For people who are convinced we are meat-machines: why is killing bad?

Great Debates
1

From the replies in this thread, it seems many on this board are convinced that we are just meat machines and when we die that is the end of it.

If that is the case, then why is it bad to kill someone? They will just cease to exist, but so what? Who cares?

It is just one more meat machine that stopped working.

I understand that societies had to instill in people the idea of “good” and “bad” (and things like, e.g., killing were “bad”) for their own survival. I also understand that, through evolution, we might have acquired traits like empathy that make it less likely for us to kill someone.

However, for the rational, thinking people of this board who are convinced we are mere meat machines, what is the reasoning behind thinking that killing someone is bad?

I am not trying to imply that anyone is wrong in their beliefs. I am simply curious as to the kind of reasoning that has to go into making people believe that killing is bad, if they believe that we are merely meat machines.

For example, people who believe in a Christian-type God, believe killing is bad because 1) God says so, and 2) You will burn in hell forever if you kill someone (which is somewhat of a bad thing)

On the other hand, for someone who is convinced that there is no God and that we are merely meat machines, beyond the possible punishment if you get caught (and let’s say for the sake of argument that you would not get caught), it’s hard to come up with rational reasons for not killing someone if it benefits you. I’m not referring to “societal” reasons, but to “personal” reasons, i.e. reasons that have to do with why you personally wouldn’t do it.
FTR, I’m not convinced either way on whether we are simply meat machines.

2

The fact that we only get one chance at life is exactly why murder (not all killing is murder) is bad.

If the Christian world-view were true, then killing someone wouldn’t matter much: if they go to Heaven, then you’ve done them a favour, and even if they go to Hell, their time on Earth was insignificant compared to the infinity of time they will spend in the afterlife, so who cares? In fact, in the case of Roman Catholicism, the nicest thing you could do to a person is to kill them immediately after they have taken confession and said their Hail Mary’s or whatever, but before they have had a chance to sin again, because that would maximize their chance of getting into Heaven.

But if it is true that a single life on Earth is all their is to it, then by killing a person you (as Clint Eastwood put it) take away everything that they are, and everything they will ever be. That’s pretty bad.

We are not “just” meat machines. We are highly sophisticated meat machines, capable of feeling love and joy and pain and grief. Just because our consciousness (“soul”, if you will) does not go on after our body stops moving, that does not mean we do not deserve a chance at living our lives.

Well, the person you killed cares, presumably, in his final seconds as he realises he’ll never see his children smile at him again. His family and loved ones care. The rest of us care as well, because we don’t want to be killed either.

Human life has value as an end in itself. That’s all there is to it, really. You don’t need to believe in God or an Afterlife to believe in that.

I certainly hope that those are not the only reasons why they refrain from killing. Suppose God spoke to you and told you that He had granted you a special dispensation from the Fifth Commandment, would you go on a killing spree? Or would you recognize that others have a right to life just as you have, and God’s words merely affirm that fact?

Because I am not a sociopath. And because I believe in the Golden Rule: do not do unto others which you would not want to have done unto you. Which is neither a Christian nor an inherently religious concept.

3

I’m kinda frightened of anyone who thinks that killing is bad only because god says so. What happens if you wake up tomorrow and think god said something else? It’s as though people have no innate sense of morality themselves. Maybe that is why it’s so easy to convince people to do horrible things.

Also, for those who believe in afterlife, isn’t it easier to contemplate killing someone (or yourself) if you think they will be better off in heaven?

But, back to the OP question. I don’t kill people because it is against my moral beliefs, it is against the law, and it is messy.

Where does my personal sense of morals come from? A combination of my family, the social contract, self preservation, and good sense (I don’t want you to kill me, so I don’t condone me killing you). Murder is universally prohibited by social norms and law, even in places without the bible, so I expect that the 10 commandments is not the source of the prohibition.

4

It’s a social contract. I won’t kill you if you agree not to kill me. Without that most basic of contracts, society would be unworkable. No society = no humans.

5

First, self interest. Society is simply better for everybody if we don’t kill each other.

Second, outside of sociopaths, people care about one another. Forbidding murder increases the surviviability of friends and relatives. It also increases the chance of having friends; I imagine it would be hard to make friends if you regard everyone else as either potiential prey or a potential assassin.

Third, the distinction between personal and social reasons for not killing is largely illusionary; we are all part of society, and anything that hurts it tends to hurt us.

Fourth, as Walton Firm said, if when we die we are gone then killing is an act of significant, irretrievable harm. If you believe in souls, it’s more like vandalism. I’ve long thought that if someone really believes in the Christian worldview, the most moral act is genocide. After all, you send the maximum number of people to heaven/hell as they deserve, and eliminate the trauma to surviving friends and relatives by making sure there aren’t any.

6

Other people care. On a basic level, my children are the means by which I pass on my genes, so I definitely care about losing them. My children have a better chance of surviving if their mother survives, so I defintely care about losing her. I and my family will have a better chance of survival if my extended family / tribe survive, so I care about losing them. Etc.

John Mace’s Social Contract is another good way of looking at it.

7

Why is killing bad? It isn’t, always. Under those circumstances where it is bad, it is because it is a violation of the social contract of which the killer is a part. Killing “outsiders” has been okay through much of human history.

8

We’re not mere meat machines. We’re unbelievably complex, subtle, thinking, feeling, perceiving, creating beings. We are products of billions of years of evolution and decades of nurturing, teaching and training from parents, friends, family and community, and inheritors of the accumulated culture and understanding of many millenia of human history. We are each utterly unique in our thoughts, experiences, and gifts. And each of us is staggeringly lucky to be here and has only a short window of time to offer our contributions, and enjoy and understand ourselves and our universe. Each of us is deeply enmeshed in a wide network of friends, family, and social connections and is utterly irreplacable in that role. The loss of any one of us will likely cause grief and despair in at least a few others (perhaps many) and will have a ripple effect in our community. We are all that - and when we are gone, we will never return.

9

Perhaps, if you could just come to consider them as meat machines…
Oh…wait…

10

Who do you mean when you refer to each of us? Posters on this board? Humankind in general?

11

I’m against theft. Taking someone’s life before they are willing to give it up is the ultimate theft. They aren’t done with it yet–it’s not mine to use.

However, I am not against the taking of someone’s life at their request. I support assisted suicide for humans and feel it is a horrible injustice that we are willing to put down suffering animals but are frequently unwilling to follow someone’s wishes regarding euthanasia.

12

What a misanthrope. Humankind in general. Obviously some people are subtler than others.

13

If someone were to kill a friend of mine, I would obviously be very upset. Thus, I do not kill others because it would make their friends and family sad.

What if someone has no family or friends? I’m still not going to kill them just because it might be good for me. That person has as much right to live as I do, and I certainly don’t want to be killed.

14

But, however sophisticated we are, we are still machines (if we take the mechanistic view of things), so all our “feelings” (love, joy, pain) are just some electrical signals flowing around in a bag of meat.

Why do we care that some electrical signals flowing around in a bag of meat stop flowing, and the bag of meat starts disintegrating?

Again, I myself am an agnostic: I’m not convinced either way whether there is a “soul” that exists independently from the body, or whether the soul (or consciousness) is an epiphenomenon of our material body.

So, I’m not saying that I believe either way. However, it seems to me that someone who does take a purely mechanistic view of the world should not care about anyone’s feelings, since they are just electrical signals in a meat computer.

Of course people do care, and that is most probably due to the fact that millions of years of evolution and many years of social upbringing have made us care, but, again, rationally it seems that someone who is 100% convinced about the mechanistic view of the world should not care what types of electrical signals run through the meat mass next to him.

And this should be even more the case with the newest results from neurophysiology (or whatever the field is), that show that there really is no “self”, it is just an illusion created by a bunch of independent sub-processes running in the brain.

So, with this theory, there really isn’t any one “there” to feel the pain, or lose their “self” if they are killed. It’s just some independent sub-processes in the brain that stop functioning. So what?

(I do feel like there is a “me” typing this message, and I do feel pain when I am hurt. I’m just reporting that the latest research shows that the “self” is an illusion)

Of course, if you use this as an axiom of life, then fine, no one can argue with that. However, under a purely mechanistic view of the world, WHY does human life have value as an end to itself?

15

Why would you say misanthrope? I only asked because your generalizations don’t apply to all people.

16

Maybe a small example would help.

If you could enter a virtual-reality video game (like in Total Recall), and you were 100% convinced that one of the characters in the video game is just a string of 1’s and 0’s (i.e. there is no human player behind this character, he exists entirely within the video game and is only made up of computer code), would you care if he “dies”?
A bunch of code will stop running. So what?

On the other hand, if you know that another character in this video game is just the avatar of a real human (your friend in real lilfe) who is just playing the game like you, and if you know that whatever pain this character feels will also be felt by your friend, wouldn’t you think twice before inflicting pain on this character?

So, knowing whether someone’s consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the specific world you find yourself immersed in, or whether it exists external to that world should change how you feel about the fate of that character.

17

There you go with that word “just” again, in an otherwise correct sentence. The Mona Lisa is not “just” a bunch of paint on some canvas, even though if you took the paint and the canvas away there would be nothing left. Your thoughts and feelings can be explained in terms of chemicals and electrical signals, but that doesn’t mean they are not real.

Anyway, if we accept that God exists and that people have immortal souls, why does that suddenly make murder wrong if it otherwise isn’t? After all, a human body is “just” the meat vehicle that a soul inhabits for a while, right?

Well, it seems that those of us who do admit to taking a purely mechanistic view of the world, pretty uniformly disagree with you.

Why not?

Just because something can be broken up into parts, that does not mean that it does not exist or that it is just an illusion. Would you say that cars do not really exist because they can be broken down into engine, transmission, wheels etc?

Axiom is pretty close to the truth, I guess. Upbringing, social conditioning and evolutionary instincts certainly play a part. That doesn’t make it irrational. If you keep asking “why?” long enough, you’ll always run into axioms. As long as following those axioms leads to a society that is pleasant to live in, it is rational to follow them. And of course, religious commandments are just another way of justifying those same axioms.

18

Depends on how complex that string of 1’s and 0’s is. All of today’s video games are very simple, and any apparent intelligence or feelings on the part of the characters is completely illusionary. However, if the video game character was complex enough to hold its own in an intelligent conversation, then I might feel bad about ending its “life” or doing things that might cause it (simulated) pain.

Go read The mind’s I by Hofstadter and Dennett. Except that I suspect you have already done so.

19

A few points. First, you’re confusing understanding with sociopathy. Just because we understand something about how the brain works does not make feelings imaginary; just because I have some knowledge about how someone else’s brain works on a biological level doesn’t mean they are expendable. If souls existed, what makes you think they would be any less mechanistic anyway ? Our minds are not “just” electrochemical impulses; they are a massive, ultracomplex system of impulses.

Second ,saying people are “just” meat machines is kind of silly; we can’t build one, after all. Our bodies may be machines, but they are more sophisticated machines than we can build. Our brains may computers, but they are more complex than any we can make.

Third, when you closely enough at anything, it loses it’s larger context and overarching structure. All the studies of consciousness you mention show is that there is no “consciousness center” in the brain; since the mind is distributed throughout the brain and since it’s internal impulses/processing isn’t all that fast, a close enough look at any mental process will cause it to vanish. If the self/consciousness level of the mind takes, say, 1 second to perform an operation, a .1 second-scale analysis of the brain’s processes will make it appear to vanish.

By the same token, if you are looking at the brain at the cell/chemical level, it doesn’t look much like mind because you’re too close. A painting doesn’t look much like the Mona Lisa from .001 millimeter away either.

20

With the exception of the braindead, they do, except for the one where I said “likely”