Category:Killer: Difference between revisions

A killer snuffs out the life of another being.

Depending upon the identity of the killer, of the killed, and of the witness, the act of killing may, or may not, constitute a crime. A lumberjack might think nothing of killing a tree; the state would agree with him so long as the tree was his to kill and as long as any consequent taxes were paid; a druid would agree with neither and might well see any gratuitousness on the part of the lumberjack as a crime.

Most individuals, however, do not even conceive of men armed with blades in fields or forests as killers. Indeed many individuals fail to conceive of themselves as killers as they stamp on the heads of vermin. And what about medical researchers experimenting on animals? To say nothing of mad scientists obsessed with stealing the fire of the gods and creating life.... Did Dr. Victor Mordenheim pause to wonder if he was a killer upon deciding to shut off the laboratory pump that was keeping the brain of Rudolph von Aubrecker alive? The threshold beyond which one becomes a killer in one's own eyes is flexible, all too conveniently flexible.

And what of the living confronting the undead? A creature that has returned from the grave is not exactly dead and is not exactly alive. To be undead is to be stuck somewhere in between. One robs precious little from a skeleton in pounding it to powder. One robs an existence at least as rich as that of a living man from a vampire in delivering it to the true death. The soul has perhaps long fled the rotted shell of the zombie. But is it absent from the titanic intellectual existence of the lich? Isn't there something wrong in speaking of "destroying liches", on one hand, and "killing mold", on the other? Isn't it things that one destroys and subjects that one kills? Is a vampire any less a subject than a living man? Is a living man any less a thing than a vampire? The difference, if there is one, is "life". Both creatures exist, both may revel in their existence. Only one "lives", only one is druid certified as "natural", only one is cleric certified as being "pumped full of positive energy", only one is biologist certified as obeying "received biological ideas". There is generically right being and generically wrong being. There is us and there is them. We are capable of good and evil, and so cannot be executed justly unless we are judged fairly and found to be guilty. They are not really individuals, they are generically evil, and so we can do no evil in wiping them from existence for no injustice can be done to them. There is no moral equivalence between us and them. There is no question of ethics in destroying them to their last. Or might it be better to say that a killer is one who snuffs out the existence of another creature? And so invite the fundamental question of whether the killing is just or injust.