It’s not a tautology. The aversion to killing is an inherent psychological thing. Some things are just fundamental to a person’s psychology. Some people have such a strong aversion to spiders that they can’t go near one, even when they know for certain that it’s harmless and there would be no consequences. And psychologically healthy people have that sort of aversion to killing another person. It’s inherent programming.
How often do fights end without police intervention? How many times do people get angry and decide not to escalate it to the point of murder even when they could get away with it? People do sometimes end up in situations where they could get away with killing. They rarely take advantage.
You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
When you mention “a bad outcome” you include harm to someone we care about. The vast majority of people consider a person’s death to be a bad outcome even if they don’t care about that person in particular.
I think you’re conflating two very separate ideas here. There’s the idea of the natural consequences of an action, and then there’s the idea of consequences imposed by some authority. The original comment I replied to was talking entirely about the latter. Here you discuss both but you treat them the same. But someone who refrains from killing because they don’t like the consequence of someone being dead is very different from someone who refrains from killing because they don’t want to go to prison.
There are really three different things here: 1) people don’t kill because of the legal or physical consequences to themselves 2) people don’t kill because they don’t like the outcome of a dead person 3) people don’t kill because they fundamentally don’t want to. There are examples of all 3. The vast majority of people aren’t in category 1. I think they’re almost all in 3, but there’s no practical difference between 2 and 3.
> You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
How often do fights end without police intervention? How many times do people get angry and decide not to escalate it to the point of murder even when they could get away with it? People do sometimes end up in situations where they could get away with killing. They rarely take advantage.
You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
When you mention “a bad outcome” you include harm to someone we care about. The vast majority of people consider a person’s death to be a bad outcome even if they don’t care about that person in particular.
I think you’re conflating two very separate ideas here. There’s the idea of the natural consequences of an action, and then there’s the idea of consequences imposed by some authority. The original comment I replied to was talking entirely about the latter. Here you discuss both but you treat them the same. But someone who refrains from killing because they don’t like the consequence of someone being dead is very different from someone who refrains from killing because they don’t want to go to prison.
There are really three different things here: 1) people don’t kill because of the legal or physical consequences to themselves 2) people don’t kill because they don’t like the outcome of a dead person 3) people don’t kill because they fundamentally don’t want to. There are examples of all 3. The vast majority of people aren’t in category 1. I think they’re almost all in 3, but there’s no practical difference between 2 and 3.