Humans Kill Wantonly
It's bad to exploit others. To steal, to conquer, to torture, and most often when this comes up, to kill. But what makes it especially bad? Killing because you're human. Only humans, you see, are greedy, or jealous, or kill because they revel in someone else's suffering, while a monster who eats you, well, just has to eat. It's just dinner. Or it's just conquest, or whatever—not like those nasty humans.
This can also apply to assassins, who may be human, but still don't kill out of rage, greed, or insanity like all the rest of us human killers do.
At times the same kind of motive can count either way depending on how it's presented. It's better to kill for money—after all, it's nothing personal, assassination is just a job and hey, everyone needs to eat; it's not like you're killing someone out of jealousy. Yet it's also worse to kill for money—Aliens kill because they're Aliens, but only human beings kill each other for cold cash.
Often a form of Broken Aesop meant to imply that Humans Are the Real Monsters. See also Ape Shall Never Kill Ape where the monsters are better because they don't kill even if they do have human motives.
If it is only claimed that the humans are just as bad (rather than worse), because both the humans and nonhumans kill wantonly, that is not this trope but may fall under Not So Different.
No real life examples, please; at least, not until we've made contact with an entirely pacifistic extraterrestrial race.
Film
- Ripley's famous quote above from Aliens.
- Used in Grosse Pointe Blank, where Martin claims that he's better than a psychopath because he kills for money (while psychopaths have no reason at all). He quickly backtracks into a That Came Out Wrong, of course.
- In the live-action adaption of The Jungle Book, Mowgli explains that animals only kill to eat or to keep from being eaten. He doesn't understand the concept of killing out of hatred or sport and gets pissed when one of the hunters tries to explain it to him.
Literature
- The dragon's justification in Guards Guards. Dragons kill because they're supposed to, humans kill for a variety of flimsy reasons, or sometimes just for the hell of it.
We never tortured and killed each other and called it morality.
- In Pyramids, the Assassin's Guild says that killing for money is the only sincere reason to kill, unlike killing "for honor" or "for love". Since they value life, they only kill for a lot of money. They also only kill people capable of defending themselves (skilled fighters or those rich enough to hire their own assassins) and have a list of rules of how a person can be killed, such as not killing bystanders.[1]
- In Worldwar, the Race, who has just invaded the Earth and killed lots of people is shocked to see that humans not only kill each other, but mistreat their prisoners and like to cause suffering.
- The Race is shown to be applying plenty of double standards to humans. They consider human religious beliefs to be primitive and ridiculous, but don't try to say anything bad about their emperors, whom they revere as gods (of course, this can be said about most religious people). They claim that humans are reckless in detonating nukes to try to stop the Race invasion, after nuking Berlin and Washington for no good reason and then retaliating to humans using nukes with their own nukes.
Live-Action TV
- Touched on in Battlestar Galactica Reimagined a little. Six claims murder is humanity's one true art. They also mention Cylons don't torture or try to inflict suffering when they kill. It turns out that she's completely full of shit, but in her defense, she didn't know it at the time.
- Averted in the Doctor Who episode "A Christmas Carol". Kazran states that he wanted to see a fish, not kill one. The Doctor points out that the shark was trying to eat Kazran, getting the response, "He was hungry."
- In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, "A Taste of Armageddon," this trope is the rationale for the insane computer war two worlds are fighting. To oppose that, Kirk has to tell them that they of course are capable of self-control like any rational being.
Video Games
- The Professor's opening monologue on the TurboGrafx-16 CD game It Came From The Desert contrasts us with ants, shortly before the town is overrun by giant mutant ants:
Professor: Ants, Buzz. They build cities, wage wars, take slaves to work their underground farms. Some can even fly hundreds of feet into the sky and travel across vast oceans. But they never kill for sport. That is solely the domain of Homo Sapiens.
- ↑ although, as Teatime learnt, that one's more of a guideline