Epilogue : Why we kill

In this chapter, the authors attempt to answer the question of why we kill, they do not expect to resolve these differences in moral or religious belief. Rather they hope to increase understanding of them and, in turn, to encourage an examination of their own beliefs. As human beings, and indeed as social animals who grow up within a particular context, we will continue to explain and justify, to sanitise and deny, rather than to acknowledge that we too may kill, that we too are capable of such behaviour, even where we do not define it as wrong: Normal people know how to deny things. Zimbardo comments on this behaviour as well, noting the tendency for humans to “ ‘explain away’ our personal responsibility for the damage we cause by our role-based actions,” to the extreme that Nazi SS leaders can claim they were “only following orders”.