures and have "decreased significantly in the contemporary age," says Gomez. - Still, the study published in the journal Nature found modern humans to be pretty dangerous, killing each other at a rate of about 13 in 1,000. "Our study suggests that the level of lethal violence is reversible and can increase or decrease as a consequence of some ecological, social, or cultural factors," says Gomez. (A study found early humans may have killed off real-life hobbits.)