Is genocide worse than "regular" mass murder?

[resistor]

Dark topic, I know, but I'm curious about people's opinions on this.

Many people talk about genocide like it is worse than mass murdering for different reasons. I don't believe killing a group of people because of their ethnicity is any worse than killing an equivalent amount of randomly selected people, but if you disagree I'd be interested to see your reasoning.

[drspendlove]

I agree with your premise. I think the distinction is a matter of "success" rate, where "success" is defined (darkly) as the ability to persuade enough others to commit the murders with you or on your behalf. Getting a group of people to destroy those whose phone numbers are perfectly divisible by the number nine would be a lot harder than getting a group of people to hate, harm, and kill a group seen as Other -- a group they can vent their existing fears and misguided senses of injustice against.

[fallen]

Wow, dark topic for a forum poll.

[slayernz]

For me, Genocide is worse than generic mass murder. Yes, kill 100,000 people randomly vs killing 100,000 people of a particular ethnic background results in the same number of people dead, but the thing that sets Genocide up on the pedestal of not-very-niceness is two-fold.
1) The purpose of genocide is to remove that ethnic group from the landscape (or at least in your corner of the world); and
2) Cause enough fear and panic among that specific ethnic group such that they leave your corner of the world and become SEP (Someone Elses Problem).

Genocide is almost always politically driven, is based on 100% hatred of an ethnic group, and is motivated by xenophobic attitudes. Genocide is also done with the proxy will of the majority will of the nation in which it is conducted - that is, if the majority of the population were tolerant of an ethnic minority, attempts at killing off that minority would be met with rapid protests from within your sovereign borders. Civil uprisings and protests are harder to quell than the yammering of the international community (see Myanmar and the effect of international will).

[Tomas of Moklumnue]

Well, sure, the end results are the same (I guess not really, you could argue that genocide would reduce genetic diversity). Still, what makes an action wrong or right to begin with? The consequences alone? If such is true, then yes, it's the same. But as the classic Trolley Problem would have you reminded, you wouldn't push the fat man into the tracks to save 5 workers, would you?
Do the reasons also count? Some inherent property of the action itself? I suppose i could argue that, since we have the rights not to be killed and not to be discriminated against on the basis of ethnic, randomly slaughtering people only violates one human right as genocide violates two.

[drspendlove]

Those are good points. I hadn't thought about the fear impact causing distress for the survivors. I guess I wasn't thinking of survivors at all. And it depends on deontology versus utilitarianism to an extent which I hadn't thought of at the time.