"The commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' does not say it's O.K. to kill some people and not others"
About this Quote
Harris takes a line that’s been domesticated into polite symbolism and snaps it back into its literal, inconvenient shape. By insisting that "Thou shalt not kill" contains no footnotes, he’s attacking the most common moral maneuver in modern life: treating absolutes as branding while carving out exceptions whenever politics, war, or social hierarchy demand it.
The intent is less theological than anthropological. Harris, a scientist of culture, is alert to how societies preserve their self-image. We proclaim a clean, universal rule, then quietly invent categories of people for whom the rule doesn’t apply: enemies, criminals, heretics, the “dangerous,” the disposable. His wording ("some people and not others") is deliberately blunt, almost childish, because that’s the point: the justifications are sophisticated; the underlying structure is crude.
The subtext is accusation. He’s calling out the moral sleight-of-hand that lets communities see themselves as humane while endorsing state violence, capital punishment, or “necessary” killing abroad. The quote also needles selective piety: the commandment gets invoked to police individual behavior, but becomes strangely flexible when the killing is bureaucratized, uniformed, or rhetorically sanitized.
Contextually, Harris writes in a late-20th-century landscape where moral language is constantly recruited to legitimize power. His scientific posture matters: he’s not preaching purity, he’s diagnosing inconsistency. The line works because it refuses the comforting middle ground. Either a commandment is a limit on everyone, or it’s a story we tell to feel righteous while making exceptions for ourselves.
The intent is less theological than anthropological. Harris, a scientist of culture, is alert to how societies preserve their self-image. We proclaim a clean, universal rule, then quietly invent categories of people for whom the rule doesn’t apply: enemies, criminals, heretics, the “dangerous,” the disposable. His wording ("some people and not others") is deliberately blunt, almost childish, because that’s the point: the justifications are sophisticated; the underlying structure is crude.
The subtext is accusation. He’s calling out the moral sleight-of-hand that lets communities see themselves as humane while endorsing state violence, capital punishment, or “necessary” killing abroad. The quote also needles selective piety: the commandment gets invoked to police individual behavior, but becomes strangely flexible when the killing is bureaucratized, uniformed, or rhetorically sanitized.
Contextually, Harris writes in a late-20th-century landscape where moral language is constantly recruited to legitimize power. His scientific posture matters: he’s not preaching purity, he’s diagnosing inconsistency. The line works because it refuses the comforting middle ground. Either a commandment is a limit on everyone, or it’s a story we tell to feel righteous while making exceptions for ourselves.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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