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I guess I fall into the "Murder is a legal term, consult with your GM/Lawyer/King/etc. . " resulting in an "it depends" answer, that probably isn't very satisfying.
Morally justifiable killing, however, requires answering certain questions first. Which of course, also requires discussing things with your GM. As others have pointed out:
1. Metaphysically, are there creatures that do not have free will? Limited free will? Or does everyone have free will?
2. How strong is the Alignment block on the stat block? (Always, sometimes, usually, etc. . )
These are questions that the rules either a) Don't answer (#1), or are flexible on (#2). So, we can play with these two variables, and come up with answers on justifiable killing.
A) If we live in a setting where non PC races have no free will, and the Alignment block is 'fixed', then the aslignment state of baby evil creatures is that they will be evil (no choice, only one option), and infanticide for evil creatures is justifiable (I'm not saying pleasurable, or desireable, nor am I talking about ANYTHING CLOSE TO REALITY).
B) Conversely, if everyone has free will, then by necessity Alignment can be no stronger than 'usually', and you wind up with the situation where everyone can potentially be saved, and there is no justifiable infanticide of any race.
I suspect that most games fall somewhere in between. Some races don't have free will/flexible alignments (Angels and Devils seem likely. .), while other races do (Orcs and Goblins. . ).
I know for my groups, we tend not to worry about it too much, because we've done the whole, "Oh noes, we've just found the orc nursery, what do we do!" schtick already. It just leads to arguments about this stuff, which is often counterproductive to why we got together to play a game. Most of us have enough real world drama, and enough things interfering with our game time that we just blow through this silliness.
I would disagree that I'm redefining murder in a way that removes the distinction between it and other forms of killing.
I believe what you're saying is that while all murder is killing, that all killing isn't murder.
I'd argue instead that while all murder is killing, some killing isn't murder, slaying is always murder but isnt always illegal or immoral, huting is always murder but isn't always illegal or immoral, self defense isn't even always murder and even then it isn't always illegal or immoral.
If you are however in pursuit of a difference between murder and the other forms of killing then what the distinction appears to be for you is instead what not separates murder from not murder, but what separates murder from say, slaying, self defense, hunting, pest control... All valid explorations with variable levels of [intent] [motivation] [utilitarianism] [excess].
We commonly say that a wolf kills or hunts an elk instead of murdering it.
Clearly a wolf intends to kill the elk. Intent is present so I personally define it as murder. The justification for the new 'hunting label' is on the [intent] [motivation] [utilitarianism] [excess] strata.
In assisting us with 'mitigating' that murder we check for intent: wolf is hungry and needs to eat to survive
motivation :wolf wants to live
We check for utilitarianism: Elk provides food
We check for excess: Animals don't typically hunt unless they are hungry.
So we 'excuse/mitigate' this intent by applying motivation for survival, usefulness in that pursuit, and not overdoing it. We call it hunting/survival.
People hunting elk instead
Despite the fact that people will eat what they hunt, truth be told rarely do they hunt exclusively because they need to eat. Food is readily available to them in excess.
Intent? A hunter surely intends to kill the elk when he shoots it. They do not intend to simply wound an elk.
Motivation would then be: (at best)I want to put some fairness back into the food chain by aquiring my food myself and putting the responsibility for that weight of that killing back upon me directly.
(at worst) yay look how cool I am. I can killz an elk with my superior elk killin toolz.
Utilitarianism: I *can* (and plan to) eat it. (at best) Saves the suffering of whatever I'd be eating instead.
Excess: (legal hunting limits in place to avoid killing too much even if it is for food. It is arguable if there were no hunting limits if certain hunters wouldn't hunt more than they *need*.
We still excuse this intent by applying questionable variable motivations, clear usefulness in those pursuits, and regulation from overdoing it.
Fishing!
Intent is a *little* different for fishermen. A fisherman doesn't always clearly intend to kill a fish. Occasionally they fish for sport and throw back what they catch.
Motivation? Often either to eat, or in the case of sport fisherman, the joy of proving oneself capable of catching a fish.
Utilitarian? Again *can* eat. Saves the suffering of whatever I'd be eating instead. Again taking responsibility for the effort of killing my own food.
Excess? again legal fishing limits in place to keep people who love fishing from catching more than they *need*
Now we see that occationally there is *not* intent which would remove moral murder from fishing....
And in the case of intentional killing of a fish (to eat and not to throw back) Again a variable motivation, clear usefulness in achieving those goals, and again regulation from overdoing it.
Being attacked by a person or a bear.
Intent: not always. not even often. not murder because often people defending themselves will stop when the attacker stops coming at them. You don't always intend to outright kill your attacker.
When they *don't* stop at that condition, it's murder. Legally. Sometimes it only takes a single action for an attacker to cross from alive to dead and even then it can be 'unintended' so not 'murder'
Motivation: Survival
Utilitarian: Definitely helps keep you alive
Excess? If it's not excessively pursuing the attacker's death then no. The longer it takes for you to do what you're doing to defend yourself, the harder it is to justify defense.
So in this case intent being absent would change it from murder to 'not murder' even by my definition of murder. Clearly some good motivation, and utility, and legally/morally defensable when not to excess.
The robber has your tv and is headed out to the truck with it
Intent: stop him from taking your stuff. not necessarily intent to kill him in order to stop him. not morally murder but can legally be murder anyway because it's not self defense at that stage.
Motivation: defense of property or vengeance/vigilanteism
Utilitarian: oh yes... attacking the guy will slow the tv stealing process. Hope he doesnt drop your tv and break it then come after you.
Excess: can be. depends on how 'stopped' you want him to be.
So both legal and moral murder are not absolute, but are much more likely here because of sliding scales of intent, motivation and excessiveness.
Defending against bear attack
Intent: Stop the attack (does not necessarily involve 'kill the bear')
Motivation: survive
Utilitarian: attacking bears may not be the best tactic for surviving a bear, but neither is running.
Excess? Is this a habit with you? I hope you don't often find yourself being accidentally attacked by bears. If you do... That might be something to think about.
Intent is often not present so is not legally or morally murder at all. In the case of bear death mitigated by a robust motivation for survival, lack of distinction in utility from other options, and hopefully not a habit.
Explore a bear cave, finding a bear, killing the bear
Intent: find out whats in here
Motivation: curiosity
Utilitarian: if you find a bear and kill it you'll be better able to explore the cave
Excess? Is killing what you find in a cave for the purpose of exploring a cave a habit for you?
Not necessarily murder because again not running puts you in the above example of defending against a bear attack that may not have been your intent
But if you DID intend on killing a bear if you found one, its back to murder with a motivation only of curiosity which is pretty weak defense both legally and morally
Could I use that mitigating excuse about your house? Could I continue using that excuse if I made a habit of it in your neighborhood?
The original intent might be curiosity but the more you kill as a result of curiosity the harder this is to defend on the moral ground or legal ground that 'I just wanted to have a look around'
Killing Baby bears after you killed their mama!
Intent: Uh. I don't know... Put them out of their misery?
Motivation? Hate knowing that baby bears had to grow up without their mama?
Utilitarian: yep. you're definitely the hero of this story, aren't ya? There better be some damn treasure in this cave for making me (I mean these poor baby bears) pay such a high price.
Excess? Jeez this is depressing. This happens often for you?
I never intended to kill those baby bears your honor! It was an accident. It was self preservation! They were baby bearing me alive!!! They ate my porridge and slept in my bed!
Let this be a lesson to you, baby bears. Collect lots of treasure so your deaths will not be in vain.
Killing baby Goblins after killing their parents
Intent: prevent the spread of further xenocidal stabby burny goblin flavored doom
Motivation: Baby goblins will always become evil, cruel, homicidal and dangerous (arguable depending on GM. Get an answer. Don't assume) and we'd like to stop it before it starts
Utilitarian: If the GM agrees then this is the equivalent of 'pest control' A preemptive act of self defense.
Excess? Well killing the parents was pest control also so I guess we're pretty safe as long as goblins can't possible grow up to be good.
Killing baby goblins knowing they could be redeemed:
Intent: Keep from having the hassle of taking care of them or finding them a nurturing environment. I'm obligated not to kill them. I'm not obligated to raise them in their parents abscence to be better goblins.
Motivation: Caring for baby goblins or providing for their care puts a cramp in my 'good' characters 'style' or interferes with my 'good' character's 'plans/schedule' which I'm sure is a tight one.
Utilitarian: Keeps from slowing down whatever we were up to before we ran into orphan goblins
Excess? Lets hope not.
I agree that a group that doesn't like this moral dilemma should not be finding orphan goblins all over the place. Especially a party that calls themselves good and yet doesn't like that being good might beg effort or inconvenience or time or discussion.
Picking flowers/making donuts
Intent: possessing something beautiful. making perfume. giving gifts. eating something delicious
Motivation: hunger. for something. I'm not sayin what. Lets just say its a sweet tooth of one form or another.
Utilitarian: it really adds color to the room. awww you're so sweet/needed to eat something besides dead animals for a change
Excess: individually probably not in the grand scheme of things. I rarely see 'too many flowers'... too many donuts on the other hand. It's almost not possible. Too many donuts can kill you even if you kill them first.
I dont mind exploring the difference between legal and moral definitions of murder, and I don't mind exploring the justifications of murder that mitigate its illegality or immorality. In game terms these questions are very valid.
Not 'Is it good' 'is it evil' 'is it ok' 'Is it Legal'... And not only are those questions not asked, the word murder doesn't ask those questions either. Murder doesn't ask you why you did it, how much you did it, how often you do it or if you feel justified in having done it. The word murder asks you if you did it with the expectation or hope beforehand of it working. Legal or moral (motivation/utility/excess) justifications are simply what we do to decide if you're going about it in a lawful way or if the motiviations you had for doing it were good/evil/greedy/selfish/lazy by doing it. There is a distinction. And there does need to be a distinction. For me murder answers only the question of 'what did you indend/expect to happen'. Intent alone.. But everyone in this thread is totally correct that those unasked questions that relate to excusability/mitigatability/legality are bigger and more game relevant and we *do* have different words to answer those questions.
We do have words like hunting or slaying or self defense or justifiable homicide to cover us when our murder needs to be covered so we can sleep peacefully at night and so we can decide when murdering is 'ok' and when it's 'not ok'.
People *think* it's useful on its own because it inappropriately carries the stigma of 'implying' in most peoples minds an unlawful or immoral intent which, strictly speaking, is clearly not true. All it does is establish intent.
In game we can't simply use a term like murder to decide whether an action is good or evil or lawful, because presence or lack of intent alone isn't implicitly enough to defacto qualify an action as good or evil or lawful, which is what we need to know in the context of the game.
-To answer the deeper question of if something is lawful or not, the gm simply makes the call
-To answer the deeper question of if something is good or evil, we must (instead of focusing on intent,) focus on motivation, function, and degree of excess.
Deciding evil or good or lawful based simpy on the criteria of 'is it murder' is, as they say 'a question wrongly asked'
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I don't want to do a point by point, and I appreciate your tone and presentation Vince, but..
What we keep coming back to here is that whether its objectively murder, depends on the objective functions of the world in which the actions occur.
Morality is not a point in space. Its the whole field, and the idea of murder ties into that. The unlawful death of a person depends on what is ultimately true. What value a person has? Who is a person? Who's souls go where? Why are acts evil? and so on.
In some cultures, suicide might be viewed as accepted or God help us, even celebrated.
In others suicide is viewed as the unlawful murder of the self.
What an individual culture or an individual thinks in regards to what is actually true , means Jack and s---, and Jack left town.
I believe my opinions are true, I believe they are well supported (hence why I think they're true). If a person doesn't believe his opinions are true, they're not his opinions. {/tautology]
This doesn't mean however that my opinions, well reasoned, well supported, or even yanked out of a nether cavity are therefore correct. I just think they are and act as if they are.
For this discussion, it comes down to what is actually true, which is a question for philosophers and probably outside the mandate of this particular forum and thread. Questions of moral culpability in the death of others are, understandably, a pole-star question for various philosophies. The Catholic Catechism has a huge section on why the various forms of what they define as murder are wrong. I imagine other religious texts do as well. Even Ayn Rand has her generalized non-interferance with others thing in her Objectivist philosophy.
Here in Pathfinder we can only offer the relatively lame excuse that the DM gets to be the final arbiter. He'll tell you how things work in his campaign world.
Otherwise we end up arguing our points on shifting sands, in a world where things operate differently from our own, trying to use our own world as a guidance.
If gravity's constant acceleration on MurderMoralitytron is 5.6m/s as opposed to 9.8 m/s, all of a sudden a lot of other rules start to change and shift.
Its sort of the same deal here.
Right. To me despite the stigma inappropriately tied to the word 'murder', it isn't an effective tool at determining where that murder lies in, as you say, the 'field of morality'.
And I think we all agree that establishing where any actions on the players part lie on the 'field of morality' is the questions we're actually trying to answer.
Murder as a word only establishes intent, and intent alone does not establish morality. It is in fact inadequate to a considerable measure.
Both legality and morality are much larger questions and I believe the intent of your post is to state that individually/regionally/culturally those questions are more moving goalposts than intent alone can possibly be.
In the terminology used best by Richard Bach, Intent is easy to measure. Intent is an answer for a single question. For a specific event and a specific individual based on their specific perspective.
'Why did you specifically do this specific thing which you specifically have done'
The legality and morality of that answer on the other hand are questions who's answer changes based on who you ask as well as the region or culture in which you are asking it.
Intent is mostly pretty cut and dry and thats why the legal system likes to use it, because knowing what a person is thinking is very useful in dediding if their motivations were what you or your territory or your culture define as lawful/pure.
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Words have meanings.
Also you've misunderstood me.
What I'm saying is there is a single, solid, objective pole-star for determining this stuff.
Our only problem is that people don't agree on what it is.
That lack of agreement, does not negate its existance.
The answer never changes. What is or is not moral or is or is not murder, doesn't change.
The question is how we determine it. And on that, if you ask three people you're likely to get five answers.
The subjective nature of a human's opinion does not negate the objectivity of existance nor morality. If every human being alive believes a wrong theory, it doesn't mean that truth is one of those wrong theories.
An earlier poster mentioned that one should not be thinking about murder as a moral term because its not a moral term but a legal one.
And that's true. It is a legal term. It is sterile, clinical, abject. It does not establish either lawfulness or degree of purity. It only establishes intent and leaves the lawfulness and purity questions to apply to the answer of what the intent was.
It's inappropriate to preemptively assign the words good or evil or lawful to the word murder because it only asks for intent. The answer to the question of intent can then be labeled as good or evil or lawful or unlawful, but even murder with intent can be legal/moral/good. Murder is a clinical term to ask the questions
'did you think about what you were doing'
'what did you hope was going to happen'
'what did you think was going to happen'
'despite what happened what were you trying to do'
and the answer to those question can be all perfectly legal or moral answers that make murder not an illegal or a bad thing. You pick a flower because its pretty. You didn't pick a flower so that the flower would die muhahahahahah. You hit the deer because you didn't want to swerve and drive off a cliff. You didn't hit the deer because you wanted the deer to die. You created a legal system that allows for the slaughter of cows and chickens because it's the most humane way to feed a populace, not because you're a xenocidal cow and chicken murderer.
None of these turn out in american society at least to be immoral or illegal. Murder wasn't asking to judge your answers as being good or evil or lawful. It was designed to get your answers to 'what were you thinking/planning/hoping'.
Killing is causing the death of a thing
Murder is knowing or expecting or hoping for it's death beforehand.
And none of that is defacto 'judging' the killer despite the common perspective people tie to the word.
But they were all 'knowing that killing was going to happen and then killing' which is coldly, clinically murder. The flower died from your greed to have a flower. And legally we don't charge you with flower murder because murder is a legal term and flower murder isn't against the law. The deer died because you selfishly chose your life over the life of the deer. We don't then charge you with deer murder because even selfishly choosing your own life over a deer's isn't against the law. The cow died because you selfishly decided your civilization needed to raise cows and slaughter them. The murder question is did you kill it knowingly. Society then decides if that definite unmistakable murder is justified or good or ilegal and punishable.
You guys can't be serious. This is a useless thread. I can't even believe I'm chiming in just to tell you all to drop it and find a new subject.
Well the underlying question for which this thread was ostensibly built is
Does being a murderhobo make you chaotic or evil?
Clearly a paladin who slaughters baby goblins may have intent (is killing with intent thus murdering)
His intent however may be both legal, good and pure
He is still murdering goblin babies
But that doesn't make him evil necessarily
because murder isn't always evil.
Even if a lot of people think it is.
For some reason.
Some people love detailed semantic discussions. Don't be a killjoy. You're harshing my buzz.
Whats funny is that I agree that paladins murdering goblin babies can end up not being chaotic or evil, and yet when I run games I expect my paladins to try harder to be 'gooder' than just killing goblin babies... But thats because I run on the 'redeemable goblin' trope and I like giving my players interesting moral quandries that may or may not be solved simply by chopping at them.
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But all of that is only under your rather unique definition of murder. And it still doesn't change anything. With more common usage, we argue about whether a particular killing was murder. With your usage, we have exactly the same argument about whether a particular murder was bad.
It also has the neat side effect of turning everyone (*nearly everyone. I'll accept a tiny minority of exceptions.) into murderers. Which suggests the want of a term for "immoral killer of sapient beings", if only so we can warn each other about such people.
Oh aye. Even with a more common usage, the question of whether a killing is simply a killing or a murder is most often far less relevant than if it is lawful, good, or evil though. In both the real world and in a gaming context.
And on the other front we happily do have two terms for 'immoral killer of sapient beings'... one of those terms is 'murderhobo' the other is 'paladin'. I'm pretty sure in fact that the word paladin stems from a shortening of the phrase 'brainwashed elite slave troopers'... or B.E.S.T.
But all of that is only under your rather unique definition of murder. And it still doesn't change anything. With more common usage, we argue about whether a particular killing was murder. With your usage, we have exactly the same argument about whether a particular murder was bad.
It also has the neat side effect of turning everyone (*nearly everyone. I'll accept a tiny minority of exceptions.) into murderers. Which suggests the want of a term for "immoral killer of sapient beings", if only so we can warn each other about such people.
Oh aye. Even with a more common usage, the question of whether a killing is simply a killing or a murder is most often far less relevant than if it is lawful, good, or evil though. In both the real world and in a gaming context.
And on the other front we happily do have two terms for 'immoral killer of sapient beings'... one of those terms is 'murderhobo' the other is 'paladin'. I'm pretty sure in fact that the word paladin stems from a shortening of the phrase 'brainwashed elite slave troopers'... or B.E.S.T.
In common usage, especially in a gaming context where we generally ignore legal technicalities, an evil killing is pretty much equivalent to murder. At least of sapient victims.
And in my games, a paladin who murders isn't a paladin any longer. Nor do I play with murderhobos, unless we're deliberately running an evil game - even in which case we've usually had subtler and more interesting evil in mind.
Though I do like the B.E.S.T. :)
Okay, I wasn't thinking about the whole murderhobo thing, I was focused on "how does this legal term apply to the game".
I suppose it would be reasonable to redefine murder in the context of the game to be any killing that results in violation of either the lawful or good ethos.
Regardless, for the sake of goblin babies everywhere, it's probably worth have the discussion about free will vs. predestined alignment with your GM.
Or if your the GM, y'know, just don't put goblin babies in harms way. Agian, unless it's a major plot point, we just don't put those elements on stage. Because working out the logistics of orc-phanages is to close to work, not fun.