Homicide in the Context of Killing (USP)

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Forms of Killing

To kill is to terminate the existence of a living organism. To put an end to a life. Living beings are plants and animals including the human animal. The killing of plants - the flora - is of concern for biologists and environmentalists to the degree that the reduction of biodiversity is endangering human life on this planet. The killing of animals by other animals has never been a matter of great concern, but the killing of animals by humans - the dominant source of protein supply since the beginning of our species' existence - has been receiving some attention recently, and this for a number of reasons. One of them is the fact that many animal species are at risk of becoming extinct. Another one is the development of an increased understanding of the animals' suffering under conditions of industrialized animal farming and slaughtering. Finally, the killing of humans by humans has always been a matter of concern for us humans. It has always been there, and it has always been a topic, a concern, a problem.

The killing of human life by humans takes many forms.

  • The most frequent - and highly controversial - phenomenon is the killing of unborn human life. Abortions are over a hundred times more frequent than homicides (56 million vs. less than half a million per year worldwide). In many countries it is a criminal offense, while in others, it is seen as a right of the pregnant woman to decide over her body and her self, i.e. her life.
  • Then there is the killing of people who wish to end their own life - because of old age, pain, and illness - by doctors at the request of their patients. The altruistic act of killing (active euthanasia) is at least as controversial as abortion, and worldwide statistics or even estimates are nonexistent.
  • Similarly controversial is the act of taking one's own life. Suicide in all its forms (Émile Durkheim: egoistic because of loneliness, altruistic for furthering a cause, anomic because of a great loss or ritualistic because of collapse under extreme social expectations) is today more frequent than homicide, and according to statistics even more frequent than homicide and killing in the context of armed conflicts combined.
  • Then there is the killing of enemies in times of civil war or international war. This kind of killing sticks out in its positive moral evaluation. It, too, is controversial, but its dominant moral and above all juridical evaluation is positive in the sense that it is seen as the obligation of a citizen to follow the state's call to arms, and those who refuse to do so are subject to punishment. Notwithstanding the fact that internal and international armed conflicts have cost the lives of a billion people over the course of history, the dissident voices that want to stigmatize and prohibit wars have not become effective (yet).
  • Genocide is a form of mass killing in which the effort to stigmatize and prohibit has become effective following World War II - but unfortunately not to the extent of effectively preventing genocidal killings from happening ever after (Rwanda, Rohingya)
  • Killing in self-defense by private individuals, by police, by sub-state actors and by state actors is another modality of killing - and a popular excuse for aggression and over-reaction because it is one of the few possibilities of avoiding social shame and punishment for the act of killing.
  • Then there is the killing of humans by humans in the context of legal punishment. The death penalty is similarly controversial to abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, and while some countries and ethics and religions see capital punishment as god-given, necessary, useful or at least unproblematic, others strive to abolish it not only in their own jurisdictions, but worldwide. At present, two thirds of all of the world's countries have abolished it de facto or de jure - but since those countries are the smaller ones, and since all the big countries still have it (China, India, Japan, USA), two thirds of the world's population live in countries that still have and still use hanging, shooting, decapitating, or lethal injections.
  • Finally, there is the intentional killing of another human being at the sole (juridical) responsibility of the person who takes the other one's life. This homicide stricto sensu will be at the center of today's attention.

The Act of Killing: Hot and Cold

Killing can be done with different degrees of emotional involvement and arousal. It can be the result of a person's emotional obsession, be it jealousy or hate or a sexual fantasy like in the case of serial killers like Peter Madsen (Denmark). We may call those the hot killings. It can also be performed as any other work at an assembly line (work in a chicken-, pig- or cattle-slaughterhouse). It can also be seen as an unwelcome duty one has to perform with obedience, diligence, and self-discipline. In both cases, and in different degrees, we could speak of cold killings. Individual acts of killing tend towards the hot pole of an imagined continuum, while large-scale killings (because of their organizational requirements) tend to be located at the other end of it.

A movie depicting the senseless, violent murder of an individual, and comparing it with the cold, calcuated execution by the state, is Krzysztof Kieślowski's "A short film about killing" (1988). À propos execution. Victor Hugo's very short novel (1829) about "The Last Day of a Condemned Man" (Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné) recounting the thoughts of a man before his execution, makes a good read.

A phenomenological analysis of hot homicides can be found in Jack Katz's "Righteous Slaughter" chapter of his book on Seductions of Crime (1988).

Large-scale killings need organization and obedience. Obedience requires discipline, routine, and control of individual emotions that can obstruct the chain of command. To this end, masses of individuals must be trained to accept the authority of those in command. This cannot be achieved by reliance on threats of sanctions alone, it needs the readiness of individuals to accept the justification given for the required acts of killing. It is not necessary that there be a universally accepted legitimation. All that is necessary and sufficient is that the relevant group creates a (parochial) belief system in which the required acts of killing are being justified. Such parochial justifications usually draw upon universal topics such as legitimate self-defense and states of emergency etc. - to the extent that they are effective in creating a supportive in-group belief system, such justifications help overcome natural killing inhibitions (especially with regard to helpless victims), increase killing efficiency, and prevent those who carry out large-scale killings under orders from developing post-traumatic stress disorders.

  • Dave Grossman's book (2009) "On killing: The psychological costs of learning to kill in war and society" speaks about the preconditions for becoming an effective shooter in times of war.
One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men: We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.
I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: 'The Jewish people are being exterminated', says every party member, 'this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter.' And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swines, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and 17 [...] (Himmler then praises the mindset of the SS man, devoting approximately 30 of the 116 pages to their virtues as well as their duty of becoming Europe's ruling class in 20 to 30 years.)

Mass killing in good conscience was also documented by Joshua Oppenheimer in his 2012 documentary about the Indonesian Massacres of 1965. See: The Act of Killing or just the scene "Anwar on Roof"

Homicide as a cause of death

1. In most societies, homicide is not among the frequent causes of death

As of April 2018, there are an estimated 7.6 billion human beings living on earth. This year, 130 million babies will be born, and 55 million people will die. Each and every hour, there are 15,000 births and 6,300 deaths. Per 100,000 inhabitants, there are 1,900 births and 800 deaths per year. Of these 800 yearly deaths per 100,000 inhabitants of the earth, "only" 6 or 7 are due to homicide, i.e. less than 1 per cent of all deaths. More than 99% of all deaths are due to other causes. Of the 55 million deaths altogether, 36 million are due to non-communicable diseases of different kinds, and more than half to the top 10 causes. Heart attacks and strokes combined account for 15 million deaths per year - and that has been stable over the last 18 years or so. Chronic pulmonary diseases claim more than 3 million lives, lung cancer 1.7 million, diabetes 1.6 (up from less than a million in 2000), and dementia (which more than doubled between 2000 and 2015) as the 7th leading cause about 1.5 million. Diarrhea and tuberculosis, both of which are on the decrease, still cost 1.4 million lives each per year, and road injuries 1.3 (75% of the victims are men and boys).

With 1.1 million fatalities in 2015, HIV/AIDS is no longer among the world’s top 10 causes of death. War and terrorism together are on the increase, but with a yearly total of around 150,000, these causes together claim less lives than cancer of the pancreas (330,000), and much less than homicide (less than 500,000) or even breast cancer (570,000) or suicide (800,000). In other words: With less than half a million deaths per year worldwide, homicide is far from the ten leading causes of death. ranging somewhere between suicide (800,000) and the lesser known types of cancer (bone cancer, pancreatic cancer).

In terms of public health, a 50% reduction in homicides would not have the same quantitative effect as a 50% reduction of deaths among children under the age of 5. The latter dropped, in the year 2016, below 5 million for the first time in modern history — down from 16.4 million in 1970, and 11 million in 1990.

With a worldwide average homicide rate of around 6 per 100,000 inhabitants, homicide is one of the less frequent causes of death in the real world. see: Global Study on Homicide. In that sense, we can say that we are relatively safe.

But who is this "WE"? And what does it mean to say that WE are "relatively" safe?

2. The relevance of homicide 500,000 homicides might seem little compared with more than 7 billion inhabitants of the earth. But 500,000 are 500,000. But: homicide is a different kind of death. To die from a disease is something else than dying from the aggression of another human. As the UNODC states:

"The study of intentional homicide is relevant not only because it is the study of the ultimate crime, whose ripple effect - efeito cascata - goes far beyond the initial loss of human life, but because lethal violence can create a climate of fear and uncertainty. Intentional homicide also victimizes the family and community of the victim, who can be considered secondary victims, and when justice is not served, impunity can lead to further victimization in the form of the denial of the basic human right to justice." (UNODC)

This must be one the reasons why humans are so fascinated and preoccupied with murder. In the imaginary universe of the mainstream mass media, homicide has become the most common cause of death. Even more so in entertainment than in the news (from the Silence of the Lambs to Dexter and CSI Miami, Las Vegas, New York). Another reason must be that in the real world there are segments of society and places within countries in which homicide is the number one killer: according to the Center of Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, USA, homicide is the number one cause of death for black men between the ages of 15 and 34. Accidents ranked second, and suicide third (15 and 24 years), while heart disease ranked third for men 24-34.

For the Rohingya of Myanmar and white farmers in South Africa, things look similarly bleak. An average of 2 homicides per 100 000 population is normal in Western Europe. The world average is about 6. Where the average reaches 20 security issues begin to dominate everyday life and conversations. Where the average reaches 40 people dream of getting out of the country. There are only a few countries where rates are higher - presently Honduras, and Venezuela belong to this unfortunate category. With a rate of 81, El Salvador is presently on top of the list. When there was a day without a murder in this country, that was seen as so newsworthy it was reported in countries as far away as New Zealand, Thailand and Russia. For young African-Americans in metropolitan areas that rate is above 100, and for white farmers in South Africa it has recently risen to 130. Extreme homicide rates indicate severe structural tensions - often race. class, and inequality related.

3. Homicide in Latin America: Murder, inequality, and the war on drugs

From a briefing on murder in the Economist of April 7th, 2018:

  • just 8% of the world’s population, but accounts for 38% of its criminal killing.
  • The butcher’s bill in the region came to around 140,000 people last year, more than have been lost in wars around the world in almost all of the years this century.
  • Latin America is also the most urbanised part of the developing world, and that is not a coincidence. Its urban population grew in the second half of the 20th century much faster than those of other regions.
  • Some countries in the south of the region have urbanised as fast as those in its north, but murder rates in the south remain comparable to that of the United States. The drug trade in the northern part of the region undoubtedly makes a big difference.
  • The Small Arms Survey, a research group, has three scenarios for the world up to 2030: one in which murder trends continue; one in which the trends seen in the countries that are doing best with murder in their region are exported to their neighbours; and one in which trends start to match those in some of the worst-performing countries. The difference between the best case and the worst adds up to 2.6m lives.
  • Extortion gangs are responsible for a lot in some parts of Central America, drug-trafficking in others (though Costa Rica and Panama, both on the drug route, are relatively peaceful).
  • Institutional weaknesses were widespread. Police and prosecutors in the region are badly trained, underpaid and often corrupt.
  • In some places only one in 20 reports of murder leads to a conviction.
  • Brutal government crackdowns often make things worse
  • Grossly overpopulated prisons have became crime factories rather than rehabilitation centres.
  • The vicious circle could be transformed into a virtuous one.
  • Where murder is high it is also heavily concentrated. According to Robert Muggah of the Igarapé Institute, a Brazil-based think-tank, approximately 80% of homicides in large and medium-sized Latin American cities occur on just 2% of the streets. Identifying those hotspots is crucial. Policies which use reliable data to give priority to high-risk places and people have chance of success. Armed people (including police and military) belong to the high-risk people in this context.
  • Lawrence Sherman, a criminologist, concluded in 2012 that chronic lack of data “is not an obstacle to solving an important problem. It is the most important problem.”
  • Latin American governments spend an average of 5% of their budgets on internal security—twice as much as developed countries. A recent IDB study estimates the direct costs of violent crime in the region—measured by such things as spending on police, hospitals, insurance and private security, and the lost wages of prisoners—at $236bn a year, calculated on a purchasing-power basis. At $300 per person, that is much higher than in developed countries. In El Salvador the cost of murder works out at 1% of GDP a year.
  • El Salvador: In 2004 President Francisco Flores put soldiers on the streets and threw thousands of gang members into prison to clamp down on crime. Murders went up. In March 2012 the government of Mauricio Funes brokered a truce between El Salvador’s three main gangs, giving imprisoned leaders luxuries like flat-screen televisions and fried chicken if they would tell their subordinates to stop killing each other. Murders halved almost overnight, and some criminologists applauded, seeing the policy as a step towards “focused deterrence”—a combination of incentives and threats that is deemed to have worked well in Los Angeles. But the truce soon began to unravel, and the gangs began to see violence as a bargaining tool. In early 2015 President Salvador Sánchez-Cerén sent the army back on to the streets and returned gang leaders to top-security prisons. Murders rocketed to 104 per 100,000 people. The number dropped back by 40% over the next two years, something the government put down to “extraordinary measures” in the prisons; for two years tens of thousands of gang members have seen no relatives, no doctors and no daylight. At the same time the number of members of the public shot by police has gone up 15-fold, sparking an international outcry. “The treatment that the state provides shouldn’t be as bad as the sickness itself,” says the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Agnes Callamard. And for the past six months the murder rate has been on the rise again.
  • In 1994 the murder rate in Cali was 124 per 100,000 people. The mayor set up “violence observatories” where police, public-health officials, academics and concerned citizens could study crime data. This revealed that most of the city’s murders took place in drunken brawls, not in conflict between gangs, and that they were late at night a day or so after payday. Restricting alcohol sales and gun permits helped cut the homicide rate by 35% in a matter of months. Some experts believe that the only way for developing countries to curb high homicide rates on a permanent basis is systemic reform. But data-driven policing can buy the time. In 2017 Colombia announced a murder rate of 24 per 100,000 people, its lowest in 42 years. That is still high, though, and there are more problems to come.
  • In 2016 Ignacio Cano looked at 93 homicide-reduction programmes in the region, including controls on alcohol in Brazil, an advertising campaign exhorting Venezuelans to “value life”, private investigators paid to help public prosecutors in Honduras, a $400m justice reform in Mexico and mediation with criminals in Jamaica and El Salvador. Some coincided with impressive drops in murder rates—but only 16% actually tried to evaluate their impact.

Fernanda Mena in Folha de S.P. (21 de abril 2018):

  • Brazil murder rate three times the "accepted" rate of around 10 per 100,000: 29,7 (Sergipe: 64) - 61.284 mortos
  • 100 inquéritos policiais de homicídio geram 34 denúncias por parte do Ministério Público e só 5 chegam ao julgamento.
  • Cuso mensal de prisao pouco menos que um ano de escola (2.400 - 2.800 R$).
  • Randolph Roth American Homicide compares with little trust in government in Brazil. Randolph Roth (2009) charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.
  • Courts: a lei diz que tem que terminar o processamento de casos de homicídio dentro de 316 días. Fora do papel, demora oito anos e seis meses, na média.
  • Nao basta construir presídios, tem que prender com sentido

The Anthropology of Homicide

4. Intraspecific intragroup violence is at the core of the homicide question. Violence of the human animal is much like violence of the non-human animal. Animal violence is usually interspecific: The predators practice offensive violence, whereas their victims practice defensive violence to prevent being eaten. Intraspecific competition is usually ritualized and related to fight for access to food, water, and sex. On the other hand, intra-specific killings are not as rare as once believed. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1966, still believed that that intra-specific killings like homicide and warfare only occurred in humans. Fact is that human violence is normally interspecific, but regularly also intraspecific. Intraspecific violence has proven to be useful in evolutionary terms. Especially for males: Reproductive benefits from intergroup (intra-specific) aggression are high in humans, but primarily accrue to males. - Intraspecific violence of the human animal normally takes the form of intergroup violence which tends to reinforce parochial altruism and improved survival chances. 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. Intergroup violence enhances survival chances of those best at it - developing over time both a strong parochial altruism and equally strong xenophobia. - But: When intraspecific violence goes intragroup, there is a higher likelihood of negative social reactions (definition as homicide and intensive sanctions).

The reason why homicide is seen as something exceptionally bad does not even lie in the fact that it is the killing of another human being - i.e. an intraspecies act of aggression. - It is true that human life has a higher value than other lives. This is not necessarily a natural order of things, but we have learned - since the stoneage revolution and the rise of monotheistic religions - to devalue the living environment of human life, and to cherish human life as having some innate higher value. Harari. In that sense, humans are behaving like a Band of Brothers. Against the rest. - We could even explain why societies scandalize the loss of human life through homicides. Accidents and diseases also kill people, as do predators, but the killing of a human by another human seems avoidable and scandalous, since it undermines trust and the very conditions that have to be fulfilled to guarantee the very possibility of living together in one society. This is why the murder of one person is a crime not only against that individual, but against everyone. Kant.

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. Therefore, the reason why homicide is exceptionally bad does not lie in the fact that it is a killin alone. - While the 5th Commandment says "Thou shalt not kill" - insinuating that the very act of killing is what makes it reprehensible - this cannot be the real reason. To kill means to end the existence of a living organism. We can kill people, but also animals like cats, dogs or sheep or pigs or cattle or cangoroos, or trees or plants or any other living organism. Thou shalt not kill does not contain a qualification or restriction. If the mere act of killing were what makes murder so extremely reprehensible a behaviour, than all of the mentioned examples of killing would have to entail a similar judgment by society. But that is evidently not the case. In spite of the 5th commandment, we do not rate all killing behaviour as morally bad.

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. - On the other hand, to be a human means to kill and to depend on killings. If to kill means to put an end to the existence of an organism, then we are all killers. 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. 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.

5. Is the male human animal a schizophrenic killer?

Cum grano salis, yes. He likes to think of himself as a peaceful being, but indulges in the extermination of living organisms - including of his own species.

  • Alexander Georgiev (2013): Humans are a highly aggressive species in comparison to other animals, probably as a result of an unusually high benefit-to-cost ratio for intra-specific aggression (male-male coalitionary killings). Early modern humans killed each other at a rate of about 1300 in 100,000. But the worst is the meerkat: 20,000 out of 100,000 (mostly youngsters) lose their lives at the paws and jaws of their own kind (José María Gómez et al. 2016). The meerkats are followed by two types of monkeys and assorted lemurs, the New Zealand sea lion, long-tailed marmot, lion, branded mongoose, and grey wolf - then comes the human animal (fission-fusion). A consolation: Killings of humans by humans are not an immutable feature of all members and collectives of humans. Much depends on the environment (Maori vs. Moriori).

6. 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.

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."

While estimates are ranging all the way from one to three billion, it is an undisputable fact that the intra-species killing of humans by humans in wars has cost so many lives in the course of human history that it is simply impossible to maintain the thesis that what makes murder so exceptionally "bad" is the general respect for human life. And while there are many animals that would never ever kill other members of their own species, the human animal does not have such a barrier in his behavioral repertory. Military, mercenaries, militias, violent gangs, police, euthanasia physicians, and others do kill with a license to kill under certain conditions. The reason why homicide is seen as something exceptionally bad resides in its disobedience with respect to enforceable group interests.

We are living in an age of ethical and moral universalism. We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and universal claims of religions. But when we look at the moral boundaries between allowed and prohibited killings, we soon recognize that there are two different evaluations concerning killings. Killings in the name and interest of the collective are good and laudbale, but killings in just one's own selfish, egotistical interest are forbidden and scandalized.

Examples for moral boundaries along these lines:

  • The Jain proscribe all killings, but when it comes to warfare, they require obedience to the commanders
  • Intragroup killings are regularly considered reprehensible and severely punished. This goes for illegal groups as well as for legal ones. For PCC as well as BOPE.

While murder is dysfunctional for the collective, killing in coalitionary intergroup aggression including war is good for the survival of the dominant sub-population of that species (and indirectly for the species itself at the expense of its peaceful segments). Insofar, there are important remnants of phylogenetic roots and parochial altruism as well as xenofobia.

The History and Future of Homicide

7. Today humans are living in the most peaceful era ever.

According to Steven Pinker (2011), the big picture is that of the human animal becoming more civilized - less violent towards cospecifics - by the millenia and by the centuries, so that we are now living in the most peaceful era of human existence since Adam and Eve.

Early humans killed each other at a rate of about 2,000 in 100,000, but got more violent during the Middle Ages when the rate shot up to 12,000 in 100,000. After studying 600 human populations from the Stone Age to the present day, researchers concluded that "lethal violence is part of our evolutionary history but not carved in stone in our genes. Levels of violence are influenced by societal pressures and have decreased significantly in the contemporary age. Gomez: The level of lethal violence is reversible and can increase or decrease as a consequence of some ecological, social, or cultural factors.

8. The global Scandinavia: no wars, less homicide, and ever more peaceful cooperation

  1. Peace for the World (Henner Hess, Weltstaat; Robert Wright: Non-Zero. The Logic of Human Destiny). Convergences in cultural form and dynamics across the globe suggest that for all its richness and diversity humankind is on a trajectory toward a common goal: globalized trade and communication. Notwithstanding tensions of rabid nationalism and environmental perturbation, in the medium and long term the outlook is positive. The end of bloody world wars has already come. The World State only knows military police operations like Libya and the anti-ISIS campaign.
  2. Inclusion. From the abolition of slavery over workers' rights and voting rights for women, inclusion will proceed to non-human animals (Kymlicka & Davidson: Zoopolis). Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer: The Great Ape Project (GAP, 1993). Advocating a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes. Right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture for non-human great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.
  3. New Ethics: From Taking "Thou Shalt not Kill" seriously (Ahimsa) to Transhumanism (h+): Reprogramming Predators (David Pearce). The Fifth Commandment vs. the torah's Sixth Commandment: thou shalt not kill vs. thou shalt not murder (parochial intragroup ethics vs. universalism; specieism/especismo vs. holiness of life). 2 Moises/Deuteronomio ch. 20, v 13: ratsah - to murder; harag - to kill. - Christianity (mis-) translated "murder" into "killing": but it never took "ne occides" (Vulgata; Deuteronominon; Jerome = Hieronymus= Geronimo) seriously. The Bible itself is full of legitimised homicides and genocides. Whereas "thou shalt not kill" (St. James Bible) is a general commandment, it has never been thought of as referring also to the killing of animals or plants.

9. The New Helots: exclusion, oppression, and subservience

The growing sensitivity towards animal (and plant) life and rights and the seemingly unstoppable extension of the circles of inclusion are not the whole picture, though. This compassion does not extend to those groups of humans that are seen as enemies or simply useless. Uselessness in any economic sense is the fate of a large part of the population in the post-industrial age, where robots can and will assume a lot of tasks hitherto reserved for the human labor force. According to the insightful considerations of Yuval Noah Harari, this will bring about significant changes in the fate of the masses as compared to the social development of the working class in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The global Scandinavia will not be accessible for all. It will be reserved for a minority of people, whereas the bulk of the global population will be "useless" and hence subject to less resources and rights. As natural resources (like water) are becoming more scarce, and social resources like health care and education becomes more efficient, expensive and complex, their allocation will be more differentiated - and will result in the exclusion of the global (sub-) proletariat. The fight for resources has already begun (water-wars). There is a growing global sub-proletariat without economic function and with no possible integration. They do not live in a coherent territory, but within nation states and mega-cities (see crime maps). The consequence: an ever deeper cleavage between a kind of Scandinavian world of the good, rich, and beautiful - and a sad and dark world of the have-nots in terms of material wealth, education, and welfare, the new Helotes.

If we want to imagine the future, we should have a look at the emergent systems of mass control in today's world, where restrictions of access to citizenship, social services, and rights are already being tested.

  1. Repression. Populations with decimated rights living in poverty and a de facto Hobbesian state of nature (repeated or prolonged states of emergency, suffering from extended police and military campaigns and powers, raids, maltreatment, torture, extrajudicial killings, permanent war on terror). Fragile truces will be the new normal, with deaths by political violence from above and below, including extrajudicial killings and social cleansings.
  2. Exclusion. With universalism retreating, parochial altruism (in-group coherence) and xenofobia are drawing new moral boundaries between classes and races. Reduced citizen rights, e.g. "hukou" in China - a kind of passport system, which limits access to public services, based on the birthplace of the holder. First established in 1954 to immobilise China's large rural population, it is still a central instrument of population control. The rural population and migrant workers do not enjoy the citizenship rights that international conventions see as essential. - Divide et impera: varying types of passports with differentiated access rights for different subjugated populations. Restrictions of movement (see: Egyptian military policy in the Sinai Peninsula 2017/2018). - Withholding citizenship (Rohingy in Myanmar). Denizenship: instead of full citizenship, the Helotes will be ruled by a differential system of entitlements and access rules, pitting them against each other through indirect rule (Bantustans, patrolled no-gone zones etc.). Resource allocation will be in the hands of the powerful and their quislings. Incursions and arbitrary arrests and killings will be embedded in that new kind of governance.
  3. New Ethics and Legal Philosophy: While the criminal code condemns all murder, law-in-action follows a second code. By and by, what started as the split between the first and second code, will tend to be justified politically and enshrined in formal law. Extended shoot-to-kill-powers for police. See: Police killings Example: Stephon Clark. Or: Rodrigo Duterte's policy in the Philippines.

These populations are not in chattel slavery, they are not possession of individual slave owners. Rather, they could be compared to earlier precedents where people were without rights because they were seen as possession of the state. One example that comes to mind is that of the helots (εἵλωτες), a subjugated population group that formed the main population of Laconia and Messenia, the territory controlled by ancient Sparta in the first millenium B.C.; while their exact status was disputed - some put them between free men and slaves while others called them "slaves to the utmost" - their function was clear: tied to the land, they primarily worked in agriculture and economically supported the Spartan citizens, whom they outnumbered by around seven to one. This also may explain the methods of control used by the Spartans, who regularly and even ritually mistreated, humiliated and even slaughtered helots: every autumn the Spartan ephors (a superior council of five men) would declare war on the helots so they could be killed (by the Krypteia - κρυπτεία) without fear of repercussion. All this having the effect that uprisings and attemtps to improve the helot's lot remained unsuccessful.

Diferentemente dos escravos, os hilotas eram propriedade do Estado, que administrava a produção econômica. Durante a Cripteia um grupo de jovens espartanos era designado para assassinar líderes em potencial entre os hilotas.

10. A necessary condition for the cleavage (decote, clivagem, rachadura) is the interplay between good people and those who do the dirty work.

11. Killing in the post-human age

Technological developments threatens the ability of humans to give meaning to their lives. Non-human intelligence may enter a scene one day and threaten the "scandinavian" super-humans as well as the new helots. As far as killings are concerned, humans can hope that the non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms will treat them better than humans now treat their animals.

Weblinks and Bibliography

See Also

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