Assuming that immortality only applies to humans, environmental destruction would be a big one.
People care more about pollution and climate change when they know they’ll be around to face the consequences.
Burying someone alive. Or trapping their feet in cement shoes and throwing them into the ocean.
Unforgiveable implies that there can be no mistake about the negative side effects for even the dumbest among us before committing the act. Torture is about as intentionally cruel as it gets.
Some other suggestions here are frequently used under the umbrella of torture, for example, by the IDF.
While I don’t have any statistics, other than just my impression after reading news or talking to people:
There seem to be people unaware that what they are doing is a form of mental torture. There are (at least what it seems) a lot of toxic relationships, and there are instances where neither the victim nor the perpetrator realize how their actions affect themselves or the other part.
I am far from excusing anyone who behaves in a mentally torturous way and agree that they should be punished, but torture might not be as intentional in all situations.
IMO, we should properly categorize the different kinds of torture and the different severity, and perform punishment based on those categorizations. It makes sense, at least to me, to have a stronger punishment for IDF, than for a toxic mother somewhere.
A couple of things I have read as a comment on this post that I would consider torture:
- Rape (this should be classified as torture today)
- Burying people alive
- Throwing someone in a volcano (in a world where dying is an impossibility)
Some that I am more uncertain on:
- Environmental destruction (one could argue that this is indirect torture, as the end result could lead to people being starved, or harmed in other torturous ways)
Not putting your shopping carts back.
Permanent mutilation
Burying people alive
Stealing from musk.
This one gets more complicated the longer I think about it.
My first pass was to imagine humans just as we are aside from the ability to die. Many things about how humans are don’t make sense without death though. Pain, for example likely evolved to cause organisms to avoid stimuli that could lead to their death. Fear largely derives from the anticipation of pain. Would true immortals have either? I imagine the psychology of such creatures would be vastly different from our own.
There’s also the question of what form the immortality takes. If it’s possible to destroy someone’s physical body, but their soul can immediately manifest a new one, and pain doesn’t exist, then doing so is just an inconvenience. If bodies are impervious to any damage or alteration, a large category of crimes vanishes.
It would probably come down to some sort of long-term imposition on the freedom of others, but it’s really hard to guess what that would look like.
Torture, kidnapping.
In my opinion killing is pretty bad but there are other crimes that can be worse, so not sure what point you are trying to make
Death doesn’t mean killing. You can die by an accident (falling off a ladder). You can die from a heart attack. Death just means dying.
Then even more to my point. What difference would it make?
