Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.
Primates fighting each other is not.
Murdering for acquisition of a resource is short term advantage.
We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.
I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..
Wow. I just read that whole wikipedia article and had a fantastic time. Thank you very much for sharing
But to comment on your point: species DO pay for it in the long term when members murder or teratorialism.
Lions are not cannibals. Some lions are cannibals. A successful group of lions cannibals existing (and what a brutal and awesome-in-the-biblical-sense story it is!) does not mean that it pays for the lion species as a whole to have groups of cannibals existing.
In fact, I could only see the “proliferation of groups like this committing atrocities” reach a tipping point for a species - not murdering when this murdering happens will make you cease to exist. So if the species doesn’t have a reason to reach the extreme where this NEVER happens, then it will quickly reach the point where this ALWAYS happens
On an individual level, even in authoritarian situations murder is still immoral and illegal.
Even within the context of power it's still nominally immoral. Stalin did not kill people, he tortured them until they 'admitted their crimes'. That Stalin needed to present the blood-stained admission is very telling.
Even Bloody Mary couldn't just kill however, there had to be some kind of legitimate premise. Heretics, threats etc.. It's how QE1 survived.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
There are plenty of people who advocate for war and consider it good, and plenty of disagreements over war.
People are usually in agreement that war / killing is bad when other people do it but will find all sorts of ways to justify themselves doing it when it is to their advantage. This isn't really contradictory, from an evolutionary perspective.
You have to be in a very secure situation to think this way. You also ignore that a war can prevent more problems down the line though often it doesn't. When applying game theory to these situations, depending on how you rig the utility function, you can get any chosen strategy as optimal. So it is more about how you value outcomes and if you are estimating their probabilities correctly as to what is the right decision. By your logic, imprisoning or executing a serial killer isn't OK (let's say in this situation we know they are guilty).
Finally you are completely ignoring competition for resources in your analysis. What makes you think more monkeys has positive utility to individual monkeys? You hope that's true, but until you can speak to them, its going to be hard to know.
These are complex decision and you are acting as if there is always one "correct" answer to every situation. Heck, the trolley problem was conceived of to explain to people like you why your thinking is just plain wrong in some situations.
I would caution against the use of "murder" so loosely. Lions don't murder their prey. They kill their prey. Murder occurs when one entity with personhood intentional kills another entity with personhood, where personhood is rooted in the ability to comprehend reality (intellect) and the ability to make free choices among comprehended alternatives (free choice). "Murder" thus has a moral dimension that mere killing does not. Personhood is the seat of moral agency; without personhood, murder simply cannot take place, only killing, and it is a category error to ascribe moral goodness or evil to an act committed by a non-person. A spider eating another spider of the same species isn't murder; it may very well be the nature of that species to function that way.
(Entailed also by personhood is social nature. So, murdering another person is bad, because it is opposed to the very nature and thus good of the murderer. It's why killing in self-defense and the death penalty for murder are themselves mere killing, but not murder. Justice is served against the injustice of the gravely antisocial.)
From a game theoretic perspective w.r.t. just resources, murder does not generally pay especially given the social nature of a species given how antithetical it is to the social, but even if it does in some constrained sense, there is a greater intangible loss for those with personhood. Speak to almost anyone who has murdered someone. They will tell you that it changes them drastically, and not in a good way.
Why do you think that we can define personhood without much understanding of the interior life of anything other than humans? Why do you think personhood is even required for murder? Does your pet have enough of whatever makes personhood important to qualify? How about the source of your blt?
> Why do you think that we can define personhood without much understanding of the interior life of anything other than humans?
Because the "interior life" is demonstrated by observable behavior. It is nonsensical to speak of animals with a "secret rationality" that exists apart form their behavior. This would be a dualistic position that posits that these animals are two things, not one: one that is rational, the other irrational in expression. This doesn't satisfy the demands of parsimony. In fact, it isn't even coherent.
The hallmark of rationality is language, and I mean language in the full sense, not merely signaling or expression of emotional state. The descriptive and argumentative functions are what are characteristic of rationality.
> Why do you think personhood is even required for murder?
Because, as I wrote, personhood is composed of rationality - the ability to comprehend reality - and the ability to make decisions freely among rationally comprehended alternatives. If you can't understand reality, then it is nonsensical to speak of having the ability to choose freely - that's why contracts signed by mentally incompetent people are void, because rational comprehension was a missing element and thus free consent. Without the ability to choose freely, we have no culpability for our actions. We had no choice in the matter! So, a non-person can only kill, but never murder.
> Does your pet have enough of whatever makes personhood important to qualify? [etc, etc]
I don't understand what your getting at. My pet is not a person, because my pet does not rationally comprehend reality. Comprehension is not mere sensation. Animals absolutely perceive the world. They have emotions. But rational comprehension is more than sense perception and brute imagination. It is abstraction, which is to say, the formation of intensional signs - universal concepts - like "human" and "mortal" from the sense experience of particular instances which allows me to form propositions like "every human is mortal" and from there inferences like "every human is mortal / Socrates is a human / therefore, Socrates is mortal".
No other animal that we know of demonstrates these capacities, and therefore, no other animal is personal.
If you examine the interior life of a human and its behavior you will find a LOT of complexity that doesn't appear in their behavior and if you tries to run a society simulator without modeling any part of that interior life it would probably be mostly wrong because that interior life matters.
Your position that you know to what degree the interior life of the animal is simple to the point of being able to understand them fully whilst modeling none of that implies that you don't understand them or the problem.
An act is composed of object (the act itself), intent (the purpose/end motivating the act/toward which it aims) and circumstances (the context).
Thus, murder is a species of homicide. The specific differences of murder relative to homicide is that it is voluntary, premeditated, and malicious.
The law merely recognizes this distinction. It doesn't construct some convention around homicide. Indeed, law in general is a particular determination of general moral principles within a particular jurisdiction.
So, a lion doesn't commit murder, because a lion's actions are involuntary and neither malicious nor premeditated. Also, while a lion can kill a person or non-person, it is not capable of homicide, because its meaning specifically pertains to the killing of one person by another.
I think that 'hom' in homicide stands for homo so killing of (hu)man. I read your comment as lions committing homicide on hyenas which I'm sure you don't mean.
That's not a given. Look at the Old Testament, it professes that you shall not kill, but is also full of laws that are upheld by death, stories of just killings, etc and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god.
In cultures where honor is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who bring dishonor or to maintain honor.
In cultures where purity/cleanliness is a big thing, it can be seen as just to kill those who are impure/unclean.
All cultures, even it seems primates, discriminate between notions of 'arbitrary murder' and 'justice' implying different things.
And it's all roughly consistent.
Arbitrary murder is always 'wrong' across cultures.
Self defence is almost always considered reasonable and a form of justification.
Even basic cultures developed sense of 'justice' as retribution or punishment.
It gets a bit more complicated in terms of organized violence, but even there, it's generally always considered moral in the posture of defence, just as it were a single person defending themselves.
For other things, it's more complicated.
And of course 'war parties' and 'arbitrary retribution' has always been there, aka 'they slighted us, we harm them' absent true moral justification. That's always been problematic, admittedly.
Also "and the whole thing is written via dictation from a war god." this is not an appropriate assertion (not nice or welcome)
Inside their territory, they will attempt to kill any other predator who could compete with them and who belongs to a weaker species. This is a necessary strategy, because any territory has a limited productivity and it cannot sustain too many predators that want to eat the same kind of prey. Thus predators either specialize into separate niches, e.g. some eat mice, some eat rabbits and some eat deer, or they kill each other if they want the same food, to eliminate the competition.
They will also attempt to repel outside their territory any predator of the same species with them. They will seldom attempt to actually kill a predator of their own species, but that mainly because this would be risky, as in a fight to death they could be killed themselves, so ritualized harmless fights are preferred.
The difference with some primates like chimpanzees and humans, is that competitors of the same species may be treated as other predators treat only predators from different, weaker species.
The reason might be that when you cooperate within a bigger team, you may have the same advantage against competitors that a stronger predator has against a weaker predator, e.g. a wolf against a fox.
Thus a fight to death may be chosen, because the bigger team has good chances to win the fight. So chimpanzees start wars for the same reason why Russia attacks Ukraine or USA attacks Iran, those who have more weapons and more money believe that they can win the war, so they start it.
Most other predators do not start wars against their own kind, because in a balanced fight the winner is unpredictable.
> Thus a fight to death may be chosen, because the bigger team has good chances to win the fight. So chimpanzees start wars for the same reason why Russia attacks Ukraine or USA attacks Iran, those who have more weapons and more money believe that they can win the war, so they start it.
In the two Chimpanzee "wars" discussed in Wikipedia (Ngogo and Gombe) it was the smaller group that started the aggression. They were objectively at a disadvantage, but managed to kill or drive off most of the chimps from the larger group. It's as if being focused on aggressive behavior was their advantage.
Smaller groups do not start aggression simultaneously against the entirety of a bigger group.
They seize the opportunity when a smaller group than themselves is separated from the remainder of the big group, and then they overpower the smaller group.
Then they repeat this until they eliminate the bigger group.
My point was that animals understand very well the advantages of belonging to the bigger group at the moment of starting a fight, and they will start the fight only when they estimate that they will win.
The same happens with other social predators. A big group of hyenas will harass or even kill other predators, like leopards or lionesses, which would make them run away when in a small group.
Humans and chimpanzees are probably better at planning a long-term strategy about how to use their advantage in numbers in order to eliminate rivals. Other predators might use their advantage in numbers when an opportunity happens, but they might not perform a surveillance of the actions of a neighbor community, to discover when it becomes possible to use the bulk of their mates against a smaller group of the neighbors that happens to be separated from the others during their foraging activities.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying, mind you! I'm just curious that in the two Chimp cases at the forefront of this conversation, the smaller group started the war. Yes, they of course attacked when they could find isolated targets, but still it seems more "planned" than simply chance and opportunistic attacks (as much as it makes sense to state Chimps planned this, of course).
As a comparison, and changing species, in the also mentioned Mapogo lion coalition (a similar "war" with lots of casualties), the attackers had the numbers, motive and power advantage: six "disenfranchised" male lions, healthy and powerful and experienced with tackling big game such as buffalo, which gave them an advantage when killing other lions (and yet they still chose to isolate victims first, because as you said, animals understand the principle of strength in numbers).
I'm not disagreeing with you on anything, just musing.
Among the Yanomami (per Napoleon Chagnon), killing outsiders was not “murder,” it raised status. Men who killed had more wives. Violence was cyclical and regulated, not collapse. Humans are not universally anti-killing, mainly in-group.
That pressure kept population density low and groups mobile. Less surplus, less accumulation, weaker incentives for technological scaling. Over ~10,000+ years this maintained a relatively stable human–environment equilibrium.
“The weirdest people in the world” - has a very good roots cause analysis of all this.
Basically banding into groups and guarding against outsiders is the default human behaviour. It just works that way if you do a game theory analysis of our social structures. They usually don’t scale too well, but that’s what we revolved to do as social creatures.
It’s actually and very counter intuitively the Catholic Church that lead us to individualism, common laws, nationalism, even the Industrial Revolution and the scientific method.
It sounds bizarre but if you follow the historical logic, in a round about way it has paved the way for the modern world, which the rest of human civilisation was forced to adopt, either to compete or at gunpoint.
There are few books I read in a year that change the way I look at the world, “The Weirdest people in the world” was definitely one of them.
Interesting claim, though not enough detail to disagree with constructively. I'd agree that the Catholic Church had a big influence on our history of course, though among the things you mention I would only count common laws as being intertwined with Church history, everything else pre-dating it or being independent of it in my understanding.
I'll have a look at that book however: what were the other books?
Capital in the 21 century, how to win and influence people, Sidhartha, meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the mars trilogy, the nurture revolution.
These are off the top of my head.
The Catholic Church thing - yea that was quite unexpected for me, and apparently accidental for the church too - the basic premise was - they banned cousin marriage, and heavily enforced it throughout all of society - kings to peasants - this drove people to move around and settle outside of their home towns, driving up individualism and just changing the way our brains work on a neurological level - we have always been a close nit kin social structure animals.
The e book explains it quite well with tons of historical data, neuroscience, comparisons with different countries, continents and social structures.
It got me to “understand” India on a much deeper level since I moved here from Europe, and not get pissed off at people for “not thinking things through”.
But also appreciate how small and consistent things can drive profound changes. Also how did china/ussr speed run the Industrial Revolution so quickly - spoiler alert - they copied the same “ban cousin marriage” thing
I will agree with some of those - although i would say Christianity rather than the Catholic Church specifically for most of it.
The Catholic Church did ban marrying first cousins and some other relatives (there is a complicated rule) which broke up clans. It also deserves a lot of credit for the scientific method, although that was not a deliberate strategy - it just emerged from theology and lots of educated people within in.
On laws and nationalism, there were many states and legal systems that predate it. Rome or Athens in Europe, empires, kingdoms, even a republic or two elsewhere. Legal systems go back to Hammurabi. Breaking up clans (requiring better laws) and distinguishing between secular and religious laws are something it deserves credit for.
I am puzzled by what the Church contributed to the Industrial Revolution though.
If one tribe's men kills all the men in the other tribe, that's double the number of women, and double the number of children. A large, permanent improvement in genetic fitness. Not temporary at all.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin
The idea of sin is designed to fix less than ideal human tendencies. If anything, this being the biggest sin means murder is the most inherent bad trait of humans.
It's just the sin with the greatest consequences since it invokes the wrath of the groups the person being killed belonged to. Unlawful killings challenge the authority of those who determine which killings are lawful and which aren't, therefore destabilizing societies that are more complex than a hunter-gatherer group.
However, most religions do more than just declare murder to be a sin. They usually aim to foster bonds between relative strangers as well. And values like the guest-host relationship are held to apply to all humans and even to sentient non-humans.
No disagreement across cultures? That’s downright funny, there isn’t even agreement over what counts as murder. Do you think a jihadi sawing off a head thinks they’re a murderer?
Cultures aren’t universal, and neither is your particular religious tradition.
This is a pretty terrible misrepresentation of original sin. I see you managed to copy it straight out of the Wikipedia page and completely ignore the sentence before it:
> In Christian theology, original sin is the condition of sinfulness that all humans share, which they inherit from the the Fall of Adam and Eve.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
what does it mean a condition of sinfulness, the tendency?
like, if you ask a theosophist, which a I did the other day, he claimed it is not about sexuality or human nature at all. It is the sin of attempting to create a reality without God.
You're confusing interpersonal murder with tribal conflict.
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.
You are juxtaposing murder with killing. Every culture has a strong taboo against unlawful killing, i.e., murder. What counts as murder has changed, but the taboo against murder itself has not.
But doesn't that distinction kind of prove the point? Essentially killing people is fine when society approves and not fine when society doesn't implies that there is no built in norm against killing, its just society's "rules".
Read carefully. Neither me nor bluegatty claimed humans were inherently biased against killing. We claimed that humans were inherently biased against murder - and the universal taboo proves our point.
So your claim is that there is a universal taboo against things that there is a universal taboo against? If your definition of murder is taboo killing, it is very curcular to claim there is a universal taboo against it since by definition it is only murder if there is a taboo. Thus the claim kind of proves the opposite - if you have to limit it to murder then it shows there is no built in bias, as the definition of murder varies from society to society and essentially means killing in a way the society doesn't approve off. There is no possible way for there not to be a bias against murder since if a society is ok with it is ceases to be murder.
To be fair, it doesn't really seem worth mentioning to say humans are inherently biased against murder, which we then agree is a killing against that society's norms. Because the definitions of "murder" vary so hugely, you're essentially just saying "there is a taboo against breaking the arbitrary rules of your social group."
No. What we are saying is that murder is a universal taboo. That the "arbitrary rules" of every social group on earth regulate killing demonstrates exactly that. It is precisely these rules that demonstrate universality. Some societies regulate what you can eat - halal/kosher. Most don't. Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".
> Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".
That's probably a poor choice of example given cannabilism is pretty uniformly condemned.
Even ignoring that, pretty much every society regulates food. The health inspector shutting down resturants is just as much of a regulation as religious rules like kosher & halal (and there is some reason to suspect that the original goal of those rules were at least partially health related and made a lot more practical sense with the technology available 2000 years ago)
Nonetheless, ignoring all that, i still think any self-referential taboo applies in all circumstances, and thus is kind of pointless to discuss.
E.g.
All societies regulate unlawful insider trading. Societies where all insider trading is lawful are still vaccously regulating unlawful insider trading.
I think you are being deliberately obtuse here. Or maybe you are just dumb? Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity. Hence, there is no universality. Your poor attempts at coming up with counterexamples proves my point.
I struggle to think of a society that didn't have some regulation on what you can eat. They almost all have taboos against various meats especially. Can you give me some examples?
It might also depend on mating dynamics. If females mostly prefer to all mate within the top few percent of males in a community, there might not be much to lose if some of the lower status males of them take their chances going on a war party to conquer/steal some females.
This is one theory for crime. You could think of crime as a high variance high risk strategy to improve mating status. You might then expect most criminals to be young men, and for the straight crime rate to be higher than the gay crime rate. And indeed both of these are true.
Technically you're right, because of your use of "only", but it is a fact that a minority of males reproduced, vs a majority of females, with historic ratios of 2:1 to 4:1.
The skew is weaker nowadays, but still more men are childless than women, and it is correlated with wealth to some extent.
Sure but you can advance your genes even more by taking a woman for yourself. And if there are already enough other males to ensure the survival of the females and children then it might be worth some of the males going to war to get some females.
At some point the marginal utility of warring is better for both the individual and the group than the marginal utility of yet another non-reproducing male hanging around "helping" out their kin while eating the resources.
> It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures.
This is not true at all. Not even close. Sneaky backstabbing murder by a group member against another group member in violation of implicit group norms has probably always been "bad", but "go out and murder some random human" was a rite of passage for many cultures, raids against other groups for no reason at all except for fun and maybe women were typical across perhaps the majority of groups for thousands of years, and history is full to the brim of wars prosecuted for no particular reason at all.
This goes well into the historical period and there are doubtless groups today still with the same attitude. Why did the Athenians murder the entire male population of Melos despite their neutrality? Because the strong do what we can while the weak suffer what they must.
You are confusing your modern-day HN-poster social norms with some constant of human nature.
This is simply not true, in time of severe distress and survival pressure humans are clearly capable of mass killings. It happened so many times throughout history. For example a famine forces a human group to take over rivals resources or when defending own group against agressive rivals.
Nobody ever said that these murders are arbitrary. They're the opposite of arbitrary. They're coalition-based murders against men in the opposite tribe. Highly targeted and intentional. Not random.
Lookup the definition of murder because its subtly different from the definition of the word kill. You keep substituting those two words as if they are synonyms and they are not.
You've equated war and murder, but the distinction between the two is one of the brightest lines in many law codes. Murder is a private act committed by private individuals, while war is a public act of friend against foe (distinguished as a public enemy in contrast to private ones).
Further, murder may be restricted to the killing of publicly acknowledged members of the public "friend" group, i.e. citizens, while the killing of outsiders living with the "friend" group, like slaves, is considered something else in the law.
When we codify morals as laws, we usually make a heavy and deliberate distinction between private and public, and between citizen and non-citizen. This is probably related to the nature of a social animal.
In practice, social groups (from tribes to big nations) tend to treat murder very differently from killing in war.
Sufficiently long term, everyone is dead, and I am not sure if we can tell those long-term effects that you foretell from random chance.
The Roman Empire is very dead, but so is the Carthaginian one. Nevertheless, a lot survives from the Roman Empire: basics of law, their alphabet, descendant languages and a certain fame. Quite a lot for famously war-like people.
In comparison, the Carthaginians are gone completely, only fans of history know anything about them. And they are gone because they lost a series of wars all too decisively.
Plenty of people know who Hannibal Barca was. But sure, they probably don't know anything else about Carthage.
Fun fact, the main lesson from that war on the Carthaginian side was that you never let the merchants control the state in a time of war. There was a point where Hannibal was one siege away from erasing Rome from the history books and the leaders in Carthage called him back because sieges are expensive. This decision cost those leaders everything. Most of western history ever since swung on this lone bad decision. Its one of the few true inflection points in history.
I think most people associate the name Hannibal with Silence of the Lambs, maybe 10-15 per cent will know that it was some ancient warrior, perhaps 5 per cent know that it was a Carthaginian general and 2 per cent will know that his surname was Barca. Let's not kid ourselves about actual knowledge of history...
My point wasn't about Hannibal, though. Carthage died in a very different way from Rome: none of its institutions or cultural developments survived, while we still encounter plenty of obviously Roman things in everyday life, starting with the letters we use and names of the months and ending with Latin names for diseases and animals. Pretty much the only thing that survives from Carthage is the faint memory of Hannibal and, for military history buffs, Cannae. Otherwise, the culture has been erased from this world.
The story of the callback is interesting and reminds me of the Mongols suddenly withdrawing from Europe in order to elect the new Khan.
> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder'
The quantity of murders in bad neighborhoods tends to contradict. Even seems like a matter of routine wealth acquisition. Yes, society tries to chase the murderers but, I know the figure for France, even only 40% of murders get solved.
We’ve just built a fragile social construct that not everyone recognizes, against murder, among wealthy societies mostly.
Plenty disagreements everywhere. Under (usually fake) ideas of not enough resources for everyone, so the strongest must survive.
Nazi planned to exterminate several whole ethnicities. If you think it was (or is) unversally accepted as "Bad" -- think again. Most developed countries had Nazi parties, including US and Canada. Some sympathize today. Several Middle East governments publicly claim that murders/rapes/kidnappings of people from another particular country is just and honorable, and will be rewarded in heavens.
Ancient Spartans (reportedly) killed their own weak children. In order to become a citizen every Spartan must have killed a man (non-citizen). It was considered good and just (by citizens).
In many cultures tribal warfare was paramount, even before states (and some remote tribes practice it even today). It was considered good and just.
And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
> And we honor our veterans, and for a good reason. (Without them, we would be captured/killed by other veterans, and honor them anyway). Modern civilizational culture is a thin patina on top of our primal behavior.
This is too cynical a take. "Tribal" warfare (what, Africa, North America?) seems to not be anything compared to civilizational war machines. Evidence shows it instead is two groups shooting arrows at eachother or engaging in non-bladed physical combat - think the PRC vs India in the mountains - with maybe one death. Sort of a mutually accepted way to "blow off steam."
Given that these kinds of battles exist throughout history, alongside catastrophic civilizational ethnocides, we can't assume one or the other is our "core primal behavior." Seems we have a tendency to both, depending on circumstance.
What is universally true though, preceding our capability to organize into warbands, is the fact that our evolutionary advantage is derived from our social nature. We rule the planet because we're so social we're the only species that invented language so as to communicate very complex topics. So in terms of "natural order" for humans, and adaptive behavior, it clearly is cooperation.
Evidence doesn't support your conclusion. Try reading something from Steven Pinker on this topic. Your chance of dying violently in such tribal societies is easily 10x (or more) higher than in modern society.
I was thinking about your last point about why we honor veterans. In the US it’s not really the case that without them we’d be captured or killed. All our conflicts in the last several generations have been us invading or fighting in foreign lands against forces that were not attacking us. All our modern military personnel are willfully employed and well compensated and given lifetime benefits for that.
The US engages in preventive wars, generally. For example, the wars in Korea and Vietnam were ultimately fought to prevent the USSR from becoming more dominant than the USA and ultimately to prevent it from becoming so strong that in an eventual direct confrontation they would be able to cause a lot of destruction in the US. Iran is similar: they seem to want to prevent Iran from getting nukes which could then be used to destroy Israel, which the US considers its protectorate.
But this is a super slippery slope. It’s essentially the same excuse Russia used in Georgia and now Ukraine: they are near neighbors geographically and culturally that must be stopped from joining the enemy alliance in order to prevent the enemy from attacking Russia in turn, which would be much easier should those countries be part of NATO. But where do you stop? Should Cuba be allowed to join Russia military alliance? Should Mexico be allowed to join BRICS? According to US foreign policy, the answer is always no, because of “national security”.
Well, it's much better to be on the invading side though. I've been to a coutry that was on invaded side (Ukraine), and, trust me, you'd always want to be on the invading side. And sometimes all it takes is just one invasion.
But when I said "we honor our veterans" I did not speak of USA, I spoke of any country veterans.
"I mean, the United States practically murdered an entire continent of civilizations and cultures"
You realize that this is largely propaganda and doesn't honestly or accurately describe the actual history right? If a history teacher taught you this, you deserve to get a refund. The actual history is a lot more complex, subtle, nuanced, and driven by biology and trade more than warfare. Most of the deaths were caused by disease and trade drove the warfare in most cases. Also, the warfare was rarely strictly along ethic lines but it was at times.
Perhaps you are thinking of the Spanish or something...
Look up Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act[0], manifest destiny[1] and the American Indian Wars[2]. The Trail of Tears[3]. Here's a whole Wikipedia list for massacres of native Americans[4]. Here's one for native American genocide[5]. The United States had a policy of extermination towards native peoples. Read about the history of boarding schools for native Americans[6]. This isn't propaganda, it's fact.
The narrative you're trying to present here, where the relationship between settlers and natives was mostly peaceful and amicable, is whitewashing history. Sometimes it was, but presenting the exceptions as if they were the rule is deceptive. It's the same kind of gross distortion that led to the "happy slave" narrative, that American slaves for the most part enjoyed slavery because some of them got to live in houses and had families and apparently amicable relationships with their masters. And there were plenty of Nazis who had Jewish friends - Hitler's personal chauffeur was Jewish. But the Holocaust still happened.
Most natives didn't give up their lands willingly, nor did they volunteer for the reservations or boarding schools (which were themselves part of a system of forced cultural assimilation and genocide[7]) because they agreed that the white man's God had granted their lands to them. And even if it is true that disease killed many (sometimes intentionally, as with the case of smallpox blankets) the remainder were still victims of genocide.
You are doing exactly what you are accusing me of. That is, cherrypicking to support a narrative. Maybe you should learn the entire history of the Seminole instead of just one event. Perhaps you would learn that they were paid by European monarchies to attack settlers in an entirely different country, about 500 miles from their lands. You might also learn that after the Trail of Tears, they moved back to Florida when the reservation system was dismantled (a bit before WWI). You would also learn that they built casinos and are one of the wealthiest groups in the US today. Your narrative comes from communist propaganda and in no way describes the majority of their history. You seek to turn them into children with no agency.
PS Those European countries who paid the Seminole to attack the US, they tried the same thing with about 6 other tribes, all of whom turned them down.
PPS The only event that meets the dictionary definition of a genocide in North America was natives killing natives, so that one tribe could control fur trading around the great lakes region and not have to share with other tribes.
PPPS 90% of natives died due to disease, not warfare. Nothing Europeans could do after setting foot in the New World could have prevented that without modern medicine.
Murder is a synonym for kill but you can differentiate between them to make a point that one particular instance of such a caused-death is worse. Is more reprehensible.
The semantics of the word are as fluid as the opinions of those who you are trying to explain the situation to, using such distinctions.
If you think the death was wrong, it is a murder. If you think the death was right, it was a murder, killing, assassination, or any such word. Language is obviously not as black and white as the example I gave, but the point stands.
I agree with your definition but think it’s too narrow, and thus missing the point of the original argument. I don’t agree with lo_zamoysk‘s original point. I think lions CAN murder. I think when they commit cannibalism it’s only when they murder other lions. All other deaths lions cause, lion or other animal, are killings (maybe murder maybe not). But when Lion A kills and eats Lion B, Lion A would have much preferred to get food another way. It’s a lot more likely Lion A is motivated by something other than hunger, like so many of Lion A’s - or even any Lion’s - kills are.
Motivations are required for murder. The word “murder” ascribes motivation to a killing.
Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.
Primates fighting each other is not.
Murdering for acquisition of a resource is short term advantage.
We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.
Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.
I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..