There’s another thread going on about the legality. But I’m more interested in how we as a society would feel about it.
That is, if you knew someone like that, would you feel comfortable hanging out with them? Would you feel okay condemning them? Or should they be social pariahs?
I’d tend more to the latter. If someone kills for self defense, that’s one thing, but I don’t think I can wrap my mind around someone being so angry that logic just goes out the window and they kill. Or, if that’s really how they operate, I don’t think they’re someone who I’d want to be around.
I have to agree with you. While I can understand someone being really, really, REALLY angry finding their spouse in bed with another person, I don’t understand or condone being angry enough to literally kill. How do I know you won’t be made so angry by something I (or my child or my mother or my neighbor) do that you will kill us, too?
Sorry, anger management issues aren’t an excuse. If you can’t not kill someone when you’re mad, then you’re no better than a rabid dog, and you need to be locked up or executed for the protection of the rest of us.
The second I find out about it, I drop them as a friend and acquaintance. If we have a business relationship, I end it unless legal considerations mandate keeping it open; and the second that changes, I’m done with that person.
I see no reason to consider a person who murders a spouse out of jealousy different from one who commits such a crime for, say, insurance reasons.
Really? I’d say it is less bad to kill someone for deliberately doing a bad thing than to kill someone through no fault of their own. If someone would kill their spouse for cheating on them, all you need to do to avoid being murdered by them is not cheat on them, which places no additional burden on you since you shouldn’t be cheating on them anyway.
Well, I’d say that the insurance one is worse, but not by a huge amount. If all it takes for you to snap is to see your spouse cheating, then…I don’t know that that’s someone I’d feel safe with. Either romantically or socially. As WhyNot points out, how do we know that they’re not going to kill when they get into an argument with someone that doesn’t go their way?
Once you kill because someone does something you disagree with, to me, it’s like you’ve broken the social code. You’re not someone who should be acknowledged.
Hardly. Someone willing to kill over jealousy is likely to be willing to kill for all sorts of reasons besides cheating. Maybe he won’t kill you for cheating on him romantically, but that won’t stop him from killing you because you got a promotion at work and he didn’t, or have a better house, or because his dog likes you better than him. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near such a person.
That kind of reminds me of the discussion we had about the woman who was jealous of her friend with long hair and then cut it off. Some dopers thought that the long haired woman shouldn’t have been bragging about it but my response was that if someone talking about having long hair makes you want to cut it off, then you’re a pretty frightening person. Same goes with the jealous lover.
It would be understandable from an evolutionary perspective, but it doesn’t really make sense in a modern civilized society. Even if the guy had just discovered all his kids weren’t his I would suggest that finding a different partner and getting your own kids would be a better long term strategy than killing a woman you’re ostensibly supposed to protect from, well, crazed killers like himself.
I question even the evolutionary fitness argument.
Killing a woman who has cuckolded you, even to the extent of having children by another man, does nothing to retrieve any wasted investment of time and resources. Moreover, it makes it harder for the man to get another mate, as other women are less likely to consider him mating material, on account of being scared of or furious with him.
But it does have a chance of terrorizing them into compliance. And a man who is using violence to get what he wants likely doesn’t plan to ask them if they want to have sex with him; at least not in a pre-state society where raping a woman won’t result in hostile armed people showing up and hauling him away.
From an evolutionary point of view, wouldn’t the man be unsure of whether any of his existing children were really his? Would it make sense to kill them off?
Certainly; male animals do it all the time. Which is no doubt why babies have evolved with a tendency to resemble their father - but not too much, so he can’t be sure they aren’t his.
Not to mention a group fitness argument. Groups with strong cultural enforcement of monogamy leaves people free to do other socially beneficial pursuits, while a tribe with sexual anarchy and no consequences leads to everyone spending lots of time:
Finding people to have sex with, with attendant wasteful displays.
Being cautious and uncertain about the fidelity of your mate and the parenthood of your children.
It’s no coincidence that the most highly civilized cultures, whether monogamous or polygynous, all had strict rules for female fidelity, so that fathers would be relatively sure of the paternity of their children. Sexual anarchy would leave male attention focused elsewhere.
Woo-hoo! More evolutionary just-so stories! Let’s all speculate until someone comes up with a particularly cute story, which we can then declare true because we already know the results! Hey, it works for word origins, why not human behavior?
If you look closely, you see there is actually a lot of variation in hunter-gatherer sexual mores. Different groups have different practices that suit their environment.
Where you start seeing extreme sexual jealousy and tight controls of female sexual behavior is with agriculture. Among small hunter-gatherer bands, paternity usually isn’t a huge deal- most resources are shared and there isn’t a ton of property to hand down. It’s when you have farms that which offspring get which property becomes extremely important. If you don’t inherit the farm, you probably won’t get the chance to reproduce. Not surprisingly, it’s the early agricultural societies that set out the most stringent controls on female sexuality.
Now that few of us farm, people live long enough that inheritance isn’t as important and we expect our children to make their own way in life, controls on female sexuality have loosened. Stuff like virginity until marriage, female seclusion, and legally punishing adultery have fallen out of fashion. Our changing material circumstances have changed our sexual patterns. Now, have we suddenly shrugged off our evolutionary programming? Of course not.
I’ll never understand the rush to ascribe to evolution what is much easier to explain by culture/material circumstances. While there are some basic evolutionary truths (for example, people want their offspring to survive) these manifest themselves quite differently in different environments. Not everything is some quick and cute parallel to what you imagine cave men must have done.
The proper response to finding your partner in bed with someone else lies somewhere between “oops, sorry to intrude, next time I’ll knock” and “you two ARE doing to change those sheets when you’re done, mmkay?”
I won’t go that far. It is not unreasonable to expect your wife or husband to cleave unto you alone. It is not unreasonable to expect that, if she or he finds that to be impossible because of a failing of love or other such ccircumstance, your spouse will man (woman) up and say, “I am leaving, we need to negotiate how we handle the kids and who gets what stuff” before making the beast with two backs with another person.
It IS unreasonable and immoral to react with violence to being cheated on.