Topics Ethics

Question This question has been keeping me up for the past few nights, I can't seem to put it to rest. Maybe someone here can help. Do the ends justify the means? The example I've been using is would you rather kill a serial killer directly, or through your inaction let that killer kill twenty other people? My philosophy is that there is no "indirect cause of death", and that if you have the ability to prevent that killer from killing those twenty people, and you do nothing, you're as guilty as the killer himself (just to make this scenario fool-proof, let's say you know he is about to kill those people and the only way to prevent him from doing so is to kill him). Am I wrong? why or why not? Any help anyone can offer in this department is helpful!

Accepted:
April 12, 2012

Comments

Well, I do not know if my comments will set your mind at rest and allow you to get some sleep, although I am told that reading my material is very helpful to those with insomnia.

I think you are wrong, there is a difference between letting something happen and doing it. In the real world we never really know what someone is going to do until they do it and we should wait to see what they do, other things being equal. On the other hand, if someone is on the point of carrying out his or her nefarious action, there is no reason why we should not intervene, if we are able to do so. When I started graduate work in philosophy I had a supervisor, Elizabeth Anscombe, who argued that had it been possible to predict what Hitler was going to do, and had it been possible to prevent it by framing him on some criminal charge, it would be wrong to do so, since he would not have been guilty of that charge. One can see her point, it would be wrong, but given the context perhaps excusable. For her nothing could excuse such behavior since she was a determined supporter of what she took to be the Catholic position that one can never do something wrong in order to produce a good result.

Yet often we should balance acts and their consequences and take account of those consequences, which is not to say that the consequences are the only thing of significance. To say that letting something happen is just as bad as doing it is surely wrong. As I often tell my students, if a deranged gunman were to enter the room and start to shoot them, I might just hide under the desk until he stops or is stopped. That might make me a coward but it does not make me a murderer.

Despite what you say, there are indirect causes of death. I am not in the example I have just given the cause of my students' deaths, since it is not my job to save them. What makes intervention heroic is precisely that it is not normally expected to be done, and this suggests that our responsbility towards others is far less broad than you think.