“People who don't want to be killed made up the rule that it's wrong to kill people”

The expression “people who don’t want to be killed made up the rule that it’s wrong to kill people” is Lemon’s blunt account of the prohibition on murder: he presents it as a rule devised by people seeking safety, rather than as an ethical principle beyond question. Spoken to the Prince after Lemon has killed someone, it becomes both a provocation and a test of what the Prince expects violence to mean.

The claim and its setting

The Prince asks why killing is considered wrong when war and the death penalty are permitted. Lemon answers from the immediate circumstances: he has just killed someone, making the question pointed rather than abstract. He describes the rule as the work of people who fear being killed and cannot otherwise guarantee their safety. In his reasoning, a person who wants to survive must take practical steps to avoid danger, whether by not provoking others or by becoming strong.

The answer recasts the moral prohibition as a defensive convention. It does not claim that murder is harmless; instead, it questions the standing of a rule made by people who want protection while leaving open how they can secure it. Lemon’s advice shifts attention from the rule’s moral authority to the risks and choices faced by those living under violence.

The Prince’s response

The Prince is dissatisfied. He had expected Lemon’s conduct to arise from a considered philosophy, but concludes that Lemon is acting out of necessity and has no deeper theory of violence. The gap between them is not simply disagreement over whether killing is wrong: the Prince wants a revealing doctrine, while Lemon offers a pragmatic account grounded in survival. The Prince’s disappointment exposes his tendency to judge other people’s actions by whether they satisfy his intellectual expectations.

The exchange also sits within the Prince’s broader interest in who controls public belief. He argues that people may accept a mistaken account when it comes from an authoritative voice, and points to past confidence in asbestos as an example of how accepted judgments can change. He then emphasizes the power of those who decide what information circulates, observing that a person who knows where the suitcase is can control those who want it. Against this background, Lemon’s claim about moral rules is another question of authority: who makes a rule, whose interests it serves, and why others accept it.

Rules enforced through fear

The novel places the exchange beside a different form of imposed order: the Prince’s control of the schoolchildren. When they plead with Kimura to do something about him, Kimura recalls the idea of learned helplessness. He connects repeated, unavoidable shocks with the students’ belief that resistance is futile. Their apparent inability to oppose the Prince is thus presented not as proof that his rule is legitimate, but as an effect of repeated punishment and fear.

That fear also damages trust among the students. As they prepare to use defibrillator pads on Tomoyasu and his dog, Takeshi, one student threatens another with the prospect of being reported to the Prince. Kimura compares this mutual suspicion to the distrust he had heard about in Terahara’s criminal organization, where members tried to keep punishment directed at someone else. In both settings, a powerful authority’s threat turns possible allies against one another. The contrast clarifies the stakes of Lemon’s expression: rules and conduct do not operate in a moral vacuum; power shapes who can make rules, who must obey, and what resistance seems possible.

A competing account of the prohibition

Later, Suzuki gives the Prince a different explanation. He argues that if murder were permitted, people could not rely on stable ownership or carry out ordinary economic activity; the state therefore prohibits murder to maintain social order and protect life, or at least the appearance of protection. In this account, the prohibition is not grounded in ethics alone. It is one of the rules the state sanctions because the state depends on it.

Lemon’s explanation and Suzuki’s answer converge in treating the prohibition as connected to human and social vulnerability, but they emphasize different sources of authority. Lemon traces it to people seeking personal safety; Suzuki explains it through the state’s need for order and functioning economic relations. The Prince’s question exposes the tension between a rule’s moral presentation and the interests that may sustain it. The expression remains deliberately unsentimental: it makes the desire not to be killed the starting point of law, without resolving whether that origin makes the rule unjustified or indispensable.