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Dial M for Mur...er...Morality

I was watching a video from the Prager U YouTube channel where Dennis Prager asks the following question:

But how do you KNOW that murder is wrong?

Prager's idea is that we can think murder is wrong, or feel inside that murder is wrong, but that this is not enough: according to him, it's vital for us, and for society at large that we KNOW murder to be wrong; and the only way we can KNOW it is that God tells us it is wrong.

The problem with the example of murder, is that it's completely relative. Murder is defined as the illegal killing of human beings. So anytime we want the killing of some being to be considered "wrong", all we have to do is to classify that killing as "murder". And conversely, if we want the de-lifing of some being to be permissible, we classify it as not murder. Some examples of killing that is not murder are these:

  1. War. It's perfectly legal to kill someone -- or millions of people -- using war as an excuse. There are many examples in the scriptures of God commanding this, so it's also possible for a person to argue that it's not only legal, but moral to do so.
  2. Execution. Killing someone for breaking the law is another category of making it OK in the eyes of the law (and God) to de-life someone. It seems ironic to me that we kill mostly to punish killing.
  3. Non-humans. It's never murder to kill beings that are not human. We get away with some absolutely awful behavior using the category of "non-human" as an excuse. In fact, this is one technique that we humans use to get rid of people we don't like -- we classify them as somehow less than human. Think of the Holocaust, or slavery, or any of the various pogroms and genocides that have taken place in the last few centuries.
Dennis Prager never wants to have this conversation, and he fervently hopes that people who view his videos will never exercise their critical thinking skills in this regard. But the really interesting question in this space is not "how do you KNOW murder is wrong?". The real question is this:
How do we decide when killing is wrong?
And the reason Dennis Prager would go to any lengths to avoid ever touching on this subject is that it leaves his Absolute Morality shtick without a leg to stand on.

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