Kill or be Killed
[This post may not stand well on its own, as it was written as a response to my friend Jim Davidson's facebook note concerning a person's rights to kill another person in certain situations.]
I prefer to analyze moral actions based on expected resultant value, rather than any idea of absolute rights. Doing so, the inherent need for proportionality becomes self evident:
Consider the idea that a good act creates net value and an evil act destroys net value. When faced with a choice between actions, the moral choice is the one that you believe will result in the greatest overall net value, not just for you, but summed over all affected human beings.
Now, killing someone who will otherwise kill you is usually an easy calculation – you probably believe that your value in the world is approximately equal to (if not, because of your exceptional virtues, greater than) that of others. Furthermore, this person is identifying themselves as a killer who may well kill others in the future. Thus, the statement “Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ‘em right back!” seems obvious and rational.
But does it represent an absolute moral right?
Consider that you are trapped without food and have one fellow refugee trapped with you. If the other person tries to kill you for food, they are revealed as a killer – but only a specifically conditional killer. This situation is unlikely to be repeated, so now the question of who has a life of more overall value is not so easy and things become more interesting. Consider these scenarios:
1.) The other person is great medical researcher working on a vaccine for a plague that is ravaging the world.
2.) You know that she has already invented a vaccine, and if she lives to bring it to the world, the plague will be over.
3.) You are sick and wounded and probably dying soon anyway.
4.) You are dying of the zombie virus and will soon turn into an undead brain eating monster – thus you are a known likely future killer.
If you believe that self defense is an absolute right, you may feel morally correct in killing the other person in each of these cases, but, if you feel that overall expected future value to all human beings is the correct moral criteria, somewhere down that list, you may decide that it is no longer morally correct to defend yourself.
However, please note that the morality of your actions are a separate issue from the question of whether or not it is morally correct for someone else to punish you for those actions. There is a lot of value to be found in simplicity of normal responses to the perceived misdeeds of others. Granting the absolute “legal” right for someone to defend their life is a simple rule that is almost always beneficial. Likewise, the rule that deadly force should not be used in defense of property is also a simple one, although perhaps fuzzier in its degree of benefit.
Thus one should be clear, in this sort of discussion, whether one is talking about what deeds are morally correct or what deeds should be punished.