Killing is moral?

One would think this would be fairly straightforward. It's not right to kill other people. But for some odd reasons, legally, at least, we've come up with a lot of exceptions: the Americans have "degrees" of homicide; almost every country makes some kind of distinction between willfully and accidentally killing someone, or between planning the crime or simply committing it in an act of rage or hyperemotion. And, I suppose that there are good reasons for this - legally - but it really doesn't detract from the immorality of the act, does it? After all, it's for good reason that you can still be punished legally even if you accidentally kill someone. It would seem that these are not exceptions after all, but I thought about this some more. What about the state/country/government? Why are they exempt?

Willfully killing a human being is called murder, and the state murders in two primary ways: capital punishment and war. You can twist and turn it any way you want, but while capital punishment may be legal, as it is in the US, China, or Iran, it is never moral. Oh sure, there are lots of folks who go to great lengths to justify the laws on religious grounds, but as we saw last time, morality is broader in scope than religion, so if your religion sanctions state-committed murder, you may just be an devotee of an immoral religion. Seems oxymoronic, if not downright paradoxical, to me, but I can only call them as I see them. When all is said and done, a state has simply given itself the right to commit murder without sanctions. But again, that doesn't make it moral, only legal.

A very similar case obtains with war. States, for whatever reasons, reserve the right to wage war. I'm not arguing that a possible case can be made for defending oneself against invasion, but what about the aggressors? According to their states, they are not murdering, they are "only" waging war. We have to ask ourselves though, when is a war a war. That may sound silly at first, but what the US did in, say, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan certainly looked a lot like war, those events are referred to as wars, but the US never "officially" declared war in any of those cases. I mean, there is a mechanism is place for making sure everyone knows what you're doing is actually that special case in which you've exempted yourself from the rules applying to murder. And if you don't do that? You see my dilemma?

We can even take this one a step further: what is the case with the innocent women and children who are killed in US drone attacks in, say, Pakistan? We're talking about Pakistani citizens who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, innocents who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Isn't that murder? Referring to them as "collateral damage" is probably more heinous than killing them. They were human when they were killed; their not even that anymore if they are only damage.

You may not like the outcome, but when considered morally, if killing is immoral, then all killing is immoral. We may tolerate some kinds of killing, but our tolerating them does not lessen their immorality. If our morality means something to us, then we need to start thinking very hard about how much immorality our morality can tolerate. I have found that my threshold is very low. What about you?