Topics Ethics

Question If a customer walks into a store and pulls a toy gun on the owner as a prank resulting in the owner thinking it is a real gun and suffering a fatal heart attack, then is the customer morally responsible for his death? If so, what ought his punishment be? Should it be less if the owner is in his late eighties and the customer attempted CPR?

Accepted:
January 23, 2015

Comments

Great set of questions! You put your question in terms of morality rather than legality, but it might be worth first noting the legal angle. Basically, the law would attach responsibility and the consequences of the act based on what reasonable people would do and how they would interpret the act involved. So, imagine that the toy gun is obviously a toy (it is made of vegetables and has the word "toy" spelled on it out of carrots) and that the customer had a long history (known to the owner) of pranks. Under those circumstances, we might well conclude that the owner's belief that the gun and customer were real dangers was irrational. If the customer knew that the owner was subject to irrational judgments and that he/she had a weak heart condition, we might rightly find him morally blameworthy --the death would be a murder. But if the customer did NOT know of the irrational tendencies of the owner and did not know of the heart condition, I think we would be right in thinking this was a case of when what was intended to be an innocent prank went tragically wrong, but it would not be murder. Putting aside the bizarre. obviously fake (to reasonable people) toys, matters get more serious and clear. If the owner reasonably thought that he was facing a lethal threat and died of a heart attack in such fear, and the customer was intent on using this threat as part of a theft (or maybe as a way to instill fear out of revenge for being fired by the owner in the past), then (morally and legally) I think we have a case of at least second degree homicide. If the customer / assailant tried to administer CPR after the heart attack, I think that would support second degree rather than first degree homicide (murder). We get closer to murder, however, if the customer knew the owner was 80 years old and had a weak heart and (rather than administer CPR) the assailant shouted out to the owner as he struggled to breath "Today I am paying you back for all your miserable treatment of me, and I did it with a mere toy!" That would seal (in my view) a case of murder from a moral and legal point of view.

In the last case, I think the punishment should be the same as if an assailant had used a real gun and real bullets, don't you? A philosopher who did excellent work on responsibility for harm is the late Joel Feinberg (sadly, he died a few years ago). He has a four volume work with Oxford University Press that is (in my view) unsurpassed when it comes to the nature and scope of responsibility ethically and from the standpoint of the law.