The Right of the State Over the Individual in War (1886)

Abstract

157. (1) It may be admitted that to describe war as ‘multitudinous murder’ is a figure of speech. The essence of murder does not lie in the fact that one man takes away the life of another, but that he does this to ‘gain his private ends’ and with ‘malice’ against the person killed. I am not here speaking of the legal definition of murder, but of murder as a term of moral reprobation, in which sense it must be used by those who speak of war as ‘multitudinous murder’. They cannot mean murder in the legal sense, because in that sense only ‘unlawful killing’, which killing in war is not, is murder. When I speak of ‘malice’, therefore, I am not using ‘malice’ in the legal sense. In that sense ‘malice’ is understood to be the attribute of every sense ‘wrongful act done intentionally without just or lawful excuse’, and is ascribed to acts (such as killing an officer of justice, knowing him to be such, while resisting him in a riot) in which there is no ill-will of the kind which we suppose in murder, when we apply the term in its natural sense as one of moral disapprobation. Of murder in the moral sense the characteristics are those stated, and these are not present in the case of a soldier who kills one on the other side in battle. He has no ill-will to that particular person or to any particular person.