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Originally Posted by adysav
People believe it is immoral to kill another human because our biological advancement over other animals has endowed us with empathy for our fellow man (and other animals to some extent).
Put up posters of Canadians clubbing baby seals to death and there is uproar. Ask someone to crush the head of a puppy under his boot and in the majority of cases you will get a very negative reaction. Present the same situation with a spider, cockroach or other vermin and there will very rarely be hesitation.
The opposition to killing is not a universal law, but biological and social conditioning that ensure the survival of the species.
Just because we understand the suffering of our victims doesn't make it inherently wrong.
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Are you agreeing with me?
The section of yours that I was responding to hinged upon a racist statement that the 'western' world was more socially 'advanced' than other parts of the world. I dispute that, but never claimed anything was inherently wrong.
I don't agree that 'westerners' have progressed any further than anyone else, only that all people define what they believe to be wrong or immoral behavior; people fill in the category of 'murder' and 'theft' according to their social norms, not based on an objective fact of what murder or theft are actually comprised of.
Murder and theft are containers that hold social meaning, they do not designate objective acts. People fill them in with acts that mean something to themselves and their societies. What one group of people defines as murder is different than what another group defines the same behavior. I don't agree that any one group could be said to be more biologically or culturally advanced than the next one based on how they respectively define their categories.