Abstract
This paper examines accounts of the moral wrongness of killing persons in addition to determining what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the morality of killing persons about the (in)equality of persons, and vice versa. I will argue that a plausible way of thinking about the moral wrongness of killing implies that the permissibility of killing innocent, nonthreatening persons depends on a person’s age. I address objections to this conclusion and discuss some potential implications of the view.
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Notes
For this suggestion, see Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (2007). It should be noted that Lippert-Rasmussen does not explicitly deny what follows in the paragraph.
Similarly, James Rachels (1986, p. 6) writes, “If we should not kill, it is because in killing we are harming someone. That is the reason killing is wrong”.
Jeff McMahan (2002) makes this point against the Time-Relative Interest Account, a cousin of the Harm-Based Account.
Kamm (1993, pp. 19 and 48–54) argues that someone—called the Limbo Man—can rationally choose to postpone death by entering periods of unconsciousness, if the goods death would deprive him of are held constant. This would be rational so long as a significant period of conscious life lies in prospect. By “significant period” Kamm refers to a certain quantity of life, presumably of tolerable quality. However, even if the Limbo Man could rationally choose to postpone death without affecting the sum of goods, this would not show, as Kamm suggests, that the nothingness of death is an intrinsic evil or that the end of the person is itself an evil. All it shows is that the Limbo Man can rationally prefer to have goods in prospect, which is a distinct claim. What would support Kamm’s conclusions is the claim that the Limbo Man could rationally prefer to postpone death even if there were no goods in prospect. I find this last claim to be unintuitive and am thus unable to see how the Extinction Factor represents a genuine bad-making feature of death.
Jeff McMahan and Frances Kamm point out that the capacity for autonomy is itself a matter of degree. If the wrongness of killing corresponds to this variable capacity, this might threaten the Equal Wrongness Thesis. I think Quinn’s account avoids this worry because it emphasizes the determinations of this capacity. Even if the capacity for autonomy is a matter of degree, its determinations are not.
I borrow this case from McMahan (2002, pp. 257–258).
This version was put to me by an anonymous referee. Selim Berker suggested a similar case to me.
Philippa Foot (1977, p. 106) once remarked about such cases, “[C]harity might require us to hold our hand where justice did not”.
Philippa Foot (1977) discusses this case.
Even if the two values of autonomous willing and the good of the person are not wholly independent of one another and are not to be simply added together, they are nonetheless distinct and can pull in opposing directions. Thus, it would be puzzling to claim that they never combine in any way in determining the moral status of an act, if one takes wrongness to be a matter of degree. For discussion of problems with weighing or combining reasons/values/factors, see Kamm (1986), Philips (1987), Kagan (1988).
Some have objected to the idea that wrongfulness is grounded, even in part, in harmfulness. After criticizing the notion that the wrongness of killing can be, even in part, grounded in the disvalue of death, Barbara Herman offers a Kantian account of the moral wrongness of killing in Herman (1993). She argues: Human agents cannot will a universal maxim of killing without contradiction because, being vulnerable and mortal, we could not guarantee that we would not be undermining the necessary conditions of our ongoing agency. There are two decisive problems with Herman’s account. First, it fails to exclude many cases of murder-suicide. Second, Herman’s account astonishingly gives invulnerable beings, if there were any, no reason not to kill human beings. Clearly, if an invulnerable being wills a universal maxim of killing, it would not stand in danger of undercutting the necessary conditions for its ongoing agency and so would not be engaged in a practical contradiction as Herman claims humans are. Yet this being still acts wrongly in killing humans.
There are also difficulties with attempts to explain the variation in the stringency of constraints solely in terms of facts about agency. For example, it might be claimed that more stringent constraints protect freedom/autonomy to a greater degree than less stringent ones. But this view is inadequate. Causing someone to be unconscious for an hour arguably undermines autonomy/freedom to a greater degree than torturing him or her for an hour (holding long-term effects constant). Yet the latter is more difficult to justify, for example, if this would save a life.
It seems that we must at a minimum appeal to the harm incurred by the victim to plausibly explain the wrongness of killing as well as the variable stringency attributed to constraints on action.
This conception of wrongness is espoused by Thomas Scanlon (1998).
I owe this point to Kyla Ebels Duggan.
It is worth nothing that veil-of-ignorance reasoning appears to yield a moral duty for a bystander to redirect a trolley in the standard case. A policy that merely permits redirection would not maximize ex ante each person’s chances of survival, and the cost of being queasy about killing someone if one turned out to be the bystander once the veil was lifted is far less than the cost of dying if one turned out to be one of the five on a track.
Here are two more cases modeled after one of Frances Kamm’s (1996, p. 152).
A. You can resuscitate Young, who has stopped breathing. His breathing again, however, will change air patterns so that fatal germs that previously were safely closeted reach Old in the next room.
B. The same as in A except the positions of Young and Old are reversed.
In both cases, you initiate a causal chain that saves one person and kills one person. The person saved does not himself breathe out the fatal germs (and the person killed is not abnormally susceptible to germs). The greater good causes lesser evil in A while what is brought about in B is not a greater good but in fact a greater evil, which makes for a difference in moral permissibility on Kamm’s doctrine of productive purity. If it is said that resuscitation in A is impermissible because it involves saving only one life, then I ask why should there be a numbers constraint on the greater good of action when the good achieved is large relative to the lesser evil that results from the same act and the mode of agency is otherwise unobjectionable?
I believe Simon Rippon first raised this objection to me.
Jeff McMahan has noted—via e-mail correspondence—that Kamm’s Extinction Factor does not distinguish between the deaths of persons and non-human animals. I suspect that Kamm intends the Extinction Factor to apply only to the deaths of persons, to the end of self-consciousness rather than mere consciousness. But the lose-everything thesis is frequently put forward without any regard to this distinction. It seems that unless we appeal to what is lost, there is no way of discriminating between the deaths of human infants and non-human animals, as each will “lose everything”.
For related and other concerns about positing thresholds in this context, see Lippert-Rasmussen (2007).
I borrow these two cases from McMahan (2002, p. 234).
It is important to note that what is morally relevant is not simply how much conscious life someone has already had. A case of nonlethal harming will illustrate the point. Suppose Jim is 20 and Joe is 35, Jim has had less conscious life, and each is expected to live to age 70. Suppose, moreover, that we have to distribute a harm that will induce a 10-year coma, after which normal life would resume for the victim. If we were merely concerned with how much conscious life someone has already had, then Joe should be selected to receive the harm. However, because life with the worst outcome for each would include the same total number of years of conscious life, there seems to be no plausible basis for preference. Thus, we should attend to what someone will have in addition to what they have had.
Kamm (1989) first proposed this conception of moral status.
Also see Thomas Nagel (2008) for further discussion of the value of inviolability.
A point suggested to me by an anonymous referee.
The idea that preference for the young could be extended to cases not involving life-or-death was initially suggested to me by Frances Kamm in a conversation regarding the allocation of scarce health care resources.
I owe this point to Selim Berker.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Selim Berker, Frances Kamm, Jeff McMahan, Thomas Scanlon, an anonymous referee, and the Harvard University Workshop in Moral and Political Philosophy for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.