Murder is usually regarded as the quintessential example of a wrong act and a harmful act. It is usually regarded as being as bad or worse than acts such as rape, mutilation, putting a hot poker on someone’s chest, and long term imprisonment. But, I have really started to question this common perception on murder. While I think that murder could be regarded as significantly harmful and that could reasonably imply that it is significantly wrong, it’s hard for me to see why it would be considered worse than terrible acts like rape and mutilation. This is because the convincing explanations that are usually given for why murder is wrong do not seem to make a convincing case that murder is extremely wrong while the explanations that convincingly imply that murder is extremely wrong do not seem to be plausible at all. I will make a list of the most popular explanations for the wrongness of murder and explain why I either completely reject the explanation or why I think the explanation implies that murder is not that bad of an action. So, here’s a list of explanations:

1. The Deprivation Account: Some people would say that a big part of what makes murder wrong is that it deprives the person who is murdered of the benefits of life that she would have received if she wasn’t murdered. This account typically makes a distinction between depriving a particular person of a benefit and simply preventing a benefit from occurring to an unspecified value recipient. This is why the proponents of the account would believe that murder is worse than intentionally preventing someone from being born. Personally, I do not except such a distinction. I don’t think it matters if there is a particular person who has a benefit removed or if it’s just a benefit removed from no one in particular. Of course, many would find the implication that preventing a birth could be worse than murder to be absurd. But, it’s worth noting that the deprivation account also has some implications that I think a reasonable could consider absurd. For example, doesn’t it seem absurd to anyone that the removal of a benefit would be far less wrong or bad just because we can’t identify a specific victim of the benefit removal? It seems to me like that should be irrelevant as long as we can identify that there was a benefit that would have occurred if not for the actions of an alleged wrongdoer.

Though, one could argue under my view that preventing birth should be considered as wrong as murder typically is considered but I’m inclined to favor the viewpoint that murder should be viewed more like preventing birth typically gets viewed since I’m more of a pessimist about life. Though, even an optimist should probably consider birth prevention and murder to be fairly minor harms unless he thinks that the benefits of life overwhelmingly justify the harms. Even if one accepts a deprivation account where a specific victim must be identified then they should also consider a good aspect of death in that it alleviates any future harm you would have to experience if you haven’t died an earlier death. Given this, I think it’s hard to argue that murder is a great wrong because of the deprivation that it produces.

2. Preference-based theory: Some people might argue that murder is a major wrong because people have a strong preference to continue living their life to the point that they would even be willing to have sex with someone that threatens to kill them if they don’t comply. I think this explanation for the wrongness of murder could be challenged by mentioning the fact that death is inevitable. Given that everyone will die one day, we cannot do anything to prevent anyone’s preference to not die from being violated. If someone murders another person, they are violating a preference of that person that will eventually bound to get violated anyways. Normally, we don’t consider hastening a negative outcome that would have occurred anyways to be a major harm. You might say in response that a murderer violates a preference that his victim has to specifically not die on the particular day that she dies, but under this specification, the preference-based theory just seems to be a deprivation account and it seems to contain the same problems that the deprivation account contains.

3. Grief-based theory: Some people might think that murder is a great wrong because it causes the loved ones of a murdered person to grieve. But, grief is also an inevitable part of any close relationship between 2 people that will last a lifetime. The only thing that might be changed by murder is who the grieving party happens to be. For example, if someone murders a young kid, then this will cause his parents to grieve and that’s bad. But, if that kid wasn’t murdered then he would likely have to grieve the death of his parents one day. While we might say that grief of losing your child is usually greater, could we really say that the child’s murder made things much worse in terms of grief?

4. Religious theories: Some people might have religious reasons to be opposed to murder but it’s worth noting that religious texts almost never seem to specify that murder is more wrong than other wrong things like stealing, adultery, and lying. In fact, I once heard a Christian pastor say that all sins are equally wrong in the eyes of God and that we should not assume that sins like lying to someone are less wrong than murder.

5. Kantian theories: Kantians also rarely seem to have a specific argument that murder is more wrong than other wrong acts.

While there may be more explanations given for the wrongness of murder, I think I covered the ones that are most commonly mentioned. I would love to hear some polite and constructive counter arguments to my claims and to start a pretty good dialogue.