Could a society ever exist that considers indiscriminate killing socially acceptable? [closed]

Question

This isn't for anything that I'm working on, but the idea just came to me. By completely unjustified I mean the random killing of other people, though my question pertains mostly to a society tolerant of all kinds of murder.

Edit for clarification: Unjustified was probably the wrong word. I meant more like completely indiscriminate killing; like just walking down the street, shooting someone, and that being seen as totally okay in this society (think The Purge, but forever and not written by fools). The reflexive answer is that it would clearly collapse, but maybe there is a way it wouldn't? My mistake for not making that more clear from the start.

Answer 1

Let's try to avoid giving sermons and moralizing about real world politics and actually address the question.

Starting with the premise. This is a society in which killing is an accepted act. I don't think that means that "people kill whenever, for whatever reason", but that "when people feel the desire to, it is acceptable for them to kill." So this seems more "my boss tried to make me work unpaid overtime fixing his mistakes, so I killed him", and less "I was bored so I shot the mailman."

The asker might posit "but I said all killing should be acceptable!" And there's the rub: if you kill the mailman for no reason, then their family is probably likely to kill you, and now for much better reason. The law of self interest makes these kinds of reckless killings unwise (even if society could be convinced to call the caprice justified). Obviously you can write a society where all impulse killings are considered acceptable (legally and culturally), but we can conclude that such a society would not long persist without very high tech level supporting extreme population replenishment and infrastructure rebuilding. I suppose it might also need no outside threats. This would be horrific, but could certainly be the setting for some kind of sci-fi story.

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So what does the society that sees all killing as acceptable, but can still maintain itself look like? I think these are the more interesting options for world building.

The key here is that all killing is acceptable, but that killing need not be the only desired or chosen outcome of confrontations.

In these worlds, perhaps killing when angry is commonplace (even if the person who made you angry wasn't at fault). We might overhear on a street corner two people talking about a recent occurence in which an embezzling employee was keelhauled in front of the whole office and humiliated by their boss as they were fired. "Of course," they might say, "the employee was in the wrong for stealing from the company. But when their boss humiliated them that way, you couldn't be surprised that the employee would get furious and rage-kill them. Now they'll have to be careful or make some kind of restitution to their boss' family if they don't want to be revenged upon." This would create a society with heavy cultural emphasis on calmness. Peacefulness. Empathy. The people would be very careful not to insult someone else's honour, hurt their feelings, or disrespect them; if they didn't, the consequences could be extremely dire. I could see this developing into a society that genuinely cared deeply about each other's feelings, not only for self interest! But the dichotomy of what happens when the feel-good hug-circle got mad would make for very interesting story telling.

Another society might accept fights to the death (whether as duels or ambushes or family bloodfeuds) as perfectly logical and legitimate ways to settle grievances, whether over honour, restitution for crimes/wrongings, or even tests of the truth, eg the medieval trope of "trial by combat". Again, an outsider observer could be perplexed to see how nonchalantly people accept the death of one of their friends for something like "doubting that John actually had caught a fish quite that big", or they could inadvertently find themselves one of the promised combatants (or targets) of someone's (societally) rightful ire for saying that their soup was too salt.

These are the sorts of worlds where widespread killing could be accepted, without society immediately collapsing. The important part is that although killing is fine and dandy, we're still dealing with people that are feeling and/or self interested. Just because they could kill anyone, doesn't mean that they suddenly want to do so. And even if they did, they might just think about what could happen to them. Hell, there might even be some kind of adulthood initiation process designed to find the truly sociopathic that would revel in being law-exempt serial killers, and then killing them. Or maybe giving them legally, culturally, or religiously important jobs.

Answer 2

A timely musing. One could make the case that America is such a society.

America is a democracy. As a society, together we choose the rules we live with.

We have repeatedly chosen to live with rules that enable individuals to kill many strangers for no particular reason. People are sad, but we tolerate it. It is the American way.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/america-gun-violence-problem/story?id=79222948

Please: I do not put this forward to read passionate gun debates. Those have their place; not here. I put this idea out because fiction is good for social commentary, and permits a vantagepoint less contaminated by reality and that will not attract unwanted attention from concrete thinkers and rabid partisans.

Maybe INPU is thinking of writing a story. It could be a good story.

Answer 3

Did you know that the English word "thug" comes from a very spiritualized people, that thought killing random people would prevent the destruction of mankind by a Goddess?

The Thuggee were some people in India who worshiped Kali, a goddess who rules - among other things - death. They would approach strangers, gain their trust for a while and them kill them methodically. From the article on Wikipedia about Thug View

Thugs considered themselves to be the children of Kali, having been created from her sweat. (...) According to colonial sources, Thugs believed that they played a positive role in saving human lives. Without the Thugs' sacred service, Kali might destroy all mankind.

Think of that next time you see a post in social media with the hashtag #thuglife.

Do notice that this view above is controversial and some historians think that the concept of Thuggee was an invention of the British empire. But there you have it.

Ok, so there is (some) justification for these murders here. But it depends on what you understand by justification. "We kill because that's what we do" has a very Aperture Science vibe to it ("🎵 we do what we must because we can, for the good of all of us except the ones who are dead").

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On another note, in many societies were there were slaves (specially the most recent cases in our history, less than 200 years ago), slave owners could and sometimes would kill their slaves on a whim and without consequences, because people were seen as property.

Answer 4

Are we talking about a human society?

In this case probably not. Humans do not bear many children. Depending on how "normal" you want murder to be I would argue that this would be a problem. In order for something to not have people question it and considering it as normal it needs to happen at least somewhat frequently. Imagine someone doing pushups in the supermarket. Nothing wrong with it but it is not normal. Why not? Probably because you do not really see people doing it other than that "weird guy". Now if killing was "too normal" your population would shrink instead of grow.

Another Problem is that humanity is focused on long term relationships. The fact that the word "Icebreaker" even exists means that there is some sort of barrier when having the first conversation. However when we are past that point we may form lifelong friendships or relationships and those people start becoming important for us. Typically when we want to do something that involves multiple people we choose friends instead of strangers. Because of that if someone kills a friend of you, you won't be happy. You lost something important.

Last, I want to touch on the topic that humanity is vengeful. If someone takes something important from you, you may want to kill that person, especially if it's legal. The combination of focus on long term relationships and vengeance lead to a vicious killing cycle. Pair that with a low birth rate and your society would either die out or make killing illegal or at least not morally acceptable.

But suppose our society is not human, could it then work?

Meet the swarm!

A swarmling typically lives a short life and is not scared to either die or deliver death. It is seen as something normal, something that just happens in their society.

A swarmling bears many children, hundreds, maybe thousands. This also means they cannot care for children like we humans do. Typically children stop being in touch with their parents once they can care for themselves. If a swarmling loses a child they might not even notice. Overall they value the community higher than the individual. They do not value the person that they spent the entire week with higher than the person they have not met yet. If you want to talk, you talk to a stranger. If you want to drink, you drink with a stranger. If you need help, a stranger helps you.

As for vengeance? Sure, they can be vengeful. Hard to justify much killing going on if you take away the concept of repaying someone who has wronged you and remember, we want killing to be normal.

What could a swarmling day look like?

Jeffs children moved out last week, so there is no real reason anymore to stay with his wife. He is moving out but it does take a while to move his stuff from one location to another. As he drives to his new home 7 killings occur. Nothing unusual. He gets there, looks around, chooses the swarmling that looks the least occupied and asks for help moving stuff upstairs. They are instantly friendly with each other and talk about what is going on in their lifes. Jeff wants to drink in the evening and asks the swarmling to come along. They agree to it. Once downstairs another swarmling comes by and shoots this one. Jeff starts talking to the new swarmling and learns that he had a bad week and needed to get it out of his system. No other reason, he chose a victim randomly. Understandable. Jeff is reminded that life is short and should be lived to the fullest. He also just lost his drinking buddy so he asks the new swarmling to come along. He most likely needs it as he has been having a bad week. They drink and talk about their lifes then never meet again.

Answer 5

There was a time in the USA past when a black man could be lynched for having the audacity of having black skin and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were plenty of trials for lynching where the murders were let go with little more justification then "look, his skin is too dark a color." Without a doubt there were times when one could reasonable expect to get away with murder in the USA, at least in the south.

This was in no way limited to the USA, or to people with black skin. Rather it was black people in pre civil rights eras of the USA, the Dalite in Hinduism, peasants in a feudal system, or slaves across a multitude of countries it all boils down to the same thing in the end. There is an undeniable history of certain minority groups being labeled as unclean, undesirable, or generally undeserving of basic civil rights.

There have also been similar cases for certain groups to be made out to be superiors or more 'moral' by virtue of their birth, or wealth, alone. The result was that if the supposedly 'better' group of folks choose to kill one of their 'lessers', well that is their right is it not? A slave owner has the right to whip his slave to death if that slave has the audacity of not working up to the owners unreasonably high standard. If a Dalite is murdered by a Brahmin well it's no lose, Dalite after all brought the punishment of their birth on themselves in a past life so they probably deserved it. If a Peasant was killed by a noble is a king really going to bother to have someone investigate?

The point is it's pretty well documented in human history that we have a tendency to create cast systems that are uneven. An action that would be deemed horrible and unjust if inflicted by a member of group A onto group B may be deemed moral and right if group B does it to group A. It's a terrible mindset, but sadly a common one.

So yes, I think we have plenty of history saying an 'unjust' murder can be accepted, if inflicted upon the right group of undesirables. Though of course the society wouldn't call the murder unjust, it's completely just when we do it, it's only unjust when others do it to us you see.

Answer 6

Yes and no.

First, the use of the word Murder assumes an unjustified killing. It is already assuming a moral stance.

If you mean unjustified by your own code of ethics. Sure. Why not? Not everyone has the same code of ethics.

If you mean, unjustified by the society in question, no. That society has norms and is not enforcing them. That society is in breakdown at that point.

It is also possible that a society might have multiple different norms (some may even seem internally inconsistent).

Take 4 examples from the US:

1. Some people think that unborn infants should never be killed but rapists and murderers should.
2. Some people think that its OK to kill unborn infants but rapists and murders should be let go so they can do it again.
3. Some people think "kill everyone and let [deity of choice] sort it out."
4. Some people are against killing anyone or anything (except plants, they hate plants).

There are also many in the US that don't ascribe to any of those 4.

So, in the US, using the above info, tell me what an unjustified killing even is....

Answer 7

Our society, today, think it unjustifiable, and this echoes in most of the answers presented here. I find those answers helpful in identifying the "problems" to solve, but disappointing in stopping at those problems.

What are the impediments?

Firstly, as mentioned, murders are unacceptable because they are by definition unacceptable. I side with @hszmv and will therefore use killing rather than murder. A killing is the act of killing someone intentionally^1 , whether lawful or not. An unlawful killing is a murder.

There are many instances of sanctioned killings today or in our past. The death penalty, soldiers killing other soldiers, policemen killing criminals, are all examples of such now. In the past, we also had duels to the death, owners killing slaves, etc...

Hence, there's definitely room for maneuver here.

Secondly, there's the problem of acceptance, and specifically of the just-killed person's friends and family accepting their death. Without acceptance comes retribution and an endless cycle of violence, or at least dreams of such if the power disparity is great.

In the above examples, whilst most killings are sanctioned by the society, the family or friends of the people killed mostly do not accept their death. There is one exception: duels of honor. When gentlemen dueled, and one died, whether by accident (in a duel to first blood) or by design (in a duel to death), the family of the deceased accepted their death to some extent. They were unlikely to ever be friendly again with the other party, but they were also unlikely to seek retribution.

The key here is to find a virtue that is more valuable than life.

In duels of honor, that virtue is honor. Living dishonorably would bring shame to the person, and by extension their family and friends, hence they would duel, and either prove their honor, or cleanse it, somehow, with their death.

Thirdly, there's frequency. If everybody keeps shooting everyone, population dwindles until noone's left. For a society to survive, you need population to at least maintain itself, meaning that in average an individual should kill strictly less than half the number of children they had and who died of natural/accidental causes well into adulthood.

Assuming a modern society, with few deaths from natural/accidental causes, it's essentially half the number of children they had minus one. So a couple with two children cannot kill anyone, while a couple with three can kill one other person (but not one each). One other person, in their entire lifetime. More children, more leeway.

^1 The technical term homicide covers both intentional and unintentional killings, so in terms of scope all murders are killings, all killings are homicides, but not the other way around.

Intermezzo

Having a specific cast (warrior, priests, nobles) have the right to kill indiscriminately a specific cast (other warriors, pariahs, lessers) is arguably easier, but where is the fun in easy?

What kind of society would that be?

Or why would anyone accept the death of their beloved?

Several potential ideas:

• A society idolizing Luck, for example. Those who get shot at random are unlucky, and would have brought their unluck onto their family and friends. It's better that way.
• A society idolizing Honor. In this case, rather than "random" shooting, I would rather see "random" dueling.
• A society idolizing Death. This world is a purgatory, those who die young are the lucky ones, freed from their burdens! (But those who commit suicide are cowards, doomed to hell)
• A society idolizing Parsimony; I'll detail it below.

The most difficult thing, in any of the above, is really the frequency aspect. Why would a person who has lived a peaceful life for 30 years kill one other, then live peacefully for another 40 years until their death? It could be justified for an individual, but it seems hard to justify that every person would behave so, with a "sprinkling" of one/two killings in their life.

And thus I submit a society either overly conscious of its impact of the environment, or living with strictly finite resources. The number of individuals in the society is capped by law for each district. Yet, at the same time, nobody could agree on criteria to cull the excess: killing the old means losing wisdom, killing a certain group is discrimination, ... and thus it was decided to leave it to a mixture of fate and common sense.

Every week, in every district, a lottery takes place, designating a number of random adults -- based on excess -- for the culling. They are given a one-time license to kill. Some will choose to kill themselves, others will take the opportunity to kill a person they loathe, most find it easier to kill a stranger they never heard of, and whose family and friends they won't have the suffer the grief of. Motives are not questioned by authorities, only timeliness. They must be done before the next round of lottery.

It's hard to lose a friend, or a family member, to the culling. But it's necessary, lest we run out of resources and every body dies. So someone has to die. And it's frankly egoistically shameful to begrudge the death of your friend and wish it had been someone else.

It's all for the greater good.

Answer 8

Sure

Killing is frowned upon because people generally end up dead afterwards, however if being dead weren't a permanent condition and were trivially curable, I don't see a reason why you couldn't have a functioning society.

For example, there are plenty of video games that have perfectly serviceable MMO societies where players can generally kill eachother with little or no consequence if they feel like it. Sure, games often introduce loss upon death to incentivize certain styles of play, and it's usually impolite to go around killing people randomly, but killing someone in a video game doesn't have the consequences that it does "IRL".

In a more real-world context, something similar would require a bit of sci-fi handwavery akin to the "stacks" from Altered Carbon which house the human's consciousness and can be plugged into bodies at will. In this setting, injuring and "killing" people's bodies is frowned upon in the same way as vandalism or destroying someone's property is, but unless brought to a "true death" via destruction of the "stack", it's not really murder.

Answer 9

No.

For a semantical reason. By it's very definition, Murder is Unjustified Homicide.

Now on it's face, that might seem like it's a tautology, but Homicide is not in and itself a crime. Homicide merely means a human kills another human. There are several instances where this occurs under justified circumstances (killing in self-defense, state sanctioned death penalties, killing of enemy combatants in war, ect.).

This is why the police that investigates dead people is a "Homicide Unit" and not "The Murder Police" because there could be a dead person who's a victim of a homicide, but that homicide is justified and thus not Murder.

So, while a society may have a different legal definition of what homicides are justifiable vs. that which not, but the definition of Murder will always cover the subset of Homicides which are considered unjustified under the law.

Answer 10

It might not collapse.

But only if the would-be indiscriminate killers grow keenly aware that there is no prohibition on killing them and so the prohibition against killing grows up again, as an inhibition against inspiring people to kill you.

Even the most powerful of killers has to sleep some time, and a culture with no prohibition against killing certainly has no prohibition against killing in revenge.

Answer 11

Read "The Algebraist" by Iain M. Banks. One of the races depicted has enormously long life and produces enormous numbers of children, who take an enormous time to reach maturity. They consider their own children to be almost valueless (there are so many) and killing of them for any reason or none is not a moral problem. Their value increases as they reach maturity, and killing an adult is considered a heinous crime.

Answer 12

The Viking Saga, Njal's Saga, describes the society in Iceland where killing happened often without notice. Similarly, Eric's Saga describes him killing someone else and needing to have a fighting force around him to protect him from the relatives of the man he killed. In both cases, the society didn't have strong cohesion. People lived quite a distance away from each other. There were no police, or courts. The only justice that could take action was the annual gathering which could banish someone from the island. (Which is why Eric sailed to Greenland.) But even that banishment was based on allowing anyone else to kill the banished person if found on the island. The other solution was to pay some set amount of money to the family of the dead person to resolve the issue.

Similar stories can be found in frontier America. After the Civil War, there were a lot of killings in Texas between those who had supported the Union and those who had supported the Confederacy.

The problem with allowing such killing is that any killing affects the survivors (and the killers). Thus, frontier America was "tamed" by churches which supported a stronger society that protected people.

Generally speaking, the more people in a society, the more rules the society needs. Iceland needed more rules when the population grew, and it was no longer just the place to exile killers. A society of thousands will need rules of when it is acceptable to kill someone else. When the rules are followed, then the emotional impact of the killing is much less.

Answer 13

I say the answer is No. I would argue that this is not a stable social equilibrium unless the threat of being killed does not bother people. People who did a lot of killing would be seen as a threat by others and targeted, just out of self-protection. Eventually, someone would have the bright idea that maybe we should all agree that killing is ordinarily bad, and that we should gang up on people who violate that new norm.

Of course, this is armchair theorizing. But I am not aware of any society that does not treat murder as a crime, or at least something to be avenged.

Answer 14

A world where the strong are stronger than any weak group

If enough training means a strong person can kill anyone without similar training, then sure. The big reason murder is made illegal is that it tends to lead to vengeance spirals. One person kills another, and then they can just wait and kill you or your relatives, and then they'll kill your relatives, and that led to numerous bloody feuds.

Suppose that due to some martial art or magic or sci fi, the strong are so much stronger than the weak that even together they can't compete. Then they could just walk through a town and murder someone and it would have no consequences for them, or their similarly strong family.

Some people would be a bit harder to touch. Servants who were part of a powerful family, or children of powerful families. They would of course prominently display their family colours so that you knew that they couldn't just be casually murdered. The servants might be murderable, since you could just pay a blood price, but murdering a family heir would be a very high risk act as they could then just come murder all of your people. You only do it if your family is strong enough to bear that.

If you want examples, look at most cultivation novels.

Answer 15

Soylent Red:

Your society has become extremely peaceful, and the laws all honor life in every way. There is no war, and diseases have been eliminated. Birth control is considered unholy.

In other words, the planet is drowning in people.

No one wants to change society, but they all recognize the need to control population. So the incredibly rare people who are mentally ill or capable of violence are encouraged in their tendencies and provided the means to carry them out. The officials still try to stop them, but they are half- hearted and pacifistic.

No one wants to die, but random killers are societies’s way to regulate.

Did you hear about the madman who poisoned the baby formula? Hundreds died - God bless.

Answer 16

No, although one has to define "society".

Indiscriminate killing of members of a set "society" by others will result in a collapse of trust, and then a collapse of that "society".

What you can get is a secret "society" embedded within a larger one upon which it is parasitic, or against which it secretly wages war: cults and terrorist groups. On a larger not-secret scale where the killer society is a significant fraction of wider society, you have described a civil war, or a liberation movement against a brutal dictatorship where there's an oppressed majority. In all these cases, self-defined "insiders" are killing "outsiders".

There are also be societies where discriminate killing is tolerated or even expected. I have read of "primitive" societies where it is the duty of a son to humanely kill an elderly or disabled parent who has become an unsupportable drain on the tribe's resources. Harsh, but not doing so endangers the entire tribe and abandoning the victim to death by starvation or wild animals is arguably worse. Taken to an extreme you get the plot of the SF movie "Logan's Run". Another far more horrific real-world example is "honour killings" of young people (usually women) who won't accept their parent's decision about who they should marry.

Answer 17

All other answers seem to focus on societies (and lives, critically) similar to our own, but as Murinus's answer touches on, it need not be.

As with the swarmlings answer, the society being considered can take place in a context where death is almost meaningless for a reason, and thus killing (and even murder, the crime part of killing) can be also similarly meaningless and random. To me, this type of world already exists within multiplayer video games with PvP combat that is possible, but not the focus.

One classic example of this is PvP World of Warcraft servers, where raid parties are often formed just for the fun of going killing the other factions members. This is considered part of the game (and as such socially acceptable) but perhaps not exactly what we're looking for.

A more relevant example is how societies exist within minecraft servers (that are PvP enabled), where dying (and getting murdered) is possible, expected, and a setback, but ultimately not as important since the loss is only of time because lives are infinite. Life in such servers can involve killing someone in a funny or unexpected way as a prank, especially if this is agreed upon by members (read: socially acceptable)

Of course, this is simplified because video games are meant to be fun and not respawning often isn't fun (althought it can be through challenge). However, one could easily consider a post-scarcity society where clones of one's body and mind are easily accessible, and killing someone's current body can be done for fun, or at random, without consequence for them beyond the annoyance of having to "respawn" at the nearest cloning center, for example. As with our video game example, life in such a society could involve killings that are socially acceptable in some forms, while other forms (such as when attending an important event)to be a bad look because of the inconvenience.

Such a society has other implications that I feel are beyond the scope of the question but are in my opinion well thought out in the Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton, especially in book 2.

Answer 18

Define "random". If it's random with a defined and low probability, like choosing a random person once a year and sacrificing them to the gods, then sure, that society can survive perfectly well. If it's random with a probability that's high enough to cause population decline, then it obviously can't.

In St Kilda, newborns were dying because of the use of infected oil for anointing them. The resulting level of infant mortality meant that the island became depopulated and was eventually abandoned. That's no different, essentially, from the random killings you are talking about.

For another example, consider a society where killing people in a duel is legal and acceptable. The number killed in duels is going to be limited by the fact that people exercise restraint in challenging someone to a duel because of the risk of getting killed. So the probability of getting killed in a duel is subject to some kind of self-sustaining limits, which probably means that society will survive the losses. Without those restraints, the number of deaths will probably reach a level where society has to impose restraints if it wants to survive, at which point you start getting legal/moral sanctions to reduce the number of killings.

Answer 19

Qualified by the below comments, which inform {how to understand and position the question}... here is my suggestion of how this might be made to work. [I am doing this backwards, and I am not guaranteeing that the outcome is perfectly thought out.]

[As below] if arbitrary killing is perfectly acceptable, then -- to have a viable society -- there must be some reason why this is not common. It is a simple mathematical fact that unfettered large-scale (short-time-period) killing would be fatal to a society.

It is either incoherent, or irrelevant to the question, to have a moral reason why killing is less common.

...That is, a moral reason that is about killing itself. Conversely, then, we have to have an ethical dilemma. There must be some moral or ethical principle that makes [arbitrary] killing acceptable, when killing itself is not immediately acceptable.

I suggest the idea that -- think Sparta, or the Klingons -- the society in question values physical prowess. That is... effortless killing (such as with a gun from behind) is unacceptable. What is acceptable is arbitrarily taking on some other member of society in some sort of fair contest.

One might add details such as... * that there is great shame in taking on another person and failing to kill them, or * that there is no honour in successfully killing a person who is systematically weaker (such as a sick person, or perhaps someone who has devoted their life to academic pursuits or religion or what-have-you [this would have to be exceptional]), or * that the other party must consent, or * that the victor either does, or does not, gain the possessions of the other.

Possibly the best condition would be that there is honour for both participants if the contest lasts beyond some pre-set limit... at which point the contest ends. (The obvious limit is time, but there is also perhaps {both parties suffering some level of injury}.)

Ostensibly, such a society would not value having half of its members killed, over any time period.

I suppose that this is perhaps not in the spirit of the question -- it does not actually involve significant "indiscriminate killing" -- but conversely [again] it is a simple mathematical fact that unfettered large-scale killing would be fatal to the society.

It seems to me that the only alternative -- perhaps the only one that is in the spirit of the question -- is a massive reproduction rate (to balance all the killing). However, simply having a massive reproduction rate is not directly a moral justification for killing... and particularly not for killing any particular given individual. Of course, there is the obvious connection that most systems can not sustain a massive reproduction rate (except with food-chain -type killing [not the question])... but then a sophisticated society would just lower its reproduction rate [and killing any given individual is still not justified]. ...Unless it could not. This would suggest -- to a sophisticated society -- some sort of politically-established group to do the killings... which is again not what the question is about.

[Tangentially... in real life we have the situation that... we recognise that we can not reproduce massively and endlessly, as a group... but that this does not serve as a moral principle at the individual (i.e. family) level (unless one allows that every family must have no less and no more than 2.1 children).]

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Here follows considerations of points that other people have raised.

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I think some of the answers here rely on the tenets both that killing is acceptable and that it is not [not meaning necessarily to position this as an inconsistent philosophical construct] -- think America. In America, if it genuinely was perfectly acceptable to kill people (whether it be everyone or just black Americans)... I suggest that there would be a lot more killing.

(In other words... the question is not about {only evil people doing the killing}; it is about killing being something that anyone of any ethical persuasion would be equally likely to do.)

In a related vein... if we divide society into "us" and "them" then the notion is quite workable [of "us" killing "them" indiscriminately]... but arguably the intent of the question does not allow this -- it is about the "us" element, under that picture.

"user99478" 's answer considers a picture under which, immediately, killing someone is fine as a way of dealing with a moral offence against the protagonist. Immediately [again]... this is workable if there is some reasonable minimum level of justification required; otherwise one could expect the population to be exponentially halved at an astonishing rate. Even given that qualification... that would merely slow the rate at which the society wiped itself out. If one positions this condition high enough for the society to survive... ostensibly that would actually be a picture in which killing was considered wrong -- that is, required significant moral justification. (One might try to draw out a picture under which the society wiped itself out fairly slowly.)

"user99478" then adds the qualification that one might be deterred from killing someone by the expectation of revenge killing. This would certainly serve to slow the rate of killing... but arguably implies that the involved {other people} consider the killing in question to be "wrong" in some sense.

"Murinus" 's answer is interesting. I suggest that it appeals to two distinct notions. One is that the rate of reproduction is so high that a significant amount of killing is not significant, so to speak. The other is that the "persons" in question are not social beings. The latter is certainly not incoherent, but I do suggest that it is difficult to draw out a picture in which, for instance, one could be meaningfully invested in a conversation with another such "person"... but not turn a hair if and when they were killed mid-conversation. I would allow that it is possible to construct a picture of a "society" of non-social beings, but some amount of work is required. One interesting question would be whether or not such a being might have other reasons for not countenancing arbitrarily killing other "persons". [(I would expect that one such "person" would probably never kill another unless driven to it.)]

An aside on involving a god or God in the picture. There is the question of whether {the gods are against killing because it is wrong}, or that {killing is wrong because the gods arbitrarily proscribe it}. [Please respect any IP present here (re "arbitrarily"). No doubt someone else has already made that point... but I did have to work it out for myself at the time... and I have not come across, nor been shown, someone making that point.] I submit that it is fairly apparent that deeds such as rape and killing actually are wrong -- in a way that does not apply to (e.g.) whistling... even if one has no account of why. There is the implicit question, re The Question here, of whether or not we are assuming that killing is morally wrong. Even without an account of why killing is wrong... it is a significant move to hold that killing is not morally wrong; "intuition" does have a lot of weight.

Answer 20

Does it count if it's considered okay for one group in the society to commit mass killing against another group, possibly outside the society?

If so, I think most large complex human societies have been examples of this. War, slavery (early deaths from discipline, poor health, despair, and accidents), executions, displacement, etc.

At least in the short term, this tends not to tear the society apart because the society defines itself in a way to exclude a lot of the dead people.

And of course, maybe the cow aliens or wolf aliens will see us as mass murderers.

Answer 21

Mathematically impossible (or at least very limited)

The average number of people killed, per person, can never be larger than 1.

Consider, for example, a population of 100 people. If they all killed each other (perhaps with the last two timing it well enough to take each other out) that would be 100 killings. That's an average of 1 killing per person.

This means there are 3 possibilities:

Only some people can kill

For every person that kills 10 others, there needs to be 9 people who have killed no one. This sounds like some sort of class-based system and is not indiscriminate.

Limit 1 kill per person

If you want everyone to kill, only person can only kill someone once in their whole life. This also does not seem indiscriminate.

You can be killed multiple times

Video games get around this issue by letting people respawn. If this were possible, each person could kill multiple times, although still only an average of once per "life".

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What if people just have lots of kids? Still impossible.

Suppose every person kills 2 people & has 200 kids. This means the population would still grow, right? No, this still doesn't work — it would require an infinite number of dead people. Consider someone in this society who has died. They must have killed 2 people. Those 2 people must have killed 4 people. Those 4 people must have killed 8 people. Continuing this pattern, you end up with an infinite number of dead people, which is impossible on a finitely-sized world.

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So, this is impossible

Overall, if you can only be killed once, on average, you can only kill once. You can't have a society of only serial killers.

Answer 22

If you are still up for views then check out Chinese cultivation novels. I think that kind of setting is the closest to the setting you want. In these novels if you are strong enough you can kill off a whole village and no one would care. Lets imagine a scenario in which this is applicable. Lets assume that there is a strong cultivator who was minding their own business but a fool came along who didn't know their place. The fool somehow provoked the strong cultivator by insulting them or any other way. The strong cultivator could kill them in the most brutal way in the middle of a street and the people would say that the fool had it coming for foolishly provoking someone so strong. The strong cultivator will not be charged with murder at all and it would be treated as just another day.

Edit: Another idea I had is to think of people as livestock. You don't get charged with murder when you slaughter a sheep/goat/cow etc. in your barn. And even if there are some people whining about it, it does not change the fact that we slaughter animals for our food. If people were considered the same status as livestock then all they would do will be to control their killing enough to not cause a huge drop in population. We don't see the population of livestock dropping to alarming degree, because they control the slaughtering so that the livestock would have enough time to replenish its population. The slaughtering of livestock is sustainable so I don't see why your idea would do any worse in an imaginary world. You can have a few inconsistencies in the story and the readers would not mind them much depending on the inconsistencies in question. So go crazy :)

Answer 23

How attached are you to these ‘people’ being human?

So with humans, we take a long time to grow up, and a lot of time to learn a set of skills that are useful to society.

So one of us dying is bad, we’re hard to replace, and often our sets of skills are essential for at least some of the people around us.

So what about a society of non-humans, who grow up very, very quickly, live short lives, and have a significant amount of children. Let’s call them Goblins.

There is little time for a Goblin to learn, so they don’t learn anything too complex. This means an individual Goblin is not really valuable to a society. Depending on the culture, familial ties may not even be a thing!

This will limit the growth of this society, it will probably never reach a significant level of technology, as few Goblins will live long enough to discover something and pass on that knowledge.

But, this means that in this Goblin society, random killings are more or less inconsequential, so potentially, acceptable!

If their population grows really quickly, random killings may even be necessary to avoid a population growing out of control!

Answer 24

To provide a different kind of scenario let me first reference a series of light novels called Kino no Tabi (Kino's Travel), where a girl traveled through different countries (think more like walled cities than nowadays countries) where each one was a planet of hats kinda deal (Warning: TVTropes), and one of those was a country where murder was legal.

The twist was that it was a very normal and peaceful country, but when people came to visit with the idea that it was a free for all and causing trouble was ok, that's when they ended being murdered by the entire town.

Although murder might seem a little too extreme for our current year morals the underlying justice process its the same as our own (break the law, pay the price), mostly because a few years ago that was the way we kept the order in our society: in the wild west trouble makers were keen to stay away from town because nobody would think twice to put a hole in them, in the medieval times in Europe lynching societal pariahs/criminals was a common thing, even the most primitive of societies do the same to the ones that threaten the order and safety of the whole group.

You might think that introducing free murder into a current year society eventually will devolve into a free for all murder contest kinda thing, but history has show us that's not what happens.

People doesn't like to be murdered (citation needed), so when somebody start shaking the proverbial wasp nest it doesn't take long before somebody make the problem go away, especially when there's no adverse consequences to doing so. You might say that the family and friends of the now dead trouble maker might want revenge and that will start a chain of murders, but at the end of the day we live in a society, if a group of people threatens the peace of that society they will wake up one night with their house on fire and the entire town making marshmallows and shooting anybody who tries to escape.

At the end of the day, people either will behave and refrain from murdering indiscriminately if they want them and their family to live long and prosper or they will be unlived very soon, either way random murders will end up being the same or even less frequent than in our current year society.

There is an exception though: if the group of people trying to upset the normal peace is substantial enough (>20% of the population aprox) the killings will be an order of magnitude bigger, but that's also something that happens in our world as well; we call it revolution (if we agree with their ideals) or civil war (if we don't like them) and history show us that eventually one of the sides suffers enough loses that it can be completely massacred by the winning side, and as such peace is now restored again.

So as a conclusion: allowing free murder might cause some blood to be spilled, but it won't take long for peace to be restored.

Answer 25

There has been a bunch of interesting answers already, but one thing yet to be mentioned is the dying society.

So far all answers has been about trying to imagine stable, or even growing to thriving societies, but your question does not exclude societies that are neither stable nor prosperous.

If the main reason for not allowing people to tolerate the normalizing of killing is essentially because it will inevitably lead to the collapse of that society, then what if said society is already collapsing?

This concept is being played with in the RPG world of Mörk Borg, where everybody already knows that the world is ending. Doomsday is coming and everyone will inevitably die, so who cares if someone died just a day earlier.

This is interesting in many ways since people become more concerned about HOW to die, rather than not dying at all. There is for example a King in this world that prepares all the citizens in his domain for a huge mass suicide. The population is of course aware of this but doesn't even mind it. Some might even find the kings endeavor to be admirable, however the religious cult in this world considers suicide to be heresy and believe that doomsday should be welcomed, not avoided.

A world where people is mainly concerned about how to die rather than not dying gives room for a lot of interesting and gruesome conflicts between groups and people in the world. Blood is unavoidable when everybody rather sacrifice their life for whatever cause than face doomsday. It can lead to some great storytelling.

The way I see it, after reading the answers there is basically 3 options for the shape of such societies:

1. There are some sort of limitations or rules on who can kill who, how someone can be killed, or why they can be killed, alternatively some sort of quota. As long as these limitations or rules are followed nobody will raise an eyebrow over these killings. This is how most human tribes worked historically, but in worldbuilding we can take it to absurdum.

2. Dying is not the end, or alternatively people don't die at all, essentially making them undead i guess. In this scenario people are either easily resurrected, reborn, spawned or whatever, or simply can't die to begin with. Cutting someones head of might be done simply because it's hilarious, or even for practical reasons when you want to take a close look at something in a confined space not having enough room for your hole body etc.

3. My addition to the conversation. Society is collapsing so killings are normal, or even worse, as with the case in Mörk Borg, everybody is already doomed and forced to face a horrible death. The closer to unavoidable death, the more normalized it becomes.

Answer 26

No, ... but

All territorial animals including men developed an instinctive aggression toward each other that pushed them to spread out and colonise a territory as big as possible. However they also developed and instinctive repulsion to kill each other to prevent the natural aggression to go to the point where the members of the species would annihilate themselves. According to Konrad Lorenz[*] human overcame this barrier due to many factors, including the development of weapons that increased the distance and reduced the emotional contact between men. However this instinct is still there and working, although in some cases it is muffled our moral is still heavily dependent on it. The scenario you paint is extremely unlikely unless our society becomes increasingly dependent on virtual interactions and everything is perceived with the emotional disconnect of a video game.

[*]In my language many books where edited, split or joined, and published with different titles, the reference might not be precise.

Answer 27

Suppose everyone has a completely foolproof way of killing anyone they can name. Some magic spell or something. Stopping a person from being able to cast the spell is hard. Detecting casting is impossible.

Lets say that most people aren't evil. A lot of people never use that spell. But getting hit with it is the top cause of death. Society has somewhat given up searching for the culprit.