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Not All Killings Are Equally Wrong

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2019

Todd Karhu Open the ORCID record for Todd Karhu [Opens in a new window]
Todd Karhu*
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London School of Economics and Political Science
*
t.karhu@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

Many people believe that the wrongness of killing a person does not depend on factors like her age, condition, or how much she has to lose by dying – a view Jeff McMahan calls the ‘Equal Wrongness Thesis’. This article argues that we should reject the Equal Wrongness Thesis on the basis of the moral equivalence between killing a person and knocking her unconscious.

Type
Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 378 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 Dworkin, Ronald, Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia and Individual Freedom (New York, 1993), p. 85Google Scholar.

2 McMahan, Jeff, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also McMahan, Jeff, ‘Killing and Equality’, Utilitas 7 (1995), pp. 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 235.

4 Bundesverfassungsgericht, Judgment of the First Senate of 15 February 2006. Of particular relevance is paragraph 132, in which the court argues that ‘[h]uman life and human dignity enjoy the same constitutional protection regardless of the duration of the physical existence of the individual human being’.

5 McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 190. See also Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper, ‘Why Killing Some People is More Seriously Wrong than Killing Others’, Ethics 117 (2007), pp. 716–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 717. Cf. Soto, Carlos, ‘Killing, Wrongness, and Equality’, Philosophical Studies 164 (2013), pp. 543–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 551–4.

6 McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 237.

7 McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, pp. 236–7. Other discussants of the Equal Wrongness Thesis also apply these restrictions to it. See Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, pp. 718–19; Soto, ‘Killing, Wrongness, and Equality’, p. 544; Hanser, Matthew, ‘The Wrongness of Killing and the Badness of Death’, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, ed. Bradley, Ben, Feldman, Fred and Johansson, Jens (Oxford, 2013), pp. 392–409Google Scholar.

8 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’.

9 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 727.

10 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 726.

11 Kamm, F. M., Morality, Mortality: Volume I: Death and Whom to Save From It (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Kamm, F. M., ‘The Purpose of My Death: Death, Dying, and Meaning’, Ethics 127 (2017), pp. 733–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kagan, Shelly also defends the view that death is non-comparatively bad in his Death (New Haven, 2012), pp. 278–9Google Scholar.

12 Cohen, Daniel and Luck, Morgan, ‘Why A Victim's Age Is Irrelevant When Assessing the Wrongness of Killing, Journal of Applied Philosophy 26 (2009), pp. 396–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 727.

14 Hanser, ‘The Wrongness of Killing’.

15 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722.

16 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722.

17 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722. He adds that any cost it would be permissible to impose upon the agent to prevent him doing (1) could also be permissibly imposed upon him to prevent him doing (2). I agree with Matthew Hanser (‘The Wrongness of Killing’, p. 379 n. 17) that this argument would sway only someone who already believes these acts to be morally equivalent.

18 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722.

19 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, pp. 723–4.

20 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 724. In defence of his claim that knocking someone unconscious is ceteris paribus no less disrespectful than killing her, Lippert-Rasmussen points to the fact that persons deserve respect not simply in virtue of being alive, but rather in virtue of ‘certain cognitive and emotional capacities’ (‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 724). But an unconscious person might retain her capacities for cognition and emotion. Furthermore, this argument seems to conflate the bases of respect for persons and the manner in which we should respect them. That we should respect people in virtue of certain capacities they have does not imply that respect for them consists in respect for those capacities.

21 McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, pp. 241–3.

22 See e.g. Bernat, James, ‘A Defense of the Whole-Brain Concept of Death’, The Hastings Center Report 28 (1998), pp. 14–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Hanser, ‘The Wrongness of Killing’, p. 399.

24 Kamm, Morality, Mortality, p. 21.

25 Shoemaker, Sydney, ‘Persons and their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970), pp. 269–85Google Scholar; Perry, John, ‘Can the Self Divide?’, Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972), pp. 463–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, David, ‘Survival and Identity’, The Identities of Persons, ed. Rorty, Amélie (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 17–40Google Scholar; Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

26 McMahan, The Ethics of Killing. Parfit, Derek defended a similar view in ‘We Are Not Human Beings’, Philosophy 87 (2012), pp. 5–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 For illuminating surveys of these phenomena, see Horne, Malcolm, ‘Are People in a Persistent Vegetative State Conscious?’, Monash Bioethics Review 28 (2009), pp. 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, pp. 423–55.

28 Horne, ‘Persistent Vegetative State’; Zeman, Adam, ‘Consciousness’, Brain 124 (2001), pp. 1263–89CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

29 Olson, Eric, The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology, (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar; Snowdon, Paul, Persons, Animals, Ourselves (Oxford, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Hanser, ‘The Wrongness of Killing’, p. 399.

31 Kamm, Morality, Mortality; Kamm, ‘The Purpose of My Death’, pp. 734–5.

32 The argument that follows draws on one made by Parfit (Reasons and Persons, ch. 8) and an example by Hare, Caspar (‘A Puzzle about Other-Directed Time-Bias’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2008), pp. 269–77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Cohen and Luck, ‘Why a Victim's Age Is Irrelevant’, pp. 396–401.

34 Cohen and Luck, ‘Why a Victim's Age Is Irrelevant’, p. 399 (emphasis mine).

35 Assume that members of both species are born full persons.

36 I believe that my arguments generalize to longer deprivations of consciousness than one month. As we will see presently, however, even that specific equivalence is sufficient to undermine the Equal Wrongness Thesis.

37 For valuable feedback on this article I am grateful to Susanne Burri, Goreti Faria, Tomi Francis, David Kinney, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Christopher Marshall, Michal Masny, Jeff McMahan, Max Muir, Michael Otsuka, Bryan Roberts, Tom Rowe, Bastian Steuwer, Alex Voorhoeve, two anonymous Utilitas referees, and audiences at the London School of Economics and the University of Reading.