We all agree most normal people have an aversion to killing. You're saying that having an aversion to killing stops people killing, which is a tautology. And then you say it's not about consequences. What's your explanation then?
It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence, every day, everywhere. Have you never seen a fight/argument on the street suddenly diffuse when a cop appears? Or eg, a guy drunk at a bar, starting to raise his voice in anger at someone, only to simmer down when he sees the bartender walking over because he doesn't want to be kicked out?
Awareness of consequences is a necessary precondition for people to course-correct. That's an essential feature of people: we are able to notice when we're on course toward a bad outcome (whether that's harm to oneself, or harm to someone/something we care about, or any undesirable situation), and so take responsibility for our actions in advance so we can change course. Without that we'd be amoral creatures. This is what makes us moral beings – that we can take responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. This is a good thing. It's what makes us people, and it's the basis of having a civilisation that is mostly peaceful.
It’s not a tautology. The aversion to killing is an inherent psychological thing. Some things are just fundamental to a person’s psychology. Some people have such a strong aversion to spiders that they can’t go near one, even when they know for certain that it’s harmless and there would be no consequences. And psychologically healthy people have that sort of aversion to killing another person. It’s inherent programming.
How often do fights end without police intervention? How many times do people get angry and decide not to escalate it to the point of murder even when they could get away with it? People do sometimes end up in situations where they could get away with killing. They rarely take advantage.
You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
When you mention “a bad outcome” you include harm to someone we care about. The vast majority of people consider a person’s death to be a bad outcome even if they don’t care about that person in particular.
I think you’re conflating two very separate ideas here. There’s the idea of the natural consequences of an action, and then there’s the idea of consequences imposed by some authority. The original comment I replied to was talking entirely about the latter. Here you discuss both but you treat them the same. But someone who refrains from killing because they don’t like the consequence of someone being dead is very different from someone who refrains from killing because they don’t want to go to prison.
There are really three different things here: 1) people don’t kill because of the legal or physical consequences to themselves 2) people don’t kill because they don’t like the outcome of a dead person 3) people don’t kill because they fundamentally don’t want to. There are examples of all 3. The vast majority of people aren’t in category 1. I think they’re almost all in 3, but there’s no practical difference between 2 and 3.
> You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
There is a difference between a bar fight and killing someone with intent. A bar fight is a fight for dominance, like you see in animals, the outcome is rarely fatal as the point is just to establish who is stronger and who should submit.
We have an aversion to killing that goes further than the fear of consequences. It can be seen in the military, where soldiers naturally don't want to kill their enemies, even when they have incentives to do so. To be effective, soldiers have to be desensitized to killing through their training. Enemies are dehumanized, they train on human shaped targets, etc... And even with all that training, after a few years of active service, many start questioning their life choices. It is common for military pilots, who enlist for the love of flying, until they realize what they are really doing, i.e. killing people. When that happens, it is time to retire to a noncombatant job.
Punishing crime is not useless, but I think saying that consequences are the cause of aversion for killing is backwards. We have a natural aversion for killing, especially when we are in a prosperous situation like we (the first world) are now in. And that's why we take murder so seriously.
And speaking of murder, our natural aversion for killing shows when we see how we treat the death penalty nowadays. The death penalty is (generally) for the worst people humanity has to offer, their killing have been approved by the highest authority, and there is still opposition. We even have rituals to offload the responsibility of killing from the executioners. For example by having a random person in a firing squad fire a blank round.
>You're saying that having an aversion to killing stops people killing, which is a tautology. And then you say it's not about consequences. What's your explanation then?
It's a fairly straightforward understanding. If I said I have an aversion to the taste of steak, would you require additional information to why I don't eat steak? Or, to put it in your terms, eating steak causes a negative internal state for me and doesn't require any external consequence to make me avoid it.
>It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence
There's a problem with relying on "intuitive" understandings in some cases, especially when there is contradictory evidence. I think the term for your stance is "deterrence theory/effect." In this case, I believe there are plenty of studies that show harsher consequences do not reduce crimes rates (or at least have marginal effects). People are not rational actors, especially in highly agitated emotional states.
One can have an aversion to the act itself without considering the consequences. People who have never gotten in a real fight before don't understand that its actually quite difficult to throw a full-strength punch at someone if you've never done so before. It's not the consequences that you're considering in that moment, but an aversion to the violence itself.
It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence, every day, everywhere. Have you never seen a fight/argument on the street suddenly diffuse when a cop appears? Or eg, a guy drunk at a bar, starting to raise his voice in anger at someone, only to simmer down when he sees the bartender walking over because he doesn't want to be kicked out?
Awareness of consequences is a necessary precondition for people to course-correct. That's an essential feature of people: we are able to notice when we're on course toward a bad outcome (whether that's harm to oneself, or harm to someone/something we care about, or any undesirable situation), and so take responsibility for our actions in advance so we can change course. Without that we'd be amoral creatures. This is what makes us moral beings – that we can take responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. This is a good thing. It's what makes us people, and it's the basis of having a civilisation that is mostly peaceful.