Blog #5: Determinist View on Murder

by Midday

To be honest, I was never really interested in crime, gangsters, or murder of any sort, both in fiction and non-fiction. I have studied these topics in class, and have watched/read a few fictional works that focused on these topics as well, but they never really struck me deeply, probably because I was looking more into the unlimited realms of the universe rather than the confines of human society and human life. However, I have always questioned the absolute property of morals and ethics as defined under civil conduct. I would like to focus on the topic of murder, by first starting with the obvious and then investigating the deeper roots of what exactly murder is, and why it is not permitted in society.

I'm not very knowledgeable in law, and law is certainly not something that can readily be understood within a few weeks of shallow research, so I will just borrow a few words from wikipedia. Murder, under American jurisdiction, is defined as the unlawful killing of a human by another human with malice aforethought. Murder is the more severe version of manslaughter, which lacks intention or malice aforethought, and both murder and manslaughter are the major forms of homicide. Satsujin-zai, under Japanese jurisdiction, is defined as the classification of penalty consisting of the killing of a human by another human with the intention to cause death. It is interesting to note here that America is one of the few countries that do not consider euthanasia as murder, while Japan follows majority by declaring it illegal. Also, suicide used to be considered unenforced felony in the United States, but was removed from the classification of crime completely by the 1990s, while in Japan, suicide has been treated as a silent/unwritten illegality that results in no punishment.

There are your definitions. Now, I would like to address the determinist interpretation of murder. I find that from time to time, critical thinkers tend to use determinism as a means of rejecting the idea that punishment for murder is justifiable, and I would like to go about explaining whether that is true or not. Determinists take the following stance. Neither law nor social standards, nor biological human intuition even, are absolute entities that reach a universal consensus. As a matter of fact, humans are seldom ever intuitively against the idea of murder, because killing is a necessary competition within animal nature. What is the objective truth value then in declaring murder as an evil? There is none. Murder is just the name of a particular event that happens when certain situations and circumstances are met. In the universal flow of time, humans are powerless in decision-making, and the whole concept of responsibility and causality become defunct given that human individuals are not granted the power of free will. (Note, this is not an argument about whether free will exists or not, which would spark a whole other topic, but just an explanation of the determinist view. It is nearly impossible to support free will, however, and only one realistic method exists.) Hence, some determinists would claim that law and society are unjust in punishing an event that does not involve any form of responsibility nor goes against human nature.

The greatest flaw in this argument is that the idea of determinism is only being used in a part of the explanation when determinism has to be used for the entire explanation for the argument to pull through. In the case that murder and human nature are subject to determinism, law and society must be subjected under determinism as well. The complete determinist explanation would be that all phenomena are results of determinism, meaning the fact that humans feel the necessity to punish murder is not a matter of responsibility or justification, but just another inevitable entity. Therefore, determinism can never be used to declare that punishing murder is wrong, nor can it be used to describe any phenomenon under an objective right-wrong scale.

However, determinism brings up a significant point; murder is not wrong. It is very true that law and society are not absolute entities. Moreover, as the American law states, law only punishes "unlawful" killings, meaning law does not deny the idea of killing in every respect. The idea of murder exists as a major entity because humans are prone to committing it, easily pictured by the prevalence of warfare. The point I am trying to get across here, is that when you see some major criminal of mass murder, do not just end your thoughts thinking what a bad person he/she is or how sad it was for the people involved. Criminals are humans, much like we all are, and we all have a chance of standing in his/her position. Right or wrong only comes into play within the realms of civil conduct. Think about how that criminal was raised or developed to become a criminal, and blame not only the criminal but the environment. I believe that kind of critical thinking is what is necessary for the overall progress of civil ethics and morals.