Conservatives and the metaphysics of killing

Is something weird going on with conservatives understanding of the metaphysics of killing? I don’t have any knockdown evidence for this, but there’s strange bits and pieces suggesting it.

Elon Musk recently tweeted that his neuralink implants don’t kill monkeys, because the monkeys studied are already terminally ill. This is bizarre. If I shoot someone who is terminally ill, I’ve definitely still killed them. Maybe if they were going to die anyway very soon it’s a bit less wicked- maybe - but I certainly have still killed them and I am culpable for that. Now there may be ethical pluses to using terminally ill monkeys in comparison to healthy monkeys, I can definitely see that as a possibility, but you’re still killing them and it’s very important that be acknowledged.

During COVID, a number of conservatives insisted that a lot of people who died with COVID hadn’t died of COVID. In some cases, this was just making the potentially legitimate point that a lot of them would have died around the same point in time anyway- so maybe COVID played no role. Others appeared to be making a sort of utilitarian claim that these deaths are okay because they didn’t increase the total death rate (this is very empirically false: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ). But some of the conservatives seemed to be saying something deeper- deeper and much weirder- that if COVID alone wouldn’t have been enough to kill you, then even if you wouldn’t have died without COVID, it wasn’t really COVID that killed you. That is to say if an elderly, obese man wouldn’t have died if he was young and fit, then COVID “didn’t really” kill him- even if he might have lived on a decade or more without COVID. Once again, this totally misunderstands the metaphysics of killing.

During police brutality cases it is often argued by conservatives that the victim wasn’t really killed by the cop because he was high at the time. In the vast majority of cases, it seems exceedingly unlikely that just being that high on a couch somewhere would have killed the victim- that the victim had a high enough dose that they were almost certainly going to die soon but were just walking around. Thus, at least in most cases, the drugs, at most, contributed to the victims death by interacting with the chokehold or other physical strain applied by the cops or vigilantes. This is still killing. Even if someone is unusually vulnerable due to a medical condition or drug, if you choke them and they die, you still killed them. You may have even murdered them, if the possibility of their death was a reasonably foreseeable outcome of your actions, and real self-defense is not applicable. Yet a number of conservatives don’t seem to grasp this, or are pretending not to grasp it.

Now a lot of this is probably just a confluence of political coincidences- if events had gone differently conservatives would be arguing for a wider concept of killing than leftists and liberals. However, if I were to try and locate this phenomena in a fundamental account of the conservative mind, I’d point to:

1. Their contempt toward those whose conditions- whether drug use, or frailty, make them more vulnerable.

2. Their strange view of agency, deliberateness and intentionality which focuses on a kind of direct maliciousness.