What Is A Man?

...A miserable little pile of secrets.

But enough Castlevania references; have at you!

So I recently was thinking about the issue of killing nonhuman entities in fiction. A lot of shows have it apparently being okay to kill sapient nonhumans, but not humans—even if the characters are police or military. One wonders, do people who write shows understand that cops and soldiers don't kill aliens, when they fight? They kill humans. And they learn to cope.

For instance, many seem to think it's terrible, in BSG, that people say "The Cylons aren't people, just machines." Does anybody ever think to say, "Uh, sure, they're people; they're sapient AIs. They're people who want to kill us, therefore we have the right to stop them. Cyloni delendi sunt, lupa."

The same idea comes up a lot in vampire stories; the vampire hunters being good would actually be edgy, these days—since the vampires turned into the post-Drizzt Do'urden drow:

Nale: Now the whole species consists of nothing but Chaotic Good rebels, yearning to throw off the reputation of their evil kin.
Haley: Evil kin? Didn't you just say they were all Chaotic Good?
Nale: Details.

Never mind vampires are really just very unhappy ghosts, so even when they're trying to help, they'll actually be hurting people—as they say in Korea (well, shamans say it, anyway), "The hand of the dead is a thorny hand."

Why does this crap happen?

Because people heard that people dehumanize their enemies—because apparently it's only possible to hate a nonhuman. Never mind one can actually only hate a person; seriously, when's the last time you hated an animal?

Now, I will concede that it's easier to make people mistreat others if you can make them think of those others as something other than human. But that's only because many people are too soft to cope with having to kill men—they'd have to be more grownup to want to kill their enemies man-to-man.

Incidentally, there's only two viable tests for personhood, and one's a little unworkable. The unworkable one is Rousseau's: people are defined by their free will. Unfortunately, the only way you know you have free will is your subjective experience of choosing. You can't actually tell if other people have it. Weird, huh?

The other standard, used by everyone who isn't Rousseau, is reason: anything you observe reasoning (also making abstractions) is a person, by definition. This is a test, though, not an actual definition, since angels are people but they don't need to reason (or learn, that's how much smarter than you an angel is).

Late addition (2009/10/6):It occurred to me, that a distinction must be made. What, that is, about individuals of a generally rational species (humans) who can't reason, like babies, or the brain-damaged...or Joss Whedon? They've still got the same rights (inconveniently, in that last case). See, your rights are yours by nature—you can forfeit some of them by your acts, but never by your condition. And your nature is defined by your species.

What about if you want something other than human nature as the basis of "rights"? Like this half-bright I talked to on a forum years ago, who said he had his rights as a member of the community, not as a human being—he actually denied human rights, as such.

Well, what, exactly, is to keep whatever other thing you decide to base the rights on, from withdrawing them? What's to keep the community from deciding you're not a member, and killing you?

Unless, of course, membership in the community is the right of all people...as people...or in other words, a human right.