When are violence and killing okay? A bear eats a fish, and people don't mind. Death penalty as social control among humans? Very touchy subject for many. What about murdering some old lady because you want her television? Shooting a man who has a gun pointed at a child's head? When are violence and killing acceptable or unacceptable, and why?
Socially unacceptable or morally unacceptable? And can we find a logical basis for our moral judgement?
A bear eats a fish and people don't mind because it's part of the predator and prey nature of the biosphere. A human kills a deer and it's barbaric-in some people's minds-because were homo sapiens and therefore we are somehow above or beyond nature and therefore not a part of the predeator and prey relationship. What they fail to realize is that we are indeed a part of the ecosystem in which we inhabit no matter how intelligent or enlightened we may think we are and therefore we are not exempt from this relationship. However I would say only in certain situations is it acceptable to kill animals. An animal kills another animal for a reason. Generally speaking animals don't kill arbitrarily. If an animal is hungry, has it's children threatened, or is itself threatened it will kill. Similarly I think in those situations it's acceptable for humans to kill animals. For instance I recently spent 5 weeks camping in the bush at a remote bush camp. We had several bears that smelt our food. During the day they came into our camp in search of food and ran amok, one punctured a hole in my tent looking for food and stole my astronomy book-the ba$tard. In any event the bush camp manager found the bear and shot it. Simply due to the fact it was threatening us and getting quite bold. Better the bear than one of us. Similarly if one of us had stumbled upon the bear in the bush with it's cub it could very well have been one of us finding our entrails strewn about. Such is the nature of predator and prey. As far as a human killing another human, obviously, that's a bit more problematic. I would say defending oneself from elimination is certainly a viable reason to maim or kill a fellow human if indeed you cannot fly-fight or flight. There are those that say killing another human for sustinance is unacceptable and indeed repugnant. However you see many examples of this in the third world. Many, many a war has been started over scarcity of resources. In the first world I don't know that this is acceptable-even in the third world I don't know if it's "acceptable" but it's certainly "expected"-because there are numerous social programs that can help you out if you are that hard done by-in theory at least. As far as capital punishment goes I'm against it. It does not act as a deterrant because when someone is thinking or killing someone else, they are either not thinking about what their doing-man slaughter-or believing they won't be caught-1st degree murder. Furthermore it has been proven capital punishment does not reduce the rate of homicide. Capital punishment is nothing more than a draconic form of vengeance. Beyond that what if we execute an innocent person?? In Canada there have been six innocent people who have been convicted of murder since the abolishment of the death penalty, only to be found innocent later by DNA evidence. How can someone justify the murder of a completely innocent man or woman.
