Philosophy Now Forum

There are several accepted forms of killings in the world, varying from country to country in degrees, types, legalities and the extent to of their occurrences. Anything from honour killings to legal execution to warfare to euthanasia to abortion to different forms of persecutions (usually in countries with lacking independent and effective legal authority).

I've been thinking on the question of "what makes us dislike any particular form of killing?". And what it seems to me (especially after a lot of research reading) that there is a form of recognition and refutation that we do towards one another and which manages our emotional and rational relationships, and which are deeply in-grained in a kind of phenomenology, in which we predominantly focus on aspects of one another that allow for certain types of recognitions and refutations to occur more frequently than others.

Take abortion for instance. The ability to care for an unborn child depends upon an ability to relate to the child, this is far from impossible and attaching oneself to the "signs" of an emerging child are important and good qualities for being prepared to carry out love, commitment to good parenting and meet the challenges that a new child pose. People with an ease for this should be able to "recognize" the child before it becomes a child, and resistance about the idea of it never materializing or dying would be part of sticking to a coherent mindset about the spawned idea of the new child (and it feels personally bad to break ones own coherency, a kind of psychological symbiosis is developed).

On the other hand, in order to be able to carry out a refutation of the child, one would have to have a minimal of acting upon the ability to relate to the "signs" of an emerging child, a kind of away-focus. In this way, the world becomes a place where the life of any individual is dependent on the ability of all of us to recognize each other, to perceive each other, and how much we can act upon this ability (our ability to act being impeded by lack of learning and experiencing expression of recognition, such as is found in loving words for instance).

You don't half post some shit, your like bill, but without pictures and longer posts.

Is this what you call philosophy?

no, not like bill, he has some gems occasionally... besides, English isn't his first language

-Imp

that there is a form of recognition and refutation that we do towards one another and which manages our emotional and rational relationships,

I think you have got hold of an important idea there, worth exploring.
If we trace people's acceptance of certain kinds of killing back through their history and geography, that would tell us a great deal about how they value one another and themselves. It would give us at least a partial answer as to why these particular values were perpetuated, what conditions prevailed at the time of their institution and what conditions would need to change in order to devalue one kind of person and elevate another.

For example, China is looking now at a shortage of marriageable females, due to a combination of traditionally undervaluing girl babies and a recent draconian limit on families: they've been aborting selectively 30+ years. This is going to affect the cultural importance of women, and that, in turn, will alter the dynamics of the whole society.

The US has had a recent period of enlightenment and economic wealth, partly due to its relatively low birth-rate and female emancipation. (Incidentally, those two factors are inextricably co-dependent. Let women make their own reproductive decisions and the population becomes stable.) However, a large portion of US population has never truly accepted the decline of biblical-style patriarchy and a ruthless political faction has harnessed this seething resentment to enhance its own power. Result: major backlash and demolition of the equalizing legislations of the past half century. This, too, will change the social dynamics.

Skip wrote:I think you have got hold of an important idea there, worth exploring.
If we trace people's acceptance of certain kinds of killing back through their history and geography, that would tell us a great deal about how they value one another and themselves.

This kind of genealogical perspective is exactly what profit I would like to see from an exploration of the concept I introduced above. As I believe it could, with enough effort and results, produce a flashing new experience of seeing what social value really is to us. A new frontier of sociological and psychological exploration, that is.