Why killing some people is more seriously wrong than killing others

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 716-738

  Lippert Rasmussen, Kasper ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 35348980272     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/519064     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (41)

1. Killings cause death, but they need not shorten the victim's life and can indeed prolong life. By way of illustration: in January an assassin signs a contract that he will make sure that a certain person dies in December, not sooner, not later. However, another assassin has given the victim a fast working poison that will lead to the victim's demise in February. To honor his contractual obligation the first assassin gives the victim a sophisticated poison, that works as an antidote against the second assassin's chemical agent and will, ensure the victim's death in December. Ironically, the first assassin's killing of the victim, prolonged the victim's life. (For a discussion of life-prolonging killings and their relevance to the morality of killing, see Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, "Two Puzzles for Deontologists: Life-Prolonging Killings and the Moral. Symmetry between. Killing and Causing a Person to Be Unconscious," Journal, of Ethics 5 [2001]: 385-410.) Since, generally speaking, life-prolonging killings are not wrong, this suggests that the fact that killings cause death is irrelevant to their being wrong; but if this is correct, the notion that killing is worse than rendering unconscious because it alone involves causing the victim's death, must be rejected. This supports the Equivalence Thesis. Here I set the complication, that killing need not shorten life aside; I confine attention to life-shortening killings.
2. Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 190.
3. It might be suggested that although we often have a good idea about how much good a person loses by being made unconscious for a finite period of time, it is much, more difficult to know how much valuable experience a. person is deprived of by death, in part because it is hard to know how much longer he would have lived if he had not died when and how he did. Accordingly, it is often hard to know if all other things are equal when comparing a case of killing and a case of rendering unconscious. However, this asymmetiy is illusory, to some extent at least. In cases of rendering unconscious there is an analogous uncertainty as to how much longer the victim would have lived had he not been rendered unconscious when and how he in fact was rendered unconscious. For example, would the individual have suffered a mortal traffic accident, had he not been prevented from going on a road trip by being rendered unconscious? In any case, the suggested, epistemic asymmetry is compatible with the Equivalence Thesis, which asserts nothing about our ability to establish the satisfaction of the all-other-things-being-equal clause.
4. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 236-37.
5. Many liberal egalitarians hold the view that if we face a forced choice between killing different persons, we ought to make some sort of randomized choice that gives each person an equal chance of not being killed regardless of the fact that some of these persons will lose much more than others from being killed. On this view, the Equal Wrongness of Killing Thesis has a wider scope than on the view described in the main text.
6. I owe this way of putting the point to Jeff McMahan (personal communication).
7. Suppose we have no choice but to kill either A, B, or C. Suppose, moreover, that the reasons against killing A are much, stronger than the reasons against killing B (because A will lose much more by being killed, than B) and, similarly, that the reasons against killing B are much stronger than the reasons against killing C. On the view presented here, it might, be permissible to kill C, impermissible to kill A, and impermissible to kill B. Hence, while it is equally impermissible to kill A and (in the alternative) B, there are stronger reasons opposing killing A. Could not one similarly say that beyond the context of forced, killings, it is equally impermissible to kill persons despite the fact that there are stronger reasons opposing killing those who lose more from, being killed? If one could, it might be doubted that anyone is committed to the Equal Wrongness of Killing Thesis as I have put it. In my view, however, the suggested, parallel between forced, killings and unforced, killings is misleading. Intuitively, in cases of the former kind we determine the permissibility of a killing on the basis of facts about the victim, including facts about how much the victim loses from being killed. We do not think in this way about the permissibility of killings in contexts not involving a forced choice to kill. For example, we do not think that while it is, all. things considered, permissible to kill an old person with one more year to live to prevent a certain amount of serious harm to others, the prevention of the same amount of harm to others could not justify the killing of a young person with several decades left to live. Respecting the equal worth of persons silences such considerations in contexts involving an unforced choice whether to kill.
8. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 6.
9. Ibid., 235.
10. Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808 (1991), http://caselaw.lp. findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court = US&vol = 501&invol = 808 (accessed December 21, 2006).
11. In another respect the Sanctity of Human Life Doctrine is weaker than the Equal Wrongness of Killings Thesis, for the former, unlike the latter, does not apply to the killing of nonhuman persons.
12. Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 52, 54, 60, 113;
13. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 80-81,
14. and "Killing Humans and Killing Animals," Inquiry 22 (1979): 145-56.
15. James Rachels, The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6.
16. Don Marquis, "Why Abortion Is Immoral," Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 183-202, 189.
17. I suspect Marquis would agree, as he himselfindicat.es that it is not the "change in [the victim of the killing's] biological state" in itself that makes killing wrong: ibid., 189.
18. I think my argument here is largely neutral between different theories of well-being. True, there could be rare cases in which one has a preference for being unconscious for a certain period of time or in which being unconscious for a period, of time is conducive to the achievement of a particular perfection. In such cases, being unconscious rather than not existing at all is better from the point of view of an unrestricted preference satisfaction theory or a perfectionist theory. However, there could also be cases where the reverse is true. In any case, my overall argument, is no weaker if we simply set aside cases of the former kind by stipulating, realistically, that being unconscious satisfies no such preference, nor contributes to the achievement of any perfection.
19. McMahan, "Killing and Equality," Utilitasl (1995): 1-29, 13.
20. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 242.
21. Compare Robert Young, "What Is So Wrong with. Killing People?" Philosophy 54 (1979): 515-28, 519. To bring it about that a person never again exercises his cognitive and emotional capacities is not literally to "annihilate" that person, but it is to annihilate the rest of this person's distinctively personal life, and this is just as disrespectful as causing him to cease to exist altogether.
22. These two accounts of the wrongness of killing are not the only ones. Two important competitors include the Sanctity of Human Life account and Tooley's rights-based account (Michael Tooley, "Abortion and Infanticide," Philosophy & Public Affairs 2 [1972]: 37-65). The former applies to killings of human, beings and, as already indicated, has a different scope from the one that interests us here, i.e., one whose scope ranges over persons. The latter, properly specified, asserts a right, to conscious life on the basis of one's preference for continued conscious existence and, thus, identifies no morally relevant difference between killing and rendering unconscious.
23. Young, "What Is So Wrong with. Killing People?" 519.
24. As Christopher Knapp has pointed out to me, one might see the first two responses as offering an error theory of resistance to the Equivalence Thesis: in most cases killing, unlike rendering someone unconscious, deprives the victim, of what would otherwise have been the last period of conscious existence in this person's life and this loss is normally worse for the victim than the loss of an equally long period of conscious existence located elsewhere in this person's life, and because of this we mistakenly take killing to be morally worse than rendering unconscious per se.
25. Some philosophers who link the immorality of killing with disrespect acknowledge that killings of victims who are either already doomed or will lose only an "intrinsically insignificant time period (except as a buffer to death)" may be less wrong and even morally permissible (Frances Myrna Kamm, Morality, Mortality [Oxford: Oxford. University Press, 1996], 2:146, 159). I have not appealed directly to such cases in my attempt to undermine the Equal. Wrongness of Killings Thesis, because I think most will find the objection that it commits one to the view that rendering someone unconscious for a significant period of time is no more wrong than rendering someone unconscious for a truly insignificant period of time much more devastating. It. is an objection nevertheless, and one that motivates the move to *1.
26. Christopher Knapp has suggested that this reply assumes that a. precise, all-or-nothing threshold dictates when a period of time lost, in a killing is significant. The reply will not work if the threshold is vague, since if it is, all the cases I cite can be treated as borderline cases of deprivation of a significant period of time, in which case it will be unsurprising that treating them differently seems arbitrary. However, I suspect that if this line of thought is pursued, the borderline will have to be so broad that another problem will arise, a. problem stemming from the moral equivalence of killing and rendering unconscious. For it will then seem counterintuitive that when we compare two renderings unconscious within the borderline-one, on the present, proposal, that involves a loss which is almost clearly significant and one which involves a loss that is almost clearly insignificant-the former is not more wrong than the latter.
27. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 245. Strictly speaking, McMahan thinks that the wrongness of killing a newborn infant depends on its time-relative interest, in continuing to exist. However, for present purposes we can set this complication aside.
28. Something like this view may underpin Frances Kamm's suggestion that perhaps one ought not to kill a doomed, victim when that will save five others, even though the victim has waived, his right that one does not kill him, if the victim is doomed "because of injustice by another" (Kamm, Morality, Mortality, 2:249).
29. For accounts of the social and political ideal of equality, see Samuel Scheffler, "What Is Egalitarianism?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 5-39, esp. 22;
30. Elizabedi Anderson, "What. Is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337;
31. David Miller, "Equality and Justice," in Ideals of Equality, ed. Andrew Mason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 21-36. Some might respond to this characterization of the liberal egalitarian idea that it is not just a matter of the repugnance of a social world in which we regard young and old as unequals: it. is also a matter of the incompatibility of, on the one hand, the moral fact that, we are equals and the implied equal wrongness of killing and, on the other hand, the moral beliefs about unequal status that we have in the imaginary social world. While this may well be part of a full characterization of the liberal egalitarian idea I think it is too close to the Equal Wrongness of Killing Thesis to underlie it in the sense of giving it argumentative support: the latter is simply part of the former.
32. A similar result is generated, I submit, if we consider cases analogous to the World without Continuous Aging where facts about variations in those factors that affect the quality, not quantity, of people's lives (e.g., whether they will suffer from psychological maladies in the future) are inaccessible to people. In a situation like this, a mass murderer who targets people who will be happy in the future acts more wrongly than one who does not.
33. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 235.
34. McMahan, "Killing and Equality," 20-21.
35. On McMahan's view death, is worse to the extent that the victim has "so far gained relatively little from life" (McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 184). Thus, if he were to accept that the wrongness of killing is a function of the badness of the death, he would be committed, to something like the Prioritarian View. Note also that the restrictions on the scope of the Equal Wrongness of Killings Thesis which are normally taken as read and were briefly mentioned in Sec. I could, in principle, be understood to apply to the Prioritarian View as well. Accordingly, the Prioritarian View need not imply that, the harmful killing of a noninnocent threat is exactly as wrong as an equally harmful killing of an innocent threat who has enjoyed benefits equal in quantity to those enjoyed by the noninnocent threat.
36. Hence, there appears to be a tension between the Prioritarian View and our liberal egalitarian commitment to a social world of equals. However, for reasons analogous to those described in my discussion of A World without Continuous Aging I do not think that the latter commitment attests to the unattractiveness of the Prioritarian View.
37. In The Ethics of Killing, 247-48, McMahan notes "several important challenges to the idea that the morality of killing persons is governed, by a requirement, of respect that implies or supports the Equal Wrongness of Killing." The second challenge he expounds is similar to the one I present here.
38. Warren Quinn, Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 46;
39. quoted, approvingly by McMahan (in The Ethics of Killing, 256).
40. Some might think that if the inequality between these two people in the first half of their lives is natural, i.e., if it is in no way due to social arrangements, their being on "equal moral footing" does not imply that the person who has suffered, from poverty for the first forty years of his life has a. greater claim than the person who has enjoyed luxury for the first forty years of his life not to suffer from poverty for the last forty years of his life. I criticize the view that there is a moral asymmetry between natural and social inequalities in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, "Are Some Inequalities More Unequal than Others? Nature, Nurture, and Equality," Utilitas 16 (2004): 193-219.
41. McMahan, "Killing and Equality," 20.