Topics Ethics

Question Why is murder (irrespective of special circumstances such as war or self-defense) immoral? Many people consider abortion, euthanasia, and suicide to not be immoral. This would indicate that "the good life" is moral, making "good" an ideal greater than life. What's to stop a murderer deciding that eliminating someone would result in greater "good?"

Accepted:
June 7, 2013

Comments

First, a quibble: "murder" usually is taken to mean wrongful killing. But we can set the quibble aside.

I'm inclined to turn your question around. I take it to be as plausible as any moral claim gets to be that in general killing people is wrong. Philosophers have had various things to say about why, but a bit of reflection on the fact that typically, rational people would very much prefer not to be killed should tell us something.

If we agree that killing people is wrong in general, the question is why it might not always be wrong to kill people Your suggestion is that what we really care about is the "good" life, and that this is more important than mere life.

Though it's more complicated than that, there's a nugget of truth there. People who favor assisted suicide, for example, may believe that not just any life is worth living, and that people shouldn't be required to live lives that only promise pain, and that they should be entitled to ask for help in ending a painful life. Whether right or wrong, none of this contradicts the idea that in general killing is wrong.

As for abortion, those who believe it's sometimes acceptable usually don't think that fetuses are full-fledged persons with the full set of rights that you and I have. Once again, whether this is right or wrong it doesn't argue against the proposition that killing is wrong in general.

Your final worry was about the murderer. You ask what's to stop the murderer from deciding that the greater good would be served by killing someone.

One part of the answer is that even if we think there are some exceptions to the general principle that killing is wrong, that doesn't mean we think questions about who can be killed are just matters of utilitarian calculation (of adding up the "goods and the "bads.) We also think, for example, that it's typically wrong to impose our own judgments about weighty matters on other people. And in the case of taking a life, there's a great deal at stake. I don't think any of us would be willing to live in a society (if we could call it that) where your idiosyncratic judgment about the "greater good" should give you license to kill me. It's partly that the would-be murderer may be wrong about the good, it's partly that even the would-be murdered would be unhappy at the prospect of having someone act on this judgment about him, and it's partly that in addition to utilitarian goodness, we care about other things,, such as being able to live our lives more or less unmolested, and not being used merely as a cog in some scheme to achieve a dubitable "greatest good." .

In short: there's not much mystery about why killing people is typically wrong; the reasons usually given for making exceptions are just that: reasons for exceptions to the general rule. And even if people argue for various exceptions, that doesn't mean they're committing themselves to some view that allows sacrificing individual people to a "greater good.".