Is Killing Wrong?

"Thou shalt not kill" is arguably the mostbasic moral and legal principle in any society. Yet while some killers are pilloriedand punished, others are absolved and acquitted, and still others are lauded andlionized. Why? The traditional answer is that how killers are treated depends on thenature of their killing, whether it was aggressive or defensive, intentional oraccidental. But those factors cannot explain the enormous variation in legalofficials' and citizens' responses to real-life homicides. Cooney argues that aradically new style of thought--pure sociology--can. Conceived by the sociologistDonald Black, pure sociology makes no reference to psychology, to any singleperson's intent, or even to individuals as such. Instead, pure sociology explainsbehavior in terms of its social geometry--its location and direction in amultidimensional social space.Is Killing Wrong? provides the most comprehensiveassessment of pure sociology yet attempted. Drawing on data from well over onehundred societies, including the modern day United States, it represents the mostthorough account yet of case-level social control, or the response to conductdefined as wrong. In doing so, it demonstrates that the law and morality of homicideare neither universal nor relative but geometrical, as predicted by Black'stheory.