When did mankind decide it was wrong to kill another person

Anyway, getting back to the OP, all the hunter-gatherer societies I know of have some sort of prohibition against random killing. It doesn’t usually take the specific form of “Murder is a sin”, usually it’s more akin to “If you kill Bob, Bob’s brother gets to kill you if he finds you at any time in the next 12 months, and if you kill Bob’s brother for trying, you will be banished form the tribe forever.” So the general principle that killing is to be deterred almost certainly predates humanity.

However that doesn’t necessarily correlate to “killing is wrong”. Even looking at the earliest Semitic laws, it;s not immediately clear that those people considered killing to be wrong per se. Rather it seems that the *law *said that killing was wrong, which is a very different thing. The law also said that acts such as wearing poly-cotton shirts are wrong and punishable by death, and I doubt that anybody would have considered that to be inherently “wrong” as opposed to illegal.

The idea that murder is inherently wrong/immoral rather than simply illegal may actually be quite a recent concept, and by recent I mean post-reformation. As other have noted, prior to that the list of valid excuses for casual killing was astonishingly high: trespass, robbery, duels, honour killings associated with such petty acts as dating someone without parental consent or unpaid debts, petty theft. All these things were grounds for literally beating someone to death with no social repercussions and nobody seems to have seen any great problem with any of this.

For my two cents, I think that what we should be looking for in order to answer the question, is the first written record of someone speaking for society generally expressing the view that killing should be the last resort, as opposed to be the *favoured *punishment for multiple petty crimes. And when I say “speaking for society” I mean popular philosophers or judges, as opposed to radicals or leaders of small sects. This in itself is a pretty ambiguous divide, but I think it’s important to separate out a sect of 20 people living Mongolia 700 years ago from the bulk of Chinese society at the time.

I don’t understand the question. At what point would you say, “OK, now man is against murder” Is that one person? A hundred? Half of humanity? By some standards, humans are not yet against murder, considering that we do it so frequently.

I’m not sure we can make that connection. Murder may have been illegal, but does that really equate to people deciding it was wrong, as opposed to simply being unlawful?

In the modern developed world, for example, speeding in your car is illegal, but very few, if any, people actually believe that it is wrong, which is why every driver on the road routinely speeds when they think they can get away with it. I suspect that the attitude of many ancient societies towards murder was very similar. The act of killing wasn’t inherently wrong, which is why people were prepared to kill at the drop of a hat, and prepared to pay money to watch other people being forced to kill one another. The act of killing as simply illegal, just as speeding is illegal.

Of course I could be wrong, but from my reading it seems that there is a fundamental difference in the modern and ancient attitudes towards killing. The modern attitude is that killing is the final option and ultimate punishment and something to be avoided in all but the most extreme situations. The ancient attitude seems to have been that killing was not just acceptable, but enjoyable and desirable in many cases, and the laws against murder were in place to stop people from doing something that they fundamentaly *wanted *to do.

I see the same basic attitude today in places like New Guinea, where murder is illegal and punished harshly precisely because the people don’t consider it to be wrong at all, and in fact consider killing people to be a desirable thing. To me that’s very different to the modern attitude that killing is *inherently *wrong rather than simply illegal.

This, in addition to the bit about dueling over points of honor and the like, is a useful way to see where people’s thinking changed. Again, during Ancient Rome, people certainly valued their own lives – the life of someone else on the other hand … maybe not so much.

I’ve always had the theory (and therefore no citations,) that the transition may have come with the dying of the US’s Old West gunslinger culture. As sanitation and medical techniques improved, and knowledge of medial processes were communicated far and wide, and medicines were being manufactured, not just collected plants and “I hope this bleeding cures the fever,” people began to live longer, and life began to be less cheap. People were no longer hung for horse stealing – why, I don’t know, it just seemed like a prison sentence was more just.

Heck, maybe it never really happened until antibiotics were in common use. When humans no longer died from random environmental circumstances, it just seemed incredibly unjust to take their life. Conversely, harkening back to ancient Rome, if someone can die for a random unknown cause, what difference does it make if they die for entertainment?

[EDIT]

And also what you wrote while I was typing :wink:

I can’t remember the exact date, but I do remember it was a Tuesday.

Thou shall not kill is pretty unambiguous in the bible. That is from the old testament so the basic idea is pretty old.

Blake to comment on you point about killing being phased out as punishment for petty crimes. I think that this has more to do with society becoming affluent and could start to afford things like prisons. Jails and prisons are expensive you need a building and guards.

[moderating]
I don’t see how anyone could possibly make a GQ answer to this, so it’s off to IMHO for opinions.
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[Moderator Note]
Political potshots are not allowed in GQ (this thread isn’t in GQ anymore, but it was when you posted that). Do not do this again.
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Endo killing (within your tribe) has probably been proscribed since there were tribes. Exo killing is still alive and well.

  1. No such passage ever appears in the Bible, Old Testament or New.

  2. As I already noted, the injunction against** murder** sits alongside equally unambiguous injunctions against eating pork, wearing cotton coats with woolen linings and allowing menstruating women to touch wine jars. Do you also conclude that humanity finds all those things to be inherently wrong? Or is this perhaps evidence that these laws were designed to prohibit things that people were routinely doing because they didn’t consider them to be inherently wrong?

That might make sense, except that we don’t punish any of those crimes with imprisonment today. We punish them with fines or social ostracisation. When was the last time you heard of someone being jailed for calling someone else a coward?

Really? A quick online search seems to have it in the King James Version of the bible.

Aaaahh, A King James literalist. Then you must also believe that Moses had horns. Right?

I’ve read that “Thou shalt not kill,” would be more properly translated as “Don’t commit murder.” After all, the following verses go on to command the death penalty for a long list of offenses.

Yes.

This distinction between murder and kill is pedantic to the point of loosing sight of the question. If murder and kill are separate then I don’t think that even now the idea that killing is wrong has much widespread hold in human race. Most people believe that killing in self defense in not morally wrong. Even the death penalty is thought to be appropriate in a large portion of the world.

I question the idea that something would have been coded into law as wrong if it were not at one time thought immoral. What is law but the encoding of moral rules everyone has to live by?

No, it’s not “pedantic to the point of LOSING sight of the question.” It’s pointing out that the question itself contains an incorrect assumption – that mankind considers killing wrong. There are a mere handful of people who actually believe that; the majority find certain killings wrong, others necessary, and some downright heroic.

If we acknowledge that our ancestors felt the same way, and that “thou shalt not kill” is a miserable rendering of the Mosaic commandment not to commit murder, we prune away some of the sheer fantasy that covers up the real question – “when and how did certain killings become proscribed, and how have those classes changed?”

It seems likely to me that there was never a time when humans did not live in groups, and never a time when members of the group did not prefer safety within that group – thinking, as tim-n-va suggests, “I’m next.” The entire history of criminal law is the pursuit and preservation of civil order (if you stretch “civil” to embrace the earliest tribes). It’s always been perfectly okay to kill some people – and at times, “some people” included a lot more people than it does today: there were times and places in recorded history when no moral opprobrium attached to a strong man (with connections to other strong men) killing anyone who tried to keep his goods to himself. Certainly killing outsiders was not a problem; our definition of “outsider” has changed, but this is only partly due to moral teaching – it’s also a fact that more of us are outsiders than ever before, and society can no longer afford to only protect “the people that count.”