Topics Ethics

Question I'm currently struggling to convince many people that murdering a child can be justified in some very extreme situations. There's this character in a novel who attempts to murder an innocent child because, if he hadn't, his entire family would have gotten executed with certainty (his 3 children, his lover and himself). Was the character justified in attempting to murder this child? I believe that he was. After all, to do otherwise would have resulted in the deaths of 5 other people. Aren't 5 lives generally worth more than one?

Accepted:
August 8, 2013

Comments

The answer to your question depends on which 'camp' within ethics you think is correct. One major theory within ethics is consequentialism. This school claims that the moral worth of an action is determined entirely by the action's consequences. Obviously, the consequentialist theory will agree with your intuition that it is better for one person to die than for five.

In contrast, the deontological approach to ethics claims that there is something within the nature of actions in themselves that makes actions right or wrong. For example, Immanuel Kant taught that we ought to always act in such a way as to treat people as an end in themselves and never as a mere means. According to this way of thinking, some actions are against objective human dignity, so we should never 'use people'...even if we expect it to bring about a greater good. So we should never kill an innocent person, even if failing to do so would bring about multiple deaths. Kant would also deny that you can 'really know' the results of your actions. So, he would deny that the scenario you describe could really happen (but even if it could, he would say it wouldn't matter).

Another way of thinking about the situation (that doesn't neatly fit either category) is that this is morally a 'no win situation.' That either you must do something morally horrific or allow something even more horrific to occur. Either way, you would have appropriate reason to feel badly. This way of thinking might consider the murder to be 'understandable under the circumstance' but not truly 'justified'.

I’m not quite sure why you should find yourself struggling to convince many other people that killing a child to save others is or can be permissible. That is, I’m not sure what the context is in which you are thinking about this issue.

But be that as it may, you are worried about a traditional issue in normative ethics. You are approaching the question in a traditional consequentialist mode, apparently thinking that killing is permissible, and perhaps required, provided that the killing has better consequences than not killing. If killing one saves five, then there is a consequentialist case for the permissibility or obligation to kill. However, deontologists who recognize the existence of rights, understood as side constraints on the pursuit of the good, would not agree. They would think that rights are independent of good consequences and constrain how we can permissibly pursue the good. They would likely say that it is wrong to take an innocent life even if the consequences of doing so are better. So one question is whether we should recognize rights, understood as side constraints.

But there are other issues to consider. Even if we believe in rights as side constraints, we can ask whether rights are absolute. Extreme deontology insists that rights are absolute and that there is no amount of good one could achieve that would ever justify violating a right. But many deontologists are moderate deontologists, insisting that there are rights that constrain the good but allowing that there is some amount of good to be achieved or harm to be avoided that would justify violating rights. Maybe you couldn’t kill one to save two, but you could kill one to save five, or one hundred, or one thousand …. So moderate deontologists would not agree that you can kill whenever this improves the outcome, but they might agree that one could kill to save five. Or if they wouldn’t agree in that case, there is some case where the number to be saved is sufficiently large that they would agree that it is permissible to kill an innocent person. So the plausibility of your general claim (if not the specific case you describe) might turn on the plausibility of extreme deontology.

Also, your example involves the permissibility of averting harm (e.g. death) to the agent and her loved ones by causing comparable harm to an innocent party. The moral issues in this case might be different from those in which the agent has no special relationship to either the child or the people saved. For in your case, the agent might be able to invoke self-defense. The details of self-defense doctrines in the criminal law are tricky, and it’s not clear if they would apply to killing an innocent third party (the child) that is not himself an aggressor. In any case, one might be able to invoke what some philosophers call agent-centered prerogatives or options that an agent is supposed to have to protect his own interests, projects, and special relationships. Normally, such options are thought of as an alternative to doing the thing with the best consequences, not as a justification of doing something otherwise impermissible. But they might be thought also to give the agent a permission to do something that is necessary to save the agent herself and her loved ones, provided this is the only feasible way to do so.

So there are some coherent conceptions of normative ethics (e.g. extreme deontology) that could resist your case for the permissibility of killing one innocent person to save others. But there are others -- and not just consequentialist conceptions -- that might agree with you.