Restitution

Suppose Bob paid professional killer Alice to kill him on a day of her choice in the next month. Next day, Bob changes his mind, but has no way of contacting Alice. A week later, Bob sees Alice in the distance aiming a rifle at him. Is it permissible for him to shoot Alice in self-defense?

I take it (somewhat controversially) that killing a juridically innocent person is murder even if the victim consents. Thus, Alice is attempting murder, and normally it is permissible to shoot someone who is trying to murder one. But it seems rather dastardly for Bob to shoot Alice in this case.

On the other hand, though, if Bob hired Alice to kill Carl, and then repented, shooting Alice when Alice is trying to murder Carl does seem the right thing for Bob to do if there is no other way to save Carl’s life.

What is the exact moral difference between the two cases? In both cases, Alice is trying to commit a murder, and in both cases Bob bears a responsibility for this.

I think the difference has something with duties of restitution. When one has done something wrong, and then repented, one needs to do one’s best to “undo” the wrong, repaying the victims in a reasonable manner. But there is a gradation of priority, and in particular even if one is oneself among the victims (Socrates thinks the wrongdoer is the chief victim, since in doing wrong one damages one’s virtue), restitution to others takes priority. In both cases, Bob has harmed Alice by tempting her to commit murder. In the case where Alice was hired to murder Bob, restitution to Alice takes precedence over restitution to Bob, and refraining from killing Alice in self-defense seems a precisely appropriate form of restitution. In the case where Alice was hired to murder Carl, however, restitution to Carl takes precedence, and Bob owes it to Carl to shoot Alice.

In fact, I suspect that in the case where Bob hired Alice to kill Carl, if the only way to save Carl’s life is for Bob to leap into the line of fire and die protecting Carl, other things being equal that would be Bob’s duty. Normally to sacrifice one’s life to save another is supererogatory, but not so when the danger to the other comes from one’s own murderous intent.

The morality of restitution is difficult and complex.

Killing and consent

I think it’s wrong for us to kill innocent people. Some fellow deontologists, however, think this prohibition should be restricted to say that it’s wrong for us to kill nonconsenting innocent people. These thinkers hold that it is both permissible to consent to being killed and to kill those who have given such consent (except in special cases, such as when the victim has overriding unfulfilled duties to others).

I want to argue for a curious consequence of this restriction of the prohibition of murder while maintaining deontology.

By “sacrificing one’s life to save lives”, I will mean actions which save lives but have one’s own death as an unintended but foreseen side-effect. For instance, jumping in front of a train to push a child out of the way. Everyone agrees it’s typically praiseworthy, and hence permissible, to sacrifice your life to save an innocent life. Most people, however, will say that it is supererogatory to do so. It is brave to do it, but not cowardly to omit it.

But now consider cases where by sacrificing your life you can save a larger number of innocent lives, say a dozen. It is pretty plausible that it would be cowardly to refrain from the sacrifice, and I suspect it would be wrong to do it except in special cases (such as when you have just figured out how to cure cancer). But I agree that the point is not completely clear to me. However, it is quite clear to me that it would be wrong to refuse to sacrifice your life to save a dozen people when that dozen includes one’s spouse and one’s children (again, with some very rare exceptions).

Now let’s assume the view that it is permissible to consent to being killed and permissible to kill the consenting. Consider a classic deontology case: a terrorist says that if you don’t kill Bob, a dozen other innocent people will be killed. Add that the dozen people include Bob’s spouse and children. If it’s permissible to kill the consenting, then if Bob were to consent, it would be permissible to kill him. But Bob expressly and clearly refuses consent, despite his believing that it would be permissible to consent.

Assuming that it is morally required to sacrifice your life to save a dozen innocent lives when these lives include your spouse and children, it is very difficult to deny that if it is permissible to consent to being killed, in a case like the above, Bob would be morally required to consent to being killed. Granted, the sacrifice case does not include consenting to one’s death, while the terrorist case does. But as long as we have granted that it is permissible to consent to one’s death, the difference does not seem significant. Thus Bob is morally required to consent to being killed, given our assumptions about consensual killing. Bob’s refusal of consent is thus morally wrong. And very badly so: it causes eleven more lives to be lost, including his very own spouse and children. His refusal is about as bad as mass murder!

It seems that Bob is far from innocent. On the contrary, he is guilty of refusing to save the lives of eleven people, including his spouse and children. But now it seems that the prohibition against killing the innocent does not apply to Bob, and hence it is permissible—and maybe even obligatory—to kill Bob. If so, then the deontological prohibition on killing the innocent, if restricted to the nonconsenting, has a giant loophole: when enough is at stake, a nonconsenting victim is no longer innocent! Now, maybe, it is only permissible to kill the guilty when one acts on behalf of a state (and when enough is stake, which it is in this case). But it would still be very strange for a deontologist to think it permissible to kill Bob even should the state authorize it.

This is not a knockdown argument against the restriction of the prohibition of murder to nonconsenting victims. But it is some evidence against the restriction.

Ensuring

Suppose that Alice wishes to steal an item she can only take if Bob is dead. She plans to go to Bob’s house and ensure he is dead, by first checking if he is already dead, and shooting him if he is not, and then she plans to take the item. She goes to Bob’s house and finds Bob dead. And then she successfully takes the item.

Did Alice intend Bob’s death as a means to her theft? It seems she did. But one might think this:

1. If x intends y as a means to z, and x plan of action succeeds, then x caused y.

However, Alice’s plan does succeed and yet Alice did not cause Bob’s death.

Perhaps I was too quick to say that Alice intended Bob’s death. Maybe instead Alice has a conditional intention that Bob die if he is not already dead. This is, of course, a wicked conditional intention, but it is a different thing to have this conditional intention than to intend Bob’s death.

I am now inclined to think this is the right way to understand ensuring: one ensures X provided that one conditionally intends to bring about X if X does not happen for some other reason.

Proportionality in Double Effect and prevention cases

Suppose you are visiting a hospital and you see Bob, a nurse, sneaking into Alice’s hospital room. Unnoticed, you look at what is going on, and you see that Bob is about to add a lethal drug to Alice’s IV, a drug that would undetectably kill Alice while leaving her organs intact. You recall with horror that two days ago you had a conversation with Bob and he described to you how compelling he finds the argument that it is sometimes obligatory to kill one patient in order to provide organs to save multiple other patients, when this can be done secretly. At the time, you unsuccessfully tried to persuade Bob that the consequentialism behind the argument was implausible. You happen to know that if Bob were to die right now, then four people could be saved. You could now yell, push Bob away, and prevent Alice’s murder.

Here is a Double Effect argument that you shouldn’t stop the murder. Your action of pushing Bob away has two sets of effects: (a) Alice isn’t murdered and (b) four patients who would be saved by Alice’s organs die. Of these, (a) is an intended good and (b) is an unintended evil. So your action is an action to which Double Effect is relevant: it is an action with two effects, an intended good and an unintended evil. But Double Effect makes it a necessary condition for the permissibility of an action that the evils not be disproportionate to the goods. And here the evils are disproportionate to the goods. So you shouldn’t stop Bob, it seems.

Now, one might question the proportionality judgment. Maybe while four deaths are disproportional to one death, four deaths are not disproportionate to one murder? This is mistaken, however. For suppose you see an assassin trying to murder someone with a long-range shot, and you see four innocent people near the assassin. The only way you have to stop the assassin is with a hand-grenade, which would kill the four innocents as well. It is clear that four deaths of innocents are disproportionate to the one murder: you should not stop the murder by blowing up the assassin.

Suppose you bite the bullet and agree that you shouldn’t stop Bob. Then I have an even more problematic version. Go back to your disquieting conversation with Bob about killing patients for their organs. Suppose that Bob disclosed to you in the course of that conversation that it wasn’t a merely hypothetical question, as you assumed, but that he was actually planning on acting on it. It seems completely clear that you should try to persuade him out of this murderous plan. But the exact same Double Effect argument seems to apply here: There are two sets of effects of your persuading Bob not to do it—one person isn’t murdered and a number of people die. The bad effects are disproportionate to the good ones, so Double Effect seems to prohibit you from persuading Bob out of his plan.

Maybe though this second case is different from the first, in that it is one of the basic tasks of a fellow human being to persuade others to act well—this is a central part of our human communal interaction. So it may be that once we take into account the good of persuading others to act well, and add that good to the intended goods, now the four deaths are no longer disproportionate. But now increase the numbers. Perhaps Alice has some weird mutation in her heart tissue such that culturing her heart tissue would save a thousand lives. Now the death of a thousand seems clearly disproportionate to preventing one murder and obtaining the goods of persuading others to act well. Imagine that I had a choice between preventing an explosion that would completely destroy a ship with a thousand people on board and persuading someone not to commit an “ordinary” murder. I should prevent the sinking of the ship. Yet even in the thousand patient case I have the intuition—admittedly, now weaker—that I should try to persuade Bob not to murder Alice, or at least that it is permissible to do so. Especially if Bob is my friend.

What’s going on? Is it the case that when we consider the good of persuading someone to act well, we should not count against that any goods that would result from their acting badly? Is it—a graduate student suggested this to me—that if I fail to persuade them to act well in order to obtain the goods that would result from their act badly, then I become complicit in their bad action? I think there is something to this idea. It may even apply in my earlier case of not stopping Bob physically from the murder, but it seems particularly plausible in the case of refraining to persuade.

In any case, if I am right that it is right to persuade Bob out of his plan to murder Alice, we really do need to understand the proportionality condition in Double Effect very carefully. That condition seems to become significantly context-sensitive. Double Effect is not a simple structural principle by any means.

Objection: When it’s a matter of stopping Bob’s murder of Alice, you don’t cause the deaths of the patients who need Alice’s organs to live. The patients die of whatever conditions they die of, rather than from your action.
So those deaths don’t figure in the Double Effect proportionality calculus.

Response: Imagine that I could stop an ordinary murder, but to do that I would have to park my car in a place that would block an ambulance from getting to the scene of an unrelated accident, where a number of people would die of their injuries if the ambulance were not to get there in time. When considering my action of parking my car, I do need to consider the deaths of the people the ambulance would save, even though they die from their injuries rather than from my action. If the number of people the ambulance would save is large enough, I ought not block the ambulance’s path to prevent one murder.

Murder without an intention of harm

I used to think that every murder is an intentional killing. But this is incorrect: beheading John the Baptist was murder even if the intention was solely to put his head on a platter rather than to kill him. Cases like that once made me think something like this: murder is an intentional injury that one expects to be lethal. (Cf. Ramraj 2000.)

But now I think there can be cases of murder where there is no intent to injure at all. Suppose that amoral Alice wants to learn what an exploding aircraft looks like. To that end, she launches an anti-aircraft missile at a civilian jetliner. SHe has the ordinary knowledge that the explosion will kill everyone on board, but in her total amorality she no more intends this than the ordinary person intends to contribute to wearing out shoes when going for a walk. Alice has committed murder, but without any intention to kill.

In terms of the Principle of Double Effect, Alice’s wrongdoing lies in the lack of proportionality between the foreseen gravely bad effect (mass slaughter) and the foreseen trivially good effect (satisfaction of desire for unimportant knowledge), rather than in a wrongful intention, at least if we bracket questions of positive law.

It is tempting to conclude that every immoral killing is a murder. But that’s not right, either. If Bob is engaged in a defensive just war and has been legitimately ordered not to kill any of the enemy before 7 pm no matter what (so as not to alert the enemy, say), and at 6 pm he kills an enemy invader in self-defense, then he does not commit murder, but he acts wrongly in disobeying an order.

It seems that for an immoral act to be a murder it needs to be wrong because of the lethality of the harm as such, rather than due to some incidental reason, such as the lethality of the harm as contrary to a valid order.

Wronging others

Alice is about to inherit a large some of money and then she hears that she has a long-lost sibling with whom she’d have to share. So she hires an assassin to kill the sibling. Happily, the “assassin” turns out to be a police officer who promptly arrests Alice for attempted murder. Bob happens to be in exactly the same position and acts the same way. However, Bob actually has a long-lost sibling, while Alice has been misinformed.

Legally, it may be that Alice can get off on the grounds of the doctrine of impossible attempts. But morally speaking, Alice and Bob are both just as guilty as if they had successfully committed murder. And, further, they are equally guilty (barring some other differences between the cases).

However, Bob wronged and violated the rights of his long-lost sibling. This is true even though the assassination failed, because one is wronged and has one’s rights violated by an attempt on one’s life.

Alice did not wrong or violate the rights of any long-lost sibling since she does not have any such sibling.

It is correct, as a matter of the description of the situation, that Bob wronged a sibling, and Alice did not. But this fact does not add to the wrongfulness of Bob’s action. This suggests that the patient-centered concept of wronging someone does not actually carry much ethical weight.

Maybe.

But maybe what we should say is this: Bob’s action was indeed more wrong than Alice’s, but Alice is no less culpable than Bob.

If we say this, then we may want to push the reasoning further. Suppose Carl is subjectively in a situation like Alice and Bob, but (a) like Bob, Carl does have a long-lost sibling, and (b) the assassin is real and actually kills the sibling. I used to think that attempted murder was no less wrong than a successful one. But if we are to mae a distinction between Alice and Bob, perhaps we can make a similar distinction between Bob and Carl. What Carl did was more wrong than what Bob did, even though Bob is just as culpable as Carl.

I am not sure, though. Consider this. Imagine that all three malefactors are in their right minds, acting freely, with no excuses available. In that case, each one of them is fully culpable for each wrong they did. But the following principle seems pretty plausible:

1. If X and Y are fully culpable for wrong actions A and B, respectively, and B is more wrong than A, then Y is more culpable than X in regard to these respective actions.

It follows that if we think that Bob did something more wrong than what Alice did, then Bob is more culpable than Alice.

But maybe (1) is false. Or maybe we can say this. Carl is only culpable for an attempted murder, but isn’t actually culpable for the successful murder, because culpability only attaches to attempts. Neither option seems attractive. So I am back to where I was: Alice’s action is not less wrong than Bob, and Bob’s is no less wrong than Carl’s. The stuff about violating rights and wronging what one owes others, that’s all true, but it doesn’t actually affect the degree of wrongness.

Intrinsic evil

Consider this argument:

1. An action is intrinsically evil if and only if it is wrong to do no matter what.

2. In doing anything wrong, one does something (at least) prima facie bad with insufficient moral reason.

3. No matter what, it is wrong to do something prima facie bad with insufficient moral reason.

4. So in doing anything wrong, one performs an intrinsically evil action.

This conclusion seems mistaken. Lightly slapping a stranger on a bus in the face is wrong, but not intrinsically wrong, because if a malefactor was going to kill everyone on the bus who wasn’t slapped by you, then you should go and slap everybody. Yet the argument would imply that in lightly slapping a stranger on a bus you do something intrinsically wrong, namely slap a stranger with insufficient moral reason. But it seems mistaken to think that in slapping a stranger lightly you perform an intrinsically evil action.

The above argument threatens to eviscerate the traditional Christian distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic evil. What should we say?

Here is a suggestion. Perhaps we should abandon (1) and instead distinguish between reasons why an action is wrong. Intrinsically evil actions are wrong for reasons that do not depend on consideration of consequences and extrinsically evil actions are wrong but not for any reasons that do not depend on consideration of consequences.

Thus, lightly slapping a stranger with insufficient moral reason is extrinsically evil because any reason that makes it wrong is a reason that depends on consideration of consequences. On the other hand, one can completely explain what makes an act of murder wrong without adverting to consequences.

But isn’t the death of the victim a crucial part of the wrongness of murder, and yet a consequence? After all, if the cause of death is murder, then the death is a consequence of the murder. Fortunately we can solve this: the act is no less wrong if the victim does not die. It is the intention of death, not the actuality of death, that is a part of the reasons for wrongness.

So, when we distinguish between acts made wrong by consequences and and wrong acts not made wrong by consequences, by “consequences” we do not mean intended consequences, but only actual or foreseen or risked consequences.

But what if Alice slaps Bob with the intention of producing an on-balance bad outcome? That act is wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with actual, foreseen or risked consequences, but only with her intention. Here I think we can bite the bullet: to slap an innocent stranger with the intention of producing an on-balance bad outcome is intrinsically wrong, just as it is intrinsically wrong to slap an innocent stranger with the intention of causing death.

Note that this would show that an intrinsically evil action need not be very evil. A light slap with the intention of producing an on-balance slightly bad outcome is wrong, but not very wrong. (Similarly, the Christian tradition holds that every lie is intrinsically evil, but some lies are only slight wrongs.)

Here is another advantage of running the distinction in this way, given the Jewish and Christian tradition. If an intrinsically evil action is one that is evil independently of consequences, it could be that such an action could still be turned into a permissible one on the basis of circumstantial factors not based in consequences. And God’s commands can be such circumstantial factors. Thus, when God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, the killing of Isaac becomes right not because of any new consequences, but because of the circumstance of God commanding the killing.

Could we maybe narrow down the scope of intrinsically evil actions even more, by saying that not just consequences, but circumstances in general, aren’t supposed to be among the reasons for wrongness? But if we do that, then most paradigm cases of intrinsically evil actions will fail: for instance, that the victim of a murder is innocent is a circumstance (it is not a part of the agent’s intention).

Killing and letting die

1. It is murder to disconnect a patient who can only survive with a ventilator without consent and in order to inherit from them.

2. Every murder is a killing.

3. So, it is a killing to disconnect a patient who can only survive with a ventilator without consent and in order to inherit from them.

4. Whether an act is a killing does not depend on consent or intentions.

5. So, it is a killing to disconnect a patient who can only survive with a ventilator.

Of course, whether such a disconnection is permissible or not is a further question, since not every killing is wrong (e.g., an accidental killing need not be wrong).

Jan 26 Bios Centre Talk: Defining Murder

On January 26, 2021 at 18:30 GMT / 12:30 PM Central / 1:30 PM Eastern, I will be giving a work in progress Zoom talk on Defining Murder at the Bios Centre in London. I will have interesting cases, and various questions, but I don't know if I'll have any good answers.

Everyone is welcome, but you need to contact the organizer to sign up: amccarthy@bioscentre.org.

Closeness and Double Effect

The Principle of Double Effect (PDE) is traditionally a defense against a charge of bringing about an effect that is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring about, a defense that holds that although one foresaw the effect, one did not intend it.

One of the main difficulties for PDE is the closeness problem. Typical examples of the closeness problem are things like dropping bombs on an enemy city in order to make the civilians look dead (Bennett), blowing up the fat man in the mouth of the cave when there is no other way out (Anscombe), etc.

If we think of intentions as arrows and the wrong-to-intend act as a target, one strategy for handling closeness problems is to “broaden intentions”, so that they hit the target more easily. Thus, if you intend something “close enough” to an effect you count as intending (or something similar to intending, say accomplishing) that effect. There are interesting general theories of this (e.g., O’Brien and Koons), but I do not think any of them cover all the cases well.

Another strategy, however, is to broaden the target. This strategy keeps intention very sharp and hyperintensional, but insists that what is forbidden to intend is broader. A number of people have done that (e.g., Quinn). What I want to do in this post is to offer a way of looking at a version of this strategy.

The PDE is correlative to absolute wrongs. There aren’t that many absolute wrongs. For instance, Judaism lists only three kinds of acts as absolute wrongs, things that may not be done no matter the benefits:

• idolatry

• murder

• certain sexual sins (e.g., adultery and incest).

Now, intention enters differently into the definitions of these acts. Arguably, idolatry is very much defined by intentions. The very same physical bending of one’s midriff in the very same physical circumstances (e.g., standing facing an idol) can very easily be an act of idolatry or a back exercise, precisely depending on what one is intending by this bow. Such pairs of cases can be manufactured in the case of murder, but they will involve very odd assumptions. We can imagine a surgeon or an assassin cutting someone’s chest with the same movement, but it is in fact very unlikely that the movement will be the same. In the case of idolatry, we might say that more work is being done by intention and in the case of murder more work is being done by the physical act. And sexual wrongdoing is a very complex topic, but it is likely that intention enters in yet different ways, and differently in the case of different sexual wrongs.

We can think of an absolute prohibition as having the following structure:

1. For all x₁, ..., x_n, when U(x₁, ..., x_n), it is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring it about that I(x₁, ..., x_n).

Here, U(x₁, ..., x_n) is a contextual description which needs to obtain but need not be intended to have a wrong of the given type, and I(x₁, ..., x_n) is a contextual description which needs to be intended. For instance, for murder, prima facie U(x₁, x₂) might specify that x₁ is an act whose patient is known to be a juridically innocent person x₂, while I(x₁, x₂) will specify that, say, x₁ is the killing of x₂. It’s enough that the murderer should know that the victim is an innocent person—the murderer does not need to intend to kill them qua innocent. But the murderer does need to intend something like the killing.

Note that in ordinary speech, when we give absolute prohibitions we speak with scope ambiguity. Thus, we are apt to say things like “It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent person”, without making clear whether “intentionally” applies just to “kill” or also to “innocent person”, i.e., without making it clear what is in the U part of the prohibition and what is in the I part.

Observe also that in the case of idolatry, more work is being done by I than by U, while in the case of murder, the work done by the two parts of the structure is the same.

So, now, here is a general strategy for handling closeness. We keep intention sharp, but we broaden (i.e., logically weaken) I by shifting some things that we might have thought are in I into U, perhaps introducing “known” or “believed” operators. For instance, in the case of murder, we might say something like this:

2. When x₁ is known to be the imposition of an arrangement x₂ on the parts or aspects of an innocent person that normally and in this particular case precludes life, it is absolutely wrong to bring about x₁ with the intention that it be an imposition of arrangement x₂ on parts or aspects of reality.

And in the case of idolatry, perhaps we keep more in I, only moving the difference between God and the false god to the nonintentional portion of the prohibition:

3. When x is known to be a god other than God, it is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring it about that one worships x.

And here is an important point. How we do this—how we shuffle requirements between I and U—will differ from absolute prohibition to absolute prohibition. What we are doing is not a refinement of Double Effect, but a refinement of the (hopefully small) number of absolute prohibitions in our deontological theory. We do not need to have any general things to say across absolute prohibitions how we do this broadening of the intentional target.

There might even be further complexities. It could, for instance, be that we have role-specific absolute prohibitions, coming with other ways for aspects of the action to be apportioned between U and I.

Inquiring as to intentions

Thomson and other opponents of the idea that intention deeply affects moral permissibility like to point to the idea that it is silly to think that when having someone perform some task, we need to figure out what intentions they would have, when the intentions don’t affect how they will act. To use Thomson’s example, it seems silly to think that when you ask a doctor to administer a dose of morphine to a terminally ill patient where you foresee that any dose sufficient to remove the pain is also sufficient to cause death, you need to find out whether the doctor intends death by the dose or intends to play by Double Effect rules and only pursue pain-relief. As long as in both cases the doctor will give the same dose and in the same way, it doesn’t matter what they are intending when we ask them to act.

If this line of argument shows that intentions don’t affect permissibility, it proves too much. For suppose that you need a nurse to give a patient an injection of a small amount of morphine after an operation. You know there are only two nurses around. One of them is a murderer who swapped the vial of morphine in the dispensary for cyanide. Fortunately, you caught the swap, and reversed it. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know which of the two nurses is which. Suppose you know for sure that both nurses will inject the morphine equally well, but one of them will be committing attempted murder with it, thinking that it’s cyanide. It seems to me that if one is impressed by Thomson’s argument in the foreseeably lethal dose of morphine case, one should also think that in this case it doesn’t matter which nurse one chooses (as long as you know that both will do the same task the same way, and that the murderous nurse won’t swap the vial again). But in this case it is clear that it matters: one nurse would be committing attempted murder and the other wouldn’t. And we should avoid bringing it about that someone will commit attempted murder.

What about a more extreme case? Alice deeds an injection to live. Only Bob is qualified to do it. Bob, however, wants Alice dead. But Bob is mistakenly convinced that the vial of life-saving medicine is a vial of cyanide. Is it permissible to ask Bob to perform the injection?

That’s tough. Still, even if we say it’s permissible, I think it’s very plausible that it should be a last resort: if there were another to administer the injection, we should go for the other.

I am inclined to think it’s not permissible. For one’s action plan depends on Bob's attempting murder (that’s why we don’t correct his error about the vial!), and it’s wrong to intend that someone attempt murder.

Is wrongdoing an evil?

In my previous post, I said that murder is a counterexample to the privation theory of evil. For a murder is an evil, but a murder is not a privation. It may be that what makes a murder be an evil is a privation—say, the privation of justice in the agent—but the murder itself is not a privation.

But I wonder if one could save the privation theory of evil by severely narrowing the scope of what counts as an evil, so that instances of sin, suffering, error, natural disasters, etc. are not actually evils. Instead, the real evils are what I called “evilmakers” in earlier post. Thus, a murder is not an evil, but the privation of justice in the agent is the evil. An erroneous belief is not an evil, but the evil is its erroneousness, which is a privation of truth.

I don’t think I like this. It departs too far from ordinary language to say that murder or torture aren’t evils, but the privations of justice are. Here is one reason not to like it. Some evils cause direct harm to their victim, and torture is a paradigm example. But when we think of the paradigm harms of torture—namely, intense suffering as well as psychological and psychological damage—then these harms are not caused by the privation of justice. They are caused by the electric shocks, etc. So on the view that it is only the privation of justice that is an evil, the stuff that actually causes most of the suffering isn’t an evil. And while sometimes something can cause suffering without being an evil (e.g., when your well-meaning friend’s advice annoys you), torture doesn’t seem to be a case like that. It’s the torture as a whole that seems to be evil, not simply its injustice. Thus, it seems to me to be truer to say that the injustice is an evilmaker (and evilmakers are also evils), and the torture is an evil.

Truth, life and deontology

Absolutists who think that lying is wrong even to save a life are sometimes accused of thinking truth to be more valuable than life. Whether or not absolutism about lying is true (I think it is), the accusation is a misunderstanding of the structure of deontological prohibitions. For it would be silly to suppose that a deontologist who thinks it’s wrong to kill one innocent in order to save ten thinks that one life is more valuable than ten! If there is a mistake in deontology, it is not the mistake of thinking 1 > 10.

Deontology and future hypothetical wrongs

Molinism makes possible a curious kind of moral dilemma. God could reveal to Alice that if Alice doesn’t kill Bob today, she will kill Carl and David tomorrow (all these being innocents), and if she does kill Bob today, she won’t kill anyone tomorrow. Should she, thus, kill Bob today in order to prevent herself from murdering Carl and David tomorrow?

One might think that the possibility that Molinism allows for such a moral dilemma is a count against Molinism. But even without Molinism, one could have a probabilistic version of the dilemma where God reveals to Alice that if she doesn’t kill Bob today, she is very likely to kill both Carl and David tomorrow, and if she does kill Bob today, she is very unlikely to kill anyone tomorrow.

One way to make consequentialism fit with deontological intuitions is to set a high, perhaps infinite, disvalue on wrong action. That would imply that in the dilemma Alice should kill Bob in order to prevent the two murders tomorrow.

I think this is a mistake. Just as on deontological grounds it would be wrong for Alice to murder Bob to keep Eva from murdering Carl and David, so too it’s wrong for her to murder Bob to keep herself from murdering them. A eudaimonist may disagree here, holding that we should be promoting our own flourishing, so that when the choice is between committing two murders tomorrow and one today, we should go for the one today, but when the choice is between oneself committing one murder and another party committing two, we should let the other party commit the two. So much the worse, I say, for that kind of eudaimonist.

What makes it wrong for Alice to murder Bob is that the we shouldn’t perform bad acts. It’s not that we should minimize the number of bad acts performed, by others or oneself, but that we shouldn’t perform them. Of course, all other things being equal we should minimize the number of bad acts performed, by others and oneself, but a bad act is an act not to be done. And the lesson of deontology is that certain acts, such as intentionally killing without proper authority, are bad acts in virtue of their nature.

But isn’t killing Bob today the lesser evil?

Yet imagine Alice is debating whether she should eat ice cream, with its having been revealed to her that if she eats ice cream today, tomorrow she will kill Bob, and if she does not, then tomorrow she will kill Carl and David. In that case, it is clear: she should eat the ice cream. For the eating of ice cream isn’t the sort of act that is bad in virtue of its nature (unless a very strong form of moral veganism is true). Note, however, that if she eats the ice cream today, then her killing of Bob tomorrow is still wrong. (If you disagree, it may be simply because you disagree with Molinism, and you hold that the inevitability of her killing Bob takes away her freedom; if you think that, then go for a probabilistic version of the story.) This is true even though it is a lesser evil than her killing Carl and David.

In the original case, we can look at Alice doing two things when killing Bob:

1. Killing Bob

2. Bringing it about that she doesn’t kill Carl and David.

Her action is bad qua (1) and good qua (2). But we learn from Aquinas that for an action to be right, it must be right in every respect. So her action is wrong simpliciter.

On the other hand, in the ice cream version, in consuming the ice cream, Alice is doing two things:

3. Eating ice cream

4. Bringing it about that she doesn’t kill Carl and David.

Now her action is good or neutral qua (3) and good qua (4). In fact, it’s right in every respect. But her later killing of Bob is still wrong.

Murder and theft

Roughly:

1. To murder is to intentionally kill a juridically innocent person.

And:

2. To steal is to intentionally appropriate something that belongs to another.

Here, I am bracketing questions of special divine authorization, starving persons taking food for themselves, etc. Instead, the question I am interested in is this: What is the scope of “intentionally” in the two accounts?

There are killings where the killer intends to kill a juridically innocent person. For instance, a particularly evil terrorist organization or invading army may specifically choose to kill children in order to more effectively terrorize their enemy by killing the innocent. Similarly, someone might rob an enemy not just in order to have the enemy’s goods at their disposal, but may do so maliciously in order to dispossess the enemy of something the enemy owns.

But in many cases, the juridical innocence of the victim is not a part of the murderer’s reasons. Suppose Alice kills her rich uncle Bob in order to inherit his property. If it turned out that Alice was an agent of the state and Bob a guilty party whom Alice was supposed to kill, Alice’s killing Bob would serve the end of her inheriting the property just as well. Thus, Bob’s juridical innocence is not relevant to Alice’s reasons.

In fact, even Bob’s personhood may be irrelevant to Alice’s reasons. Imagine that Bob snores so loudly that his neighbor Alice can’t sleep. So Alice fills Bob’s apartment with chlorine gas. If it turns out that Bob is just a dog, Alice was still successful in her action. Thus, Alice’s intention need only have been to kill Bob, not to kill a person.

Similarly, often a thief is interested only in acquiring some item but does not care about dispossessing its rightful owner. Imagine that when Alice is turned away, Bob swipes the apple that was lying in front of her and eats it because the apple looks so delicious and not out of any malice towards Alice. If it turned out that the apple did not belong to anyone, Bob would still have fulfilled his intention, because his intention was to appropriate the apple. Bob may have thought that the apple belong to another, but the fact that the apple belonged to another was irrelevant to his intentions.

In particular, it follows that while a murderer or a thief has to intend to kill or appropriate, they need not intend to murder or steal. And if to attempt to ϕ entails intending to ϕ, as seems plausible, it follows that a murder or theft attempt need not be an attempt to murder or steal. For the the attempted murderer or thief, just as the actual murderer or thief, need not intend murder or theft, but may simply intend to kill or appropriate, while believing, correctly or not, that the victim is innocent or an owner, respectively.

It seems more precise to say:

3. To murder is to intentionally kill someone whom one believes to be a juridically innocent person.

4. To steal is to intentionally appropriate something that one believes to belong to another.

But I think that’s not quite right. If Bob takes the apple that he thinks belongs to Alice, but the apple is ownerless, then Bob hasn’t stolen. And if Alice kills Bob whom she believes to be a person but it turns out that Bob is a dog, then Alice hasn’t murdered. In both cases, the agent has done something wrong, something morally on par with theft or murder, respectively, but the thing wasn’t theft or murder.

Here is another suggestion:

5. To murder is to intentionally kill someone who actually is a juridically innocent person.

6. To steal is to intentionally appropriate something that actually belongs to another.

But I am inclined to think that’s not right, either. If I take your pen thinking you’ve given it to me, I haven’t stolen. And if Carl intentionally kills Dave while thinking Dave to be a deer and not a man, Carl hasn’t murdered.

Perhaps we need to combine the above two suggestions:

7. To murder is to intentionally kill someone whom one correctly believes to be a juridically innocent person.

8. To steal is to intentionally appropriate something that one correctly believes to belong to another.

This is my best bet. But I don’t like its messiness. (Note that replacing “correctly believes” with “knows” will narrow things too much. If I take what I correctly believe to be your pen, but my reasons for believing that the pen is yours are fallacious, I am still a thief.)

The pastoral problem of double effect reasoning

As part of a just war, Alice drops a bomb on the enemy military headquarters. Next door to the enemy headquarters are the world headquarters of a corporation that Alice knows has been responsible for enormous environmental degradation, and the bomb will level the whole block. Alice finds it very difficult not to jump in glee at the death of the immoral CEO.

It would be murder, however, for Alice to drop the bomb in order to kill the CEO. It would still be murder even if she dropped the bomb in part in order to do so. But it’s hard for Alice not to be motivated by the death of the CEO, and hence Alice—who is deeply morally sensitive—finds it difficult not to feel guilty of murder.

There are two interrelated pastoral problems here. First, how can Alice avoid being a murderer—how can she avoid intending to kill the hated CEO? Second, if she succeeds in avoiding being a murderer, how can she avoid feeling like a murderer?

Reflecting on counterfactuals may help Alice.

1. Would I still drop the bomb here if the military leaders were elsewhere and I could get away with it?

2. Would I still drop the bomb here if the CEO were elsewhere but the military leaders were here?

If the answer to (1) is “yes” or the answer to (2) is “no”, she very likely is intending to kill the CEO. But even if the answer to (1) is “no” and that to (2) is “yes”, that does not prove that the CEO’s presence isn’t contributing to her intention. Perhaps the CEO’s presence isn’t enough to motivate her by itself, but it nonetheless contributes to her motivations. One could try to tease this apart through further counterfactuals.

3. Is there a personal cost such that (a) if the CEO were elsewhere but the military leaders were here, I would not drop the bomb on account of the cost, but (b) if the CEO were here along with the military leaders, I would drop the bomb notwithstanding the cost?

A positive answer suggests that she is intending to kill the CEO. But the counterfactual (3) is hard to evaluate, and it is not clear that it is epistemically accessible to Alice.

Perhaps these counterfactuals would be more helpful:

4. If I could aim the bomb in such a way that I would kill the military leaders but not the CEO, would I?

5. If after dropping the bomb, I could call for an ambulance to save the CEO, would I?

Answers to these two questions seem imaginatively accessible. I think a positive answer to both questions is strong evidence that the CEO’s death is not intended. And it seems to me that (4) and (5), unlike (3), are pretty accessible to Alice, they could help with the problem of not feeling like a murderer.

Interestingly, positive answers to (4) and (5) are not logically necessary for Alice not to be a murderer. Suppose Alice were callous and did not care either way about the CEO’s death. Then she wouldn’t be intending the CEO’s death—any more than she would be intending to make cracks in the sidewalk—but she wouldn’t go to any trouble to prevent his death.

Positive answers to (4) and (5) would indicate that Alice has on balance a negative attitude to the CEO’s death, despite uncontrollable feelings of glee. And it seems that to deal with the pastoral problem of double effect, what one needs is to have not just a neutral but a negative attitude to the evil. Of course, guilt at the CEO’s death may survive reflection on (4) and (5). But (4) and (5) could be a helpful step.

One writer on double effect said that for a double effect justification to apply one needs to do something to prevent or lessen the unintended evil. That kind of action could indeed help with the pastoral problem. But sometimes no action is possible—in that case, reflection on counterfactual action may help.

Still, I think even positive answers to (4) and (5) can leave a residual worry, especially in a scrupulous person. Alice might worry that she really does want the CEO dead, and while she would aim differently or call for an ambulance if she could, that would be out of duty rather than out of desire, and hence she still is intending the CEO to be dead. I think this is a mistaken worry. If she is thus moved by duty, then it seems that duty is structuring Alice’s intentions in a way that makes her not intend to kill the CEO—even if she uncontrollably rejoices at the immoral CEO’s death.

Intention and credence

In a paper on Double Effect, I offer this kind of an example. Jim has sneaked into a zoo on a mission to kill the first mammal he sees at the zoo, because a very rich eccentric has informed him that he’d give a very large sum of money to famine relief if Jim did that. Jim sees the zookeeper and kills him, reasoning that zookeepers are mammals, and hence the kill will satisfy the eccentric’s condition. In the paper, I argued that Jim need not be intending to kill a human being even if he knows the zookeeper is a human being. His intention need simply be to kill that mammal. Of course, this is still a murder, and hence I argue that the Principle of Double Effect should not be formulated in the classical way in terms of intentions.

I think a lot of people are incredulous of my claim that Jim can know that the mammal he is shooting is a human being and yet not intend to be killing a human being. It’s just occurred to me that there may be a way to help overcome that incredulity by making the story more gradual. Jim first sees a shadowy figure in the dark in the primate enclosure very far away. He assumes it’s an ape, and aims his rifle. However, he doesn’t want to miss, so he comes a couple of steps closer. As he gradually approaches, he has a very vague impression that there is something a little human-like about the movements of that primate. He thinks to himself, however, that apes are close relatives to humans, so it’s almost certainly still an ape. But as he approaches, his evidence that what is before him is a human rather than an ape increases. Finally, by the time he’s close enough to shoot, the evidence is conclusive: he knows it’s a human. But he doesn’t care a whit—the only thing that matters to this callous individual is that it’s a mammal. So he shoots and murders.

Let’s suppose that Jim’s credence that the mammal is human goes from 0.0001 to 0.9999 as he walks forward. At the 0.0001 point, it’s clearly not Jim’s intention to kill a human being. Nor at the 0.5000 point. Nor even at the 0.5001 point. Could it be that Jim’s intention becomes one to kill a human being once his credence gets high enough for him to count as believing, or maybe even knowing, that this is a human being? But it is implausible that a merely numerical increase in the credence suddenly forces a change in Jim’s intention. Intention just does not seem to be degreed in a way that lines up with the degreed nature of Jim’s credence.

So, what should we say? I think it is this: Whether Jim’s credence was 0.0001 or 0.9999 at the time of the shot, as long as he was acting callously and not caring about whether the victim is ape or human, he accomplished the death of a human being. This accomplishment (or something close to it) makes him a murderer. Of course, at the 0.0001 credence point, it would be hard to prove in a court of law that he accomplished the death, that he shot without caring whether the victim is ape or human, caring only that the victim was a mammal.

The unknown mechanism of action of the IUD

A fellow philosopher just sent me this very interesting quote from an article in a reputable medical journal:

[I]f it was conclusively shown that the sole or principal mode of action [of the IUD] was to prevent the embryo from implanting, then this method, as in the case with emergency contraception, would be considered by the Roman Catholic church as causing an early abortion. As a result many agencies involved in the research, development or delivery of contraception prefer to leave the mechanism of action issue unresolved, which may explain why research into the contraceptive mechanisms of IUDs has been sparse in the last 20 years.

The quote’s invocation of politics fits with vague suspicions I had.

But in any case, I wonder whether leaving the “the mechanism of action issue unresolved” helps all that much morally. Suppose that prevention of implantation is morally on par with paradigmatic cases of killing an adult human. Now consider this story. You are a doctor on board a spaceship marooned on an alien planet. All your drugs have been destroyed but one of your patients is suffering severe pain. The aliens have a callous attitude to human life, but in exchange for a piece of fine art they offer you a drug. The aliens always tell the truth and they guarantee that the drug “terminates the pain.” But when you ask them about the mechanism by which it does so, they say: “Trade secret. It terminates the pain.” You try asking more general questions like: “Does it suppress pain signals in the brain?” They just say: “That would terminate the pain. It terminates the pain. Why ask more?” Then someone else in your crew asks: “Does it terminate the patient?” And the aliens say: “That would terminate the pain. It terminates the pain. Why ask more?”

The end result is that you have no idea whether the drug terminates the pain by suppressing the pain as such or by killing the patient. It is clear that in that case we should not use the drug, except as a last-ditch hope for a patient who is already dying. (I am not saying it is acceptable to kill someone who is already dying. But if someone is already dying, then one can tolerate a greater risk of unintended death.)

I am not saying, of course, that we need to find evidence against every crazy hypothesis. There is, after all, the hypothesis that ibuprofen works by annihilating the patient and calling in aliens that replace the patient with a pain-free simulacrum. The tiny but non-zero probability of that hypothesis should not keep us from using ibuprofen. But when we do not know how some drug or procedure works, and one of the serious hypotheses is that it works by killing someone, then that’s a problem.

Given the callousness of the aliens, the hypothesis that they are offering a euthanasia drug is a serious hypothesis. Likewise, the hypothesis that the IUD works primarily by preventing implantation is a serious hypothesis (see the suggestive evidence in the above-quoted paper). In both cases, then, unless we can find significant evidence against this serious hypothesis, the use of the drug or method is wrong (except perhaps in exceptional cases).

We rightly have a guilty-until-proved-innocent approach to medical interventions. Apart perhaps from exceptional cases (e.g., terminal ones), a medical intervention must be tested for its effects on the directly affected parties. The manufacturer's failure to gather data on the effects of the IUD on some of the directly affected parties, namely the embryos, means that the IUD has not been tested up to the morally required standards of testing medical interventions, and hence cannot be licitly used (apart perhaps from some exceptional cases), even absent the data that we have that is suggestive of fatal effects on those parties.

Yet another odd double effect case

Alice has just fed a poison to Bob. Bob hasn’t died yet. He is standing, by coincidence, on the edge of a cliff, and soon will die of the poison, unless he gets an antidote. Carl is there and has a syringe full of the antidote. Carl injects Bob with the antidote, but this startles Bob and Bob falls off the cliff to his death.

Question 1: Did Alice murder Bob?

Answer: I think not. Here’s an argument. Bob dies as a side-effect of injection with the antidote. But it could just as well have been Carl who slipped and fell while injecting Bob instead of Bob falling. And surely then we shouldn’t say that Alice murdered Carl—though she did wrongfully cause his death.

Question 2: Suppose that Carl was Alice’s friend and foresaw that Bob would fall off the cliff to his death if injected with the antidote, but reasoned: “I am saving Alice from being a murderer.” Could one legitimately make this double-effect analysis? “Carl is intending that Alice not be a murderer. His means to that is giving Bob an antidote to the poison. A foreseen side-effect of Carl’s action is Bob’s death, but this side-effect is not intended either as an end or as a means. And given that Bob would have died anyway, the side-effect is not disproportionate to the good of saving Alice from being a murderer.”

Answer: I think the proportionality condition is not met. Sure, Carl makes Alice not be a murderer. But Alice is still an attempted murderer—which is just as culpable as being an actual murderer—and her malfeasance still causes Bob’s death, so she still has that death on her conscience. Granted, she isn’t a murderer any more (if I am right about Question 1), but the bad of Carl’s accidentally killing Bob seems disproportionate to the relatively minor good achieved here.

It’s interesting when it is the proportionality condition in double effect that ends up being crucial.

Intending material conditionals and dispositions, with an excursus on lethally-armed robots

Alice has tools in a shed and sees a clearly unarmed thief approaching the shed. She knows she is in no danger of her life or limb—she can easily move away from the thief—but points a gun at the thief and shouts: “Stop or I’ll shoot to kill.” The thief doesn’t stop. Alice fulfills the threat and kills the thief.

Bob has a farm of man-eating crocodiles and some tools he wants to store safely. He places the tools in a shed in the middle of the crocodile farm, in order to dissuade thieves. The farm is correctly marked all-around “Man-eating crocodiles”, and the crocodiles are quite visible to all and sundry. An unarmed thief breaks into Bob’s property attempting to get to his tool shed, but a crocodile eats him on the way.

Regardless of what local laws may say, Alice is a murderer. In fulfilling the threat, by definition she intended to kill the thief who posed no danger to life or limb. (The case might be different if the tools were needed for Alice to survive, but even then I think she shouldn’t intend death.) What about Bob? Well, there we don’t know what the intentions are. Here are two possible intentions:

1. Prospective thieves are dissuaded by the presence of the man-eating crocodiles, but as a backup any that not dissuaded are eaten.

2. Prospective thieves are dissuaded by the presence of the man-eating crocodiles.

If Bob’s intention is (1), then I think he’s no different from Alice. But Bob’s intention could simply be (2), whereas Alice’s intention couldn’t simply be to dissuade the thief, since if that were simply her intention, she wouldn’t have fired. (Note: the promise to shoot to kill is not morally binding.) Rather, when offering the threat, Alice intended to dissuade and shoot to kill as a backup, and then when she shot in fulfillment of the threat, she intended to kill. If Bob’s intention is simply (2), then Bob may be guilty of some variety of endangerment, but he’s not a murderer. I am inclined to think this can be true even if Bob trained the crocodiles to be man-eaters (in which case it becomes much clearer that he’s guilty of a variety of endangerment).

But let’s think a bit more about (2). The means to dissuading thieves is to put the shed in a place where there are crocodiles with a disposition to eat intruders. So Bob is also intending something like this:

3. There be a dispositional state of affairs where any thieves (and maybe other intruders) tend to die.

However, in intending this dispositional state of affairs, Bob need not be intending the disposition’s actuation. He can simply intend the dispositional state of affairs to function not by actuation but by dissuasion. Moreover, if the thief dies, that’s not an accomplishment of Bob’s. On the other hand, if Bob intended the universal conditional

4. All thieves die

or even:

5. Most thieves die

then he would be accomplishing the deaths of thieves if any were eaten. Thus there is a difference between the logically complex intention that (4) or (5) be true, and the intention that there be a dispositional state of affairs to the effect of (4) or (5). This would seem to be the case even if the dispositional state of affairs entailed (4) or (5). Here’s why there is such a difference. If many thieves come and none die, then that constitutes or grounds the falsity of (4) and (5). But it does not constitute or ground the falsity of (3), and that would be true even if it entailed the falsity of (3).

This line of thought, though, has a curious consequence. Automated lethally-armed guard robots are in principle preferable to human lethally-armed guards. For the human guard either has a policy of killing if the threat doesn’t stop the intruder or has a policy of deceiving the intruder that she has such a policy. Deception is morally problematic and a policy of intending to kill is morally problematic. On the other hand, with the robotic lethally-armed guards, nobody needs to deceive and nobody needs to have a policy of killing under any circumstances. All that’s needed is the intending of a dispositional state of affairs. This seems preferable even in circumstances—say, wartime—where intentional killing is permissible, since it is surely better to avoid intentional killing.

But isn’t it paradoxical to think there is a moral difference between setting up a human guard and a robotic guard? Yet a lethally-armed robotic guard doesn’t seem significantly different from locating the guarded location on a deadly crocodile farm. So if we think there is no moral difference here, then we have to say that there is no difference between Alice’s policy of shooting intruders dead and Bob’s setup.

I think the moral difference between the human guard and the robotic guard can be defended. Think about it this way. In the case of the robotic guard, we can say that the death of the intruder is simply up to the intruder, whereas the human guard would still have to make a decision to go with the lethal policy in response to the intruder’s decision not to comply with the threat. The human guard could say “It’s on the intruder’s head” or “I had no choice—I had a policy”, but these are simply false: both she and the intruder had a choice.

None of this should be construed as a defence in practice of autonomous lethal robots. There are obvious practical worries about false positives, malfunctions, misuse and lowering the bar to a country’s initiating lethal hostilities.