Is it truly evil to kill someone else to save yourself?

I got to thinking about this after reading about Mind Flayers in Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks and then again after watching Coraline. It's not clear to me in the movie, but I've read that in the book - which I haven't read, but I've read about it - it's strongly implied that the Other Mother eats the souls of children because she would starve to death otherwise. She's often referred to as the villain of the story, and Mind Flayers are considered evil even though they need to eat brains directly from victims skulls to survive. But can these characters really be considered evil villains when their motive is just to avoid starving to death? Obviously being a humanitarian isn't right even for one's own survival, but can we really call such a person a bad person when their motive is fear of dying? Wouldn't a lot of otherwise decent people in real life do the same thing in a desperate situation? What do you think?

edited 8th Oct '15 4:20:17 PM by SeriesOfNumbers

I'm letting this thread happen but I'll just point out that we do have a general philosophy thread, where this discussion might be more likely to get well thought-out and properly compose replies (with definitions and so on). That's not to say that this conversation can't occur here, obviously - just that it'll probably be better there.

Similar arguments could probably be made about vampires and such. Of course, the same logic that prevents one from calling them "evil" per se also means that it's hard to come up with logical reasons not to kill them anyway, at least when confronted directly. They eat people to survive, people kill them to not get eaten.

Circle of Death.

The simplest way to answer this question is to look at people who have done so, such as the Donner party, since survivor accounts do talk about the cannibalism they did to survive being trapped over the winter.

It's also a bit obvious, but we don't consider self defense to be murder; in such cases, killing someone else to save yourself (or others) is normally considered the right thing to do.

edited 9th Oct '15 3:56:58 AM by BlueNinja0

Context can also be a rather important thing. This is in a fantasy Dn D setting with cosmic Good/Evil and lots of monsters swarming around? As opposed to a more realistic place closer to RL?

In a fantasy setting, the 'someone else' you kill to survive could be an evil person, and there could be plenty of such people to go around. Especially if the guy who feeds on others is a player character... I mean an adventurer. In real life, finding humans who deserve death on a regular basis is probably much harder.

Didn't the Donner Party merely eat their dead without being the ones who made them dead in the first place?

A more accurate example would be some shipwrecked sailors (Edit: found it) who were convicted (albeit not sentenced to death, IIRC Edit: Commuted) for murdering one of their number for his meat.

edited 10th Oct '15 3:23:22 AM by Medinoc

About vampires: it would depend on whether they need to kill the people (or animals) they feed from (it varies across the various works in which they appear). If they do, then killing them would be self-defence (like with the mindflayers). If they don't, then some non-violent deals could be made.

There is a distinct difference in killing sentient beings than there is in killing others.

As Mordin Solus puts it in Mass Effect he "never experiments on anything that can do calculus".

Wether this is something that humans rationalize in order to excuse the slaughter of animals, or is something that makes sense, is up to you to decide.

Personally, I think it's just a familiarity thing. Sentience is an arbitrary line in the sand that we've declared to be the definitive humanizing quality. Since we can't just declare, "Never kill things" due to the biological requirement of killing to exist, science fiction has declared sentience to be the measure by which we determine what life has value and what life does not.

But that distinction is ultimately rooted more in Sci-Fi's idealism than anything else. While Sci-Fi writers are going, "You are a bad person if you kill a sentient lifeform," Fantasy writers are constantly undermining it with Always Chaotic Evil races that, despite their intelligence, must be slaughtered en masse. Meanwhile, in the real world, we are a long ways from holding sentience in such vaunted esteem because we can't even agree to stop killing our own species.

The result is a weird sort of disconnect between the worldviews of, "That is a sentient creature, therefore it is wrong to kill it," versus "Who the f*ck cares about 'sentient creatures' when it's them or us?" versus "Y'know, things that can't perform calculus have a right to exist too, guys."

EDIT: Of note, the level of intelligence required to qualify for "sentient" itself seems to be fairly arbitrary due to the fact that we're attempting to definitively prove a creature's ability to feel or think - something impossible to know without being able to communicate with them.

An advanced alien race might just as easily deem us non-sentient because "The average human cannot perform advanced quantum physics calculations in their head, erego, they're not an intelligent species."

edited 9th Oct '15 1:32:22 PM by TobiasDrake

I've read Coraline. The mother doesn't have to eat children's souls to survive. She's a horrible monster who does monstrous things and deserves to be put down.

As mentioned before, there is a big difference between eating a dead body in a survival situation or killing someone trying to kill you vs. a vampire.

Now that you mentioned the bit about Fantasy vs Sci-Fi I think it interesting to bring out the Always Chaotic Evil nature of the bad guys (orcs, goblins, ogres, undead, whatever) that although sentient, they seem blatantly incapable to be anything more than man eating monsters. The "humanizing" of savage orc races is a relatively modern addition.

But pragmatically seen, even other biological entities murder each other. I am not sure if the definition of "sentience" is as arbitrary as you make it out to be but our sense of morality is definitely arbitrary and different to anything else...that is, even assuming that it is possible for other beings to have a sense of what we call "morality".

If anything, THAT sounds like an alien concept to think about

I think the main problem here is people using "sentient" for "sapient" most of the time. And even there, the threshold for sapience may be arbitrary.

That seems more like a problem we need to work on rather than something we should use to devalue the concept of sapience and how it plays into morality.

Well, on earth we have the Great Apes and Cetaceans as suspected sapients, and generally we avoid killing any of those these days.

If you think it's okay to kill life-forms that cannot do calculus (or are sapient), wouldn't it be okay to kill babies and severely mentally disabled humans?

The exact quote is, "Never do experiments on species capable of performing calculus." Otherwise, given that it's coming from a member of the species who has deployed culture-shaping bioweapons^note said bioweapons are a tailored set of viruses that reduce the hyperfertility of a sapient species by 99.9%, so that their birth rates are more in line with the other spacefaring races. The fact that it effectively destroys their culture and leaves every female to bury dozens of stillborn children each year is utterly ignored by the scientist until you pretty much shove it in his face. it would sound way to close to advocating eugenics.

Mind Flayers and Vampires alike have other qualities that make them evil. For example both enthrall, enslave, or alter people against their will often in horrible ways. They also often align with overtly evil entities like demons, evil gods, and dark powers. They are not simply evil for eating they do other things that pushes them that far.

Right, but in some canons they don't all have those abilities. What of a vampire that needs to drink blood to survive, but is only fast and strong without any mind powers?

The most common depiction is the not so nice and more then just needs to feed though.

Just to make sure, are we talking about human killing each other or human vs other species or other species vs other species?

Edit: Why the fuck would you correct make into Mae, auto-correct?!

Because the mythical and fictional monsters were brought up as examples of not evil because they need to eat to live. It isn't the eat to live part that makes them evil. Neither would be killing someone else to save yourself. In real life it is a morally ambiguous and situational thing.

You might be judged more harshly if you have other reasonably viable options open to you and you kill them anyways then if you are in oh shit no choice left type situation.

For the monsters it is the other things they do beyond just feeding that usually marks them as evil. Mind Flayers do lots of bad things beyond sucking your brain out for a snack. While yes there are some depictions of vampires that have them just needing to eat to survive the bulk of the depictions it is seldom just eat to survive and has other implications.

Vampires also get a bad rep because they tend to be immortal. Their blood sucking is violently cutting short the life of several people while they prolong their lives for centuries and centuries on far beyond the natural limit. It seems very selfish of them to value their prolonged life over thousands of shorter innocent ones.

Eh. It's not really reasonable to ask people to give up their lives for your sake, immortal or not. It doesn't mean we let them do as they please, merely that we have a conflict of interest.

edited 10th Oct '15 4:05:46 PM by wehrmacht

My point exactly.

edited 10th Oct '15 8:21:32 PM by Gaon

-oops nevermind

edited 10th Oct '15 8:47:10 PM by wehrmacht