It is generally agreed in all societies that murder of another human is immoral. There are some cases were people have found ways to justify this murder, such as capital punishment, "just" wars, and possibly abortion. Yet, for the most part, the act of taking someone else's life from them is violates the ethics of humanity.
What is it that causes this act to be immoral? What is it that causes any act to be immoral? These are questions which I cannot readily answer, and I doubt very much anyone could easily answer. Yet I have created a hypothetical universe I often use when trying to reach a conclusion. Let me give you a quick introduction to the universe of MÙrmorthor.
Through the murder of another individual in our world, one inflicts emotional pain onto the world. When you rob the world of someone else, you cause feelings of loss and sorrow. This may be no different then the set of emotions that flow from a natural death, except in murder, a personal has caused them. That personal is responsible for inflicting of pain an suffering on those still living.
In MÙrmorthor, there is no emotion. It is a universe devoid of joy, but also devoid of pain. There is no sorrow or regret at the loss of another's life. So when you choose to take the life of another, you are hurting no one emotionally. No one seeks out psychiatric health and no one feels the need to cry. It is the passing of a life, similar to when a car stops running.
Is murder immoral in MÙrmorthor?
"Well," one might say, "each person has something unique and special about them. You take away from the diversity of the world when the life is lost." You would be correct in our world, but I forgot to mention another small fact about MÙrmorthor that separates it from our world.
In our world there are three types of knowledge that we know of:
- Genetic knowledge - The instinct stored in each creatures DNA.
- Extragenetic - That which is stored outside the DNA, usually in the minds and muscles of living creatures.
- Extrasomatic - A subset of extragenetic information, this is what is stored outside the body. In our world it appears that few creatures use books, pictures, computers, and other techniques to store information outside themselves so that when they pass on, the information remains.
This is no the case in MÙrmorthor. In that universe is a great library. It is a magical library by our standards, but quite common place by there's. In it, the knowledge and life experience of each living person is recorded automatically as they live. The books fill with a language too complicated for humans to understand, but it captures perfectly the uniqueness of each individual who ever lived.
In MÙrmorthor when a person dies, or is murder, there is no loss of information in the world. It us all stored in the great library. Volume after volume of life is recorded there for all eternity. To spend just an hour reading to reveal so much about the minds of your fellow creatures.
In MÙrmorthor, when someone is killed, there is no sorrow. In MÙrmorthor, when someone is killed, there is no loss of uniqueness.
I ask a second time; in MÙrmorthor, is murder immoral?