You're confusing interpersonal murder with tribal conflict.
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.
You are juxtaposing murder with killing. Every culture has a strong taboo against unlawful killing, i.e., murder. What counts as murder has changed, but the taboo against murder itself has not.
But doesn't that distinction kind of prove the point? Essentially killing people is fine when society approves and not fine when society doesn't implies that there is no built in norm against killing, its just society's "rules".
Read carefully. Neither me nor bluegatty claimed humans were inherently biased against killing. We claimed that humans were inherently biased against murder - and the universal taboo proves our point.
So your claim is that there is a universal taboo against things that there is a universal taboo against? If your definition of murder is taboo killing, it is very curcular to claim there is a universal taboo against it since by definition it is only murder if there is a taboo. Thus the claim kind of proves the opposite - if you have to limit it to murder then it shows there is no built in bias, as the definition of murder varies from society to society and essentially means killing in a way the society doesn't approve off. There is no possible way for there not to be a bias against murder since if a society is ok with it is ceases to be murder.
To be fair, it doesn't really seem worth mentioning to say humans are inherently biased against murder, which we then agree is a killing against that society's norms. Because the definitions of "murder" vary so hugely, you're essentially just saying "there is a taboo against breaking the arbitrary rules of your social group."
No. What we are saying is that murder is a universal taboo. That the "arbitrary rules" of every social group on earth regulate killing demonstrates exactly that. It is precisely these rules that demonstrate universality. Some societies regulate what you can eat - halal/kosher. Most don't. Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".
> Thus, there is no universal taboo against "unlawful eating".
That's probably a poor choice of example given cannabilism is pretty uniformly condemned.
Even ignoring that, pretty much every society regulates food. The health inspector shutting down resturants is just as much of a regulation as religious rules like kosher & halal (and there is some reason to suspect that the original goal of those rules were at least partially health related and made a lot more practical sense with the technology available 2000 years ago)
Nonetheless, ignoring all that, i still think any self-referential taboo applies in all circumstances, and thus is kind of pointless to discuss.
E.g.
All societies regulate unlawful insider trading. Societies where all insider trading is lawful are still vaccously regulating unlawful insider trading.
I think you are being deliberately obtuse here. Or maybe you are just dumb? Most societies have no concept of trading based on private knowledge and certainly no taboo against that activity. Hence, there is no universality. Your poor attempts at coming up with counterexamples proves my point.
I struggle to think of a society that didn't have some regulation on what you can eat. They almost all have taboos against various meats especially. Can you give me some examples?
Personal murder is tightly controlled now. But this is a fairly recent development. In many periods it was tolerated under various forms, including slavery, blood feud, honour killings, and state-sanctioned murder as punishment, or political process.
It's only in the last few centuries that it's been prohibited, and the prohibition in practice is still partial in many countries. (See also, gun control.)
Tribal murder has been the norm for most of recorded history. There are very, very few periods in very, very few cultures where there was no tribal/factional murder in living memory, and far more where it was an expected occurrence.
And technology has always been close by. Throughout history, most tech has either been invented for military ends or significantly developed and refined for them.