We Humans Don’t Really Have a Killing Instinct

“There are no instincts, if by instinct we mean behaviors that we perform without needing to learn to perform them. Can you think of anything we do without learning to do it? … No, the question we should ask is not whether there is an instinct to kill, but rather, whether killing is something that we value. … We value much more than we judge to be worth valuing … [and] we, as a people, do value killing.”