Ethics

Can the taking of another's life, even in self-defence, ever be justified?

Comments

To be able to justify a killing, we must first and foremost be able to justify it to the victim. Here is one idea for how this might work.

Suppose you have a number of agreements with your neighbor: borrowing tools, babysitting, having no loud parties after midnight, and so on. If your neighbor does not live up to one of these agreements (never leaves the key to her tool shed at the agreed-to hiding place, for example), then you are justified in ending it. You may do this explicitly, if you have the opportunity. If there is no such opportunity, you may still, when she next comes to borrow a needed tool, decline her request and justify this to her by saying that, once she has broken the agreement, she has forfeited her claim on you to live up to it.

The same sort of justification can work for the general duty to honor agreements one has made. If you find that your neighbor tends to break her agreements with you for the sake of any small convenience, then your duty to live up to your agreements with her is undermined. You may decline to honor an agreement with her -- even one that, as it happens, she has not yet broken herself -- and you can justify this to her by saying that, once she has blatantly disregarded her duty to honor your mutual agreements, she can no longer validly invoke this duty against you. In this scenario, too, it might be better to tell your neighbor explicitly that you consider your mutual agreements voided by her conduct. But there may be no opportunity to tell her this before she next invokes one of these agreements. Even then, I think, you can justify to her your refusal to honor the agreement she invokes. You can say that her appeal to the general duty to honor agreements one has entered is invalidated by her own blatant disregard of this very duty. Her appeal cannot ground a valid complaint against your non-compliance.

We can think about the duty not to kill in analogy to the duty to honor agreements one has made. Each of these general duties binds us irrespective of whether we wish to be bound. And each can be validly appealed to only by those who honor it themselves. One who attacks you with potentially lethal force has no valid complaint when you return fire. Her appeal to the general duty not to kill is invalidated by her own blatant disregard of this very duty.

This line of argument, supposing it is successful, does not quite answer your question yet. Even if one can justify to one's victim one's use of lethal force in self-defense, one's conduct may still not be justified. Others -- the victim's child or society -- may have a valid complaint, especially if the agent could have repelled the attack without killing the attacker. So the argument does not show that it is always permissible to kill killers, rape rapists, and so forth. It merely removes a major obstacle to showing how killing in self-defense can be justified by explaining how someone can forfeit her right not to be killed. If there are no other obstacles -- the attacker has no family, say, and society has democratically decided that it has no objection to the use of deadly force against an attacker who would otherwise kill -- then we have an affirmative answer to your question: one kind of case in which the taking of another's life is justified.

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