A close study of humanity would inform you that killing is not the norm. Soldiers in modern scenarios missing on purpose is no different than it has been for thousands of years. Human beings do not want to kill other human beings.
The time frame in which Humans have had weapons capable of picking out an individual target and been averse to using that ability to kill has been about 100 years. As
On Killing points out, people no longer generally choose to miss. Before that, with volley fire, you could reasonably contend you were just as likely to hit nothing at all. Unsurprisingly, most places that use execution by firing squad still use volley fire. It's an easy psychological way around the problem, but the problem has also been more or less solved.
Also, you don't really get to miss on purpose when it's a guy two feet in front of you and you've got to stab him with a spear or sword or else you die. For most of war's history, the choice has been fairly binary, because that's what the technology permitted: fight or die. Most people didn't choose to die. When put into a kill-or-be-killed situation, most people don't choose to die.
That's just hilariously wrong on all levels.
No, actually, it's not, unless you'd now like to take on basically every anthropological study of tribal warfare ever. My
entire. goddamn. premise. is that even the "worst" societies above that level, including say,
medieval Europe represented large-scale improvements in the field of "not dying to murder," and thus could be considered "better" on the metric of "I don't want to be murdered," and that romanticizing Humanity's "state in nature," is bogus because Humanity in nature is all about the murder. Literally every single step away from our default has been an improvement in terms of not being murdered. (Decline of life expectancy and quality of life otherwise until recently, sure.)
I'm guess we are leaving the rest of my previous point alone. Which is cool.
Responding to every single line will make this a book.
Sure its contextual. In the context of the phrase that you used ("that the cause of death for around 50% of its individuals will be murder, and that actually there's nothing inherently wrong or evil about that") death of a half of the population from murder is both "wrong" and "evil" to me.
You're reading it wrong, which you should've picked up from everything else I've said. "That" refers to murder, not the whole clause.
Yes and no. Killing for food is a natural part of life. Killing because your wife needs a fur coat to appear in public might be called excess. Here new (or well forgotten old) concepts of good and evil can be introduced - evil as "taking more than you need for survival".
A lot of the time we kill things simply because they annoy us or we've designated them as a "pest" with only a mildly causal connection to some function we deem important.
"Wolves eat livestock so even though
this wolf is just kind of in the vague vicinity of my farm just prancing through the woods or whatever I'm going to blow it away."
"Crows eat seeds and I have a rifle so I'm just going to shoot that crow up there in that tree."
"Bugs don't belong in houses so I'm just going to smash this one that I happen to see."
"I saw
Jaws and sharks are evil so I'm just going to kill this shark."
(50% of population, really?).
Though to be fair, we had this recently too, by the way, you might've heard of the Cold War.
I do hope that their system has been both tried by the times and that it is as reasonable as the one that allows you to spare the life of your enemy in an armed conflict. I think that this ability may be the only thread that holds our species from falling into self-extinction.
So far the primary thing that's kept us from extinction in light of the expansion of our capabilities hasn't been peace or love or communication, it's been the clear threat of the use of overwhelming force. Deterrence—the threat of murder—has historically been the primary way of
preventing murder. And it works out fairly well provided one has a strong deterrence. When capabilities are homogeneous, that's when there are problems.
To that end I do not think that the death of 50% of people around me is justified by some "natural state of the human species".
Yet here you are on a forum about simulating/aping history and if you weren't so damn hung up on your misreading and focus on 50%, you'd probably agree that murder is easily justifiable and that Humans have been murdering one another for literally forever and will probably go on doing so. If that isn't a definition for a natural part of existence, let me ask,
what is?
