Killing In the Name Of Hunting, murder, and war are all words men have made to distinguish between types of killing and the varied justifications made for committing the same deed. In carrying out this most grave and final of all endeavors, as any other action, one sees it is not the actual temporal action itself that matters and defines the moment. The intention with which one sets out is even more important than what is done, and determines, at least within the actor’s mind, the righteousness of the act. G. E. M. Anscombe’s “War and Murder” provides the baseline definitions f how to categorize killing during a time of war.
These views are supplemented by fictional works in which death and its cause play a central role. Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” clearly illustrates predators and murderers as interchangeable, while the historical-fiction account of Breaker Morant depicts the ambiguity of assigning culpability to killing during a time of sanctioned war. Anscombe argues that military violence is essential to the preservation of society, and society necessary modern man’s wellbeing and happiness.
Murder then becomes a corruption of the power only the state is to wield. Furthermore, the strong commanding the weak exerts a beneficent “coercive power” which is “essential to … [society]” (Anscombe). This monopoly on violence even extends to limiting the responses a “private man” can offer in a struggle against an aggressor (Anscombe). The state then paradoxically becomes the authority on preventing violence, and also greatest creator of violence in its struggles with other sovereign nations.
Though most view war as an unfortunate result of the human condition, animosity to the In “War and Murder”, troops on the following orders is rarely seen because the type of illing they are engaged in is legitimized by the governing authority. Consider a former soldier killing someone for trespassing. He shot men in war for crossing his patrol line, and he does so now. Although the actions, described from a detached objective sense, are nearly identical, the two situations will have very different consequences for the soldier.
In one case, a medal or commendation, in the other prison or parole. The nature of violence is such that it is not inherently good or evil, but judged as righteous or villainous within the framework of culture and authority the observer resides in. In act, Anscombe explains the “perverse” way in which this relativism of intentions affects the conundrum of sin and guilt by saying that intentions determine “the goodness or badness of an action” and that therefore one “only had to ‘direct [his] intention’ in a suitable way.
In practice, this means making a little speech to yourself: “What I mean to be doing is… ” (Anscombe). The portrait painted by the Catholic analysis of war is a world where it is the duty of the strong (nations, groups, or individuals) to dominate the weak so that the world is a less wild and primitive place to inhabit. In “The Most Dangerous Game”, the hunter Rainsford, a man used to being in control of life and death, finds himself as the quarry in an ironic reversal of fate. Only when in the place of the prey does he understand the fear and terror felt when pursued by the reaper.
Compounding the mania experienced by Rainsford is the fact that he cannot plead ignorance. He has been the predator countless times, pursuing his living quarry with religious zeal, and he knows how this encounter ends all too often. The antagonist, General Zaroff, has grown bored of traditional hunts and sought out “the only animal with reason” (Connell). Killing men for entertainment, or “sport”, may seem barbaric to most civilized people. But many other deaths occur daily from trivial pursuits from the running of the bulls in Pamplona to the ski slopes in the Alps.
Furthermore, if the General seems desensitized to the destruction of human life, this doubtless stems from his service as a Cossack officer, where killing men was compulsory and undoubtedly an adrenaline-fueled adventure. The “legitimate” killing in war very well may have given him the taste for his “barbaric” hunts. To hunt is to kill with the intention of sport. This fictionalized anecdote illustrates that the killing in itself is neither good nor bad, but judged so by the killer.
When General Zaroff was hunting enemies of the Russian state in the Caucus Mountains, were those kills more honorable than his forays into his private “game reserve”? Would the General’s killings be more legitimate if he declared himself the monarch of his small island, and wrote out an ultimatum against all who washed up on his shores? Upon closer examination line used to distinguish killings blurs. The tragedy of Breaker Morant, the Australian put to death for his execution of Boer P. O. W. s, as not that he died in a foreign land in a futile war. That much must have been expected by many men in his unit.
The film documents the court-martial of an officer and his subordinate officers serving in the Bushveldt Carbineers, an elite anti- guerrilla division fighting in the Boer War. They are accused of murder, committed in the field. Through the arguments from the prosecution and defense, past events are brought to light that make one question the legitimacy of killing at any time, and the painful similarities between murder and battle. The tragedy is that he became the tool of the state’s monopoly on violence, nly to be thrown in the trash heap once it became politically expedient.
In the struggle between the Breaker and the crown, both parties believed that they are pursuing the best course of action in the taking of a life. Ironically, the legitimized form of killing many soldiers had to commit in the Boer War, for him was labeled as murder due to the framework that the British government viewed the events within. This is a conflict of intentions, and was resolved by erasing the point of view, and man, that disagreed with the state’s monopoly on violence. Through the perspectives offered by all three sources, the elativity of the moral justifications behind each death becomes clearer.
The death of Breaker Morant was justified to hold save the British from a German incursion in South Africa. The deaths Breaker Morant ordered were justified by the conventions of the brutal war the men were engaged in. The killings General Zaroff routinely carried out were justified because “Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and if needs be taken by the strong” (Connell, 12). Through all of these instances, Anscombe laments the killing of innocents, but acknowledges that right omes from the justifications with which we set out to do the deed.
Anscombe declares that it is “nonsense” to form justifications other than “the means you take to your chosen end,” (6). The uncaring disposal of Breaker Morant by the crown and the cold calculating closure of General Zaroff all illustrate the very human need to feel justified in our acts described by Anscombe as the impetus behind all other moral The justifications for killing are varied, but the relativism that seems to permeate the logic offered by both parties on any exchange of violence shows that the act is not efined by the end it provides, but rather the means by which rationalizations. he killer comes to the conclusion that he must kill.
Whether General Zaroff on the chase, Breaker Morant facing the firing squad, or the Catholic soldier in the trenches trying to make peace with his faith and circumstances, the approach of death and its decisiveness cuts down all arguments for its justification. Realizing that intentions, especially in violent conflicts, must be carefully chosen and questioned, and not blindly followed, is paramount for the average citizen, and certainly future commissioned officers.