Talya wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
It seems that the idea simply fills you with fear and revulsion, because you are so often told that we should not feel pleasure at the death of another. I would agree that we shouldn't, but some people simply do. If, however, they engage in self-control and turn that energy to positive ends, what is immoral about that?
I don't know about immoral, but it's definitely creepy. (See Dexter.)
It occurs to me after seeing this that I may not be entirely clear. The sort of people I'm talking about do not "enjoy killing" in the sense of enjoying the actual death of another person in and of itself, like a psychopath might. They would not, for example,want to strangle a child any more than anyone else.
The killing they enjoy is in confronting and defeating a dangerous enemy, one tht is intelligent and has the potential to kill them. The best way to put it is that they enjoy the defeat of an enemy in circumstances where that defeat is highly likely to end in death for the defeated party. When such people don't find healthy outlets for this, they become things like gang members or other forms of organized criminal, not psychopaths. When they do find a healthy outlet they generally go into the military, in the most combat-oriented tasks they can find.
People like this are also quite rare; the vast majority of soldiers or gang members wouldn't fit into this category.
People like this to a less extreme degree are more common, however, and we call them "adrenaline junkies". One way to satisfy that desire is hunting big game. Big game is dangerous to hunt, just not as dangerous as an armed human.