Morality in Kara no Kyoukai

Considering how Kara no Kyoukai (The Garden of Sinners) is my third favorite anime of all time, you might wonder why I haven't talked about it much. It's not that there is a lack of interesting points about the show, but rather that the show itself is so misleading and deep at the same time that it becomes hard to analyze. Being a Nasuverse show, its characters have ambiguous goals and unpredictable yet well themed powers. The amount of information these shows leave unsaid allows endless speculation and theory crafting, but if there is one thing Kara no Kyoukai wishes to be definitive about, it would be morality.

"A person can only murder another once. The act of murder is giving up the humanity that is within oneself. What is left is just emptiness. You can not lose humanity if it is already lost. The act of murder turns into the act of slaughter. They are two different things."

This is Ryougi Shiki's morality. Its meaning is very definitive: a person cannot murder and still consider themself human. The definition of murder in this sense is very specific and not what you would find by searching the definition. When searching the definition on google, what comes up is "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another." There are a few problems with this definition as it applies to Shiki's morality, so I will address them here.

1. unlawful: Shiki never cares about laws, and neither does morality. Whether a killing is lawful or not does not matter.
2. premeditated: Shiki does not care about whether the killing was planned. What matters is intent to kill, rather than a plan for doing so.
3. one human being: Strangely enough, Shiki goes against her own definition in movie seven, where she considers killing a murderer murder despite not considering him human.

Another interesting aside is that Shiki had in the past, committed several murders in her second personality, which she does not consider herself.

is this the only anime where hair is rendered above eyes?

Almost paradoxically, Shiki's power is that her eyes allow her to "kill" anything by showing their weak points. This power is explained better in Tsukihime where it is stated that attacking these magical weak points destroys the existence of the target itself. Luckily for Shiki, the target does not have to be a person. It becomes a great asset to her in her adventures that she is able to attack anything that exists, including other people's powers, and even concepts. In the third movie, she was tasked with taking out an out-of-control woman who was sick, and who used her power to kill people by warping space. Rather than trying to kill her, Shiki defended herself by attacking the points in space that were being warped. To save the woman, Shiki was also able to kill the disease.

This all becomes important in the seventh movie, where Shiki chooses to murder Lio Shirazumi, thinking he had already killed her friend, Kokutou. Afterward, when she realizes that Kokutou was alive she felt that she had failed to follow his advice. She confesses to Kokutou who tries to both scold her and console her at the same time. It is revealed over the course of all the movies that part of the reason Shiki holds her morality is because she feels that a person should only ever have control over their own death, and killing prevents them from dying human. Kokutou offers her a solution where she would rely on him, and he would carry her sins. It is left unclear whether her morality was undermined, or whether she now owes a debt to Kokutou for his generosity.

So, let me know what you think. Do you agree with Shiki, or do you think that killing is not necessarily wrong?