Question Details	Asked By	Asked On
Why is it normally wrong to kill a person?	tonyrey	08/08/06
Would killing a person in normal circumstances cease to be wrong if the majority decided it is not wrong? If not why not?
Answered By		Answered On
Jim.McGinness		08/09/06
Reverse Euthyphro It seems like you are approaching Plato's Euthyphro problem from the other direction. Socrates disabuses us of the notion that "what the gods command" is identical to "good" or "right" -- and shows that we have an ability to make moral judgements that is independent of or prior to "what is required by God". Here, you are asking us to consider whence these independent moral judgements arise. If the world were otherwise than it is, and most people did not consider killing another person to be wrong, would it still be wrong? I expect people who adhere to a system of moral absoluties will consider the wrongness of killing to be unmodified by whatever world-changing hypothetical assumption you've adopted. For relativists and skeptics about moral absolutes, it's harder to answer. Why would a majority have come to the conclusion that killing is not wrong? What if, for instance, the "killing" was actually a biologically necessary step in reproduction and that the consequences of the "killing" were that one month later you got one or more copies of the person who was "killed"? Under those circumstances, the opinion of the majority is pretty reasonable. There are people who consider sex to be wrong, but the majority don't let that stop them. Moral principles are cultural artifacts. They have arisen in part because they specify behaviors that have helped the culture survive. If the culture finds itself in sufficiently different circumstances, we should expect to see some modifications occur in moral principles.

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