Is Killing Wrong?: A Study in Pure Sociology

7. The Cultural Dimension

around the year 1317—the exact date is unknown—the king of the Irish province of Ulster, Donal o’neill, composed a remonstrance, or formal letter of complaint, to Pope John XXII. Writing on behalf of the chiefs and people of Ireland, o’neill complained of the cruel and unjust manner in which the English were ruling his land (Duffy 1998: 480). among his grievances was that no Englishman “is punished for the murder of an Irishman, even the most eminent.” “The English of Ireland,” the complaint continued, “differ so widely in their principles of morality from those of England and all other nations that they may be called a nation of the most extreme degree of perfidy. Lay and cleric, they assert it is no more sin to kill an Irishman that it is to kill a dog” (quoted in Curtis 1938: 192). The king’s lament is a familiar one in human history—two ways of life, two standards of morality. For dividing the English and the Irish at the time was a litany of civilizational contrasts. Each nation had its own language, music, history, traditions, folklore, etiquette, and entertainments.1 Sociologists call this dimension of social life culture, and it profoundly affects the morality of killing. CULTURAL GEOMETRY Culture “is the symbolic aspect of social life” (Black 1976: 61). a quantitative dimension of social space, culture includes all forms of individual and collective expression, such as language, religion, art, folklore, and science. Culture varies in several ways, including its frequency or conventionality. In america today, English is a more conventional language than Spanish, Christianity a more conventional religion than Buddhism, and a business suit more conventional male attire than a loin cloth. 7 THE CULTURAL DIMENSION the cultural dimension 133 Conventionality is an elevated location in social space, a form of social status. Hence, Blackian theory holds that the familiar fourfold status effect applies: homicide is more serious in a direction toward more conventionality than toward less conventionality; in a direction toward more conventionality, seriousness increases with cultural distance; in a direction toward less conventionality, seriousness decreases with cultural distance; and seriousness increases with the conventionality of both parties.2 Cultures can be more or less distant from one another, quite apart from their conventionality. Even when all religions are numerically equal, Protestantism and Catholicism are less distant than Protestantism and Islam—they have more beliefs and practices in common. Similarly , as languages, French and Italian are less distant than French and korean—their vocabulary and syntax are more similar. Black (1976: 74) proposes that the relationship between law and cultural distance is curvilinear: little law is found between culturally close disputants and between those who are so distant as to live in different social worlds; between these extremes, greater cultural distance increases law. Within modern societies, the last part of the curve can generally be ignored and the proposition simplified: law increase with cultural distance. Conventionality and cultural distance, then, overlap to some degree .3 nonetheless, the concepts are separate, as cultural distance does not necessarily imply unconventionality. Both help to explain the handling of homicide. LAW Conventionality manifests itself in many ways—in how people think, dress, and speak, in what they say, believe, and worship. Blending in with the crowd, however constituted, is generally an advantage in legal disputes. In modern Western nations, such as the United States, it is more serious to kill a house-dweller than a tent-dweller, a beauty queen than a drag queen, a bourgeois than a bohemian. Elsewhere, the killing of members of majority groups likewise triggers greater penalties . For instance, in Islamic countries, such as Saudi arabia, the killing of a Muslim generates more punishment and compensation than the killing of a non-Muslim (U.S. Department of State 2006). 134 Is Killing Wrong? racial and ethnic groups commonly have distinctive cultures, and their members may be legally advantaged or disadvantaged, depending in part on the group’s frequency in the population. Frontiers provide many examples. FrontIerS Frontiers serve as natural laboratories for the study of the effects of cultural differences and particularly majority-minority relations. The commingling of disparate languages, attire, beliefs, and traditions increases the potential for conflict if only because of the heightened potential for misunderstanding (see, e.g., reid 1999). Perhaps the most renowned frontier is the nineteenth-century american West (Hines and Faragher 2000). Hundreds of books, articles, and movies...