Is it Murder?

Words have such power. Beyond they're actual meaning, they can convey sense or attitude on a variety of topics, either positive or negative, by their individual choice.

My eyebrow arched as I saw a tv ad for the latest edition of the National Geographic Magazine. The article that drew my ire was entitled:

Who Murdered the Virunga Gorillas?

(See: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/07/virunga/jenkins-text.html)

Murder Gorillas? In the logical world in which I was raised, this title is itself an oxymoron. Murder is defined as the unlawful taking of a human life. I looked it up on Merriam Webster's and sure enough:

Main Entry:

¹mur·der

Pronunciation:

\ˈmər-dər\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

partly from Middle English murther, from Old English morthor; partly from Middle English murdre, from Anglo-French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English morthor; akin to Old High German mord murder, Latin mort-, mors death, mori to die, mortuus dead, Greek brotos mortal

Date:

before 12th century

1: the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought2 a: something very difficult or dangerous <the traffic was murder> b: something outrageous or blameworthy <getting away with murder>

Well I thought, perhaps they changed the definition of "person?" "No" there too, it reads:

per·son

Pronunciation:

\ˈpər-s^ən\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-French persone, from Latin persona actor's mask, character in a play, person, probably from Etruscan phersu mask, from Greek prosōpa, plural of prosōpon face, mask — more at prosopopoeia

Date:

13th century

1: human, individual —sometimes used in combination especially by those who prefer to avoid man in compounds applicable to both sexes <chairperson><spokesperson>2: a character or part in or as if in a play : guise3 a: one of the three modes of being in the Trinitarian Godhead as understood by Christians b: the unitary personality of Christ that unites the divine and human natures4 aarchaic : bodily appearance b: the body of a human being; also : the body and clothing <unlawful search of the person>5: the personality of a human being : self6: one (as a human being, a partnership, or a corporation) that is recognized by law as the subject of rights and duties7: reference of a segment of discourse to the speaker, to one spoken to, or to one spoken of as indicated by means of certain pronouns or in many languages by verb inflection.

National Geographic is far from the benign magazine of our youth. Regrettably, many, if not most, do not understand the seriously flawed philosophical argument it is attempting to covertly make when it speaks of the "murder of gorillas."

Comments

[Samantha]

poached.

you're right.

[Atlanta Catholic]

Now, if only the pro-abortion advocates could call the killing of babies in the womb, "Murder". Maybe if society starts calling unborn babies, little developing gorillas, there will be outrage at the thought of murdering them.

[Cory T.]

Did you ever think that maybe the word "murder" was selected as an eye-grabber? Journalists tend to choose sensational words for headlines in order to capture people's attention in the short space they get.

I think you're reading WAAAAAY too much into this.

[joanne]

I don't know, Cory, I think he has a point. It seems that an effective first way to desensitize people to reality is to make words less precise. Consider "marriage". Consider "church". One path to destroying both is to define the words more and more inclusively until they have no core meaning. Ditto with "man" and "woman".
Loyala, did you look up "murder" in a published, hard copy of Webster's? I have found, with the other words I mentioned, that on-line dictionary definitions are already corrupt. As I keep telling my friends, we should hang on to our dictionaries as well as our Bibles. The day may come when they are the only mainstream evidence of what we once knew to be true.

[John Heitkamp]

As an undergraduate, I took a course in Nichomachean Ethics taught by Professor Fr. James Stromberg. Fr. Stromberg at some point distinguished between the treatment afforded human beings and that afforded animals and based that moral distinction on the presence of rationality. A student challenged that science might one day prove that the great apes were endowed with reason. In that event, what would Fr. Stromberg recommend? Without skipping a beat, he quipped, "Why, then, we should baptize them, of course?"

[John Heitkamp]

As an undergraduate, I took a course in Nichomachean Ethics taught by Professor Fr. James Stromberg. Fr. Stromberg at some point distinguished between the treatment afforded human beings and that afforded animals and based that moral distinction on the presence of rationality. A student challenged that science might one day prove that the great apes were endowed with reason. In that event, what would Fr. Stromberg recommend? Without skipping a beat, he quipped, "Why, then, we should baptize them, of course?"

[loyolalaw98]

Cory,

As a Christian, you should be concerned about the "trend" in national publications to covertly change established cultural norms, including the definition of murder.

Taken in a vacuum, I can see where my rant at RC blog seems like "overkill." I would offer two hopefully salient points that may schew that view.

1.) National Geographic has in recent years become unbelievably anti-Christian. It has done so in the guise of promoting science in the face of "religious" ignorance, especially vis-a-vis creationism vs. evolutionism.

2.) This article appears in the larger context where there are multiple groups advocating that animals have the same rights as people.

You may be right that the word "murder" was chosen for mere attention grabbing. Nonetheless, any use of language that equates human beings with animals should receive a giant dose of opprobrium.

[Jeffrey]

It kind of reminds me of a video I was sent that was all about "Speciesism", basically saying that by eating meat we are like racists but about species instead of skin tone. But do you think the vid creator was pro-life? Haha. Right.
Kind of makes me want to accuse vegetarians or vegans of "Kingdomism". You know, they discriminate against the animalia kingdom eaters while themselves being multicellular and likely Fungi kingdom devourers.
Logic...it has no place in the house of the liberal!
I'm copywriting "kingdomism", by the way. You saw it here first.

[Jeffersonranch]

But behind all this is human nature. The nature will continue to spell evil in different actions and words. Satan runs with us. God help us all.

[Ender]

Well, not everyone believes that the dictionary is the arbiter of 'correct' meaning. Certainly it's the arbiter of 'standard' or 'official' or 'textbook' meaning, but people outside academia rarely stick to that, they use words to mean what they want them to mean at the moment of utterance.

And why should we care what the dictionary definition of a word is, when talking or philosophising? Well for clarity of communication, for one, but what authority should we grant the dictionary?

Taking the fact (I believe) that previous to more modern knowledge about the mechanics of pregnancy the Church was not against abortion before a certain point in pregnancy (the quickening, I think). Before this the foetus was not considered 'human'. And taking the assumption that the populace at large would have agreed, we can construct a hypothetical (one which may be true, but that's irrelevant and I have no interest in researching early dictionaries to find out).

Hypothetically, the writers of the first dictionaries could have defined 'human life' as starting at the quickening. Thus abortion is only murder after that. Would you then argue that we cannot say 'abortion is murder' when referring to abortion pre-quickening, merely because that was the correct definition of the words according to the dictionary?

In that case I would not feel bound by the dictionary definition. And I can therefore understand when other people do the same. Particularly in cases like this where it is clear what they're saying, that the killing is in the same moral category as more conventional murder.

Also, I'd likely refer to the deliberate killing of sentient alien individuals as murder, were we to ever meet them. That's not the dictionary definition either, but is that a useful criteria to use to determine whether I'm right to think that?

[Cameron]

http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2008/07/making-chimps-human.html

It's not so much an attention grabber as it is an attempt to tear down the human exceptionalist philosophy that separates us from animals. We know that only people can kill people; if a gorilla killed a person it would not be murder; if a person kills a gorilla it is not murder... at least until we change "person" to include gorillas. What's the animal rights nutcases' motto? "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." Anthropomorphizing in language is just one part, then it turns to anthropomorphizing in philosophy, then in law.