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Not All Killings Are Equally Wrong
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 May 2019
Abstract
Many people believe that the wrongness of killing a person does not depend on factors like her age, condition, or how much she has to lose by dying – a view Jeff McMahan calls the ‘Equal Wrongness Thesis’. This article argues that we should reject the Equal Wrongness Thesis on the basis of the moral equivalence between killing a person and knocking her unconscious.
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References
1 Dworkin, Ronald, Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia and Individual Freedom (New York, 1993), p. 85Google Scholar.
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4 Bundesverfassungsgericht, Judgment of the First Senate of 15 February 2006. Of particular relevance is paragraph 132, in which the court argues that ‘[h]uman life and human dignity enjoy the same constitutional protection regardless of the duration of the physical existence of the individual human being’.
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15 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722.
16 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722.
17 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722. He adds that any cost it would be permissible to impose upon the agent to prevent him doing (1) could also be permissibly imposed upon him to prevent him doing (2). I agree with Matthew Hanser (‘The Wrongness of Killing’, p. 379 n. 17) that this argument would sway only someone who already believes these acts to be morally equivalent.
18 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 722.
19 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, pp. 723–4.
20 Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 724. In defence of his claim that knocking someone unconscious is ceteris paribus no less disrespectful than killing her, Lippert-Rasmussen points to the fact that persons deserve respect not simply in virtue of being alive, but rather in virtue of ‘certain cognitive and emotional capacities’ (‘Why Killing Some People’, p. 724). But an unconscious person might retain her capacities for cognition and emotion. Furthermore, this argument seems to conflate the bases of respect for persons and the manner in which we should respect them. That we should respect people in virtue of certain capacities they have does not imply that respect for them consists in respect for those capacities.
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32 The argument that follows draws on one made by Parfit (Reasons and Persons, ch. 8) and an example by Hare, Caspar (‘A Puzzle about Other-Directed Time-Bias’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2008), pp. 269–77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Cohen and Luck, ‘Why a Victim's Age Is Irrelevant’, pp. 396–401.
34 Cohen and Luck, ‘Why a Victim's Age Is Irrelevant’, p. 399 (emphasis mine).
35 Assume that members of both species are born full persons.
36 I believe that my arguments generalize to longer deprivations of consciousness than one month. As we will see presently, however, even that specific equivalence is sufficient to undermine the Equal Wrongness Thesis.
37 For valuable feedback on this article I am grateful to Susanne Burri, Goreti Faria, Tomi Francis, David Kinney, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Christopher Marshall, Michal Masny, Jeff McMahan, Max Muir, Michael Otsuka, Bryan Roberts, Tom Rowe, Bastian Steuwer, Alex Voorhoeve, two anonymous Utilitas referees, and audiences at the London School of Economics and the University of Reading.