What if they are going to kill your child? I have zero respect for this kind of conviction.
I would comfortably say I completely share this conviction. I would not like to find myself in a position where that conviction was tested -- such as that you describe -- but not killing is almost universally understood to be a fundamental law of civilised society.
One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.
What methods are you referring to? Pepper spray? Aiming for the leg?
> that do not involve murder.
By definition if one is defending oneself, one is not committing murder.
Despite the fact that I think you understood what they were saying perfectly fine, you can substitute "killing someone" (or "taking another life", etc.) for "murder" in their above sentence if it helps you.
specproc: I have to say I'm fortunate enough never to have found myself in that situation. Is this something that happens regularly in America?
We all know it's not common in any industrialized society for a parent to have to kill to protect their child's life. And asking laurent_du about the American experience may not be productive as he or she may never have been to America.
Regardless, the frequency of a situation is not relevant to a discussion of what a person would or should do in that situation.
Violence is abhorrent. Frequency is relevant because one can base one's life and actions on principles of nonviolence, and deal with such extreme situations in the unlikely event they ever come up.
It's a dumb playground question, like would I cheat on my wife if $FAMOUS_HOTTIE came on to me.
One can live one's life by not being violent, by not working in violent industries, by not owning weapons, by seeking and promoting solutions that do not involve violence in one's community and national politics. This is a morally correct life.
Sure, one day, someone might try and kill my child. I hope it never happens, and I hope that situation could be resolved without anyone dying.
But say, somewhere in this long tail, I killed to defend, I don't believe that would invalidate how I've lived the rest of my life.
Only extremists create their principles from extreme cases.
As we used to say in the military, "the enemy gets a vote, too". You may find that your non-lethal methods of self defense come up short when the enemy is equipped with a knife or gun. Or at the state level, perhaps a ballistic missile. There have been plenty of victims of those in the media recently. What non-lethal methods would you recommend they use to protect themselves?
If you want your society (and by extension your belief system) to survive, there must be a segment of that society that is at least willing to engage in lethal violence, if only as a last resort. You do not get to hide behind others who are willing to do your moral dirty work and declare yourself morally superior to them. That's like a meat eater looking down on slaughterhouse workers because he bought his meat at the store (I say this as a meat eater myself).
Murder and manslaughter occurs in every country. Violence is hyperlocal and can be entirely stochastic. There are simply broken humans everywhere.
>One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.
Too much fiction, not enough fighting experience. There are myriad ways in which you cannot effectively defend yourself and cannot flee in these lose-lose scenarios. There largely wouldn't be victims, if this were true.
Dumb drunk guy swung at my face, I took it, a bunch of bystanders jumped on him and hauled him off. Pretty much end of story.
I've plenty of fighting experience, the ones that have ended badly for me have been the ones where I've fought back.
Obviously not the trolley problem-esque situation from the context, but my core point is that one cannot construct morality from extreme hypotheticals.
Isn’t that what happens when we codify limits of behavior, which are often extreme, into laws or religious texts which then govern a population?
Even if you don’t consider law as de facto defining morality, moral lessons from literature to oral tradition are often handed down as metaphor through stories of finding balance between extreme outcomes.
Where we run into trouble is where we say, well here is an example of a case where this extreme behaviour may be countenanced.
There may well be such cases! If I had a gun (I don't) and someone was attacking a loved one (fortunately rarely if ever happened) with intent and ability to kill (definitely never) and the only way I could stop them because of the specific situation was to kill them (waaay down the tail now)... perhaps, I don't know how I would react in that situation.
Here's where ethics becomes like programming. I could sit down and come up with a list of cases in which I felt it appropriate to kill, and code all the edge cases. This is inefficient and sorta silly, and I guess how I chose to interpret the comment that started this thread.
I could come also up with a clever algorithm which balances harm done and harm prevented (or good caused) based on a range of parameters. I think this is more what GP was pointing to, a teleological ethics. But what model? What parameters? What loss function? Which libraries?
My position here, at least on violence is deontological. If everyone can write their own crufty (and inevitably closed-source) solution to the problem, then bad actors can (and do) code it so they get the results they want when they need them. The result is a violent world.
The cleaner, more elegant, and more ethical code simply prohibits harmful outcomes altogether. I suspect derivations from this initial simplicity in religious texts and interpretations are malicious code added in later updates.
When a third party becomes involved you only need to rely on option 1. You are still probably acting out of “selfish” reasons in this case, however; I’d rather save my child than preserve the life of a murderer, but that is simply because my child’s life is more important to me than that of a murderer, regardless of moral justification.
The questions about self-centeredness get more interesting in life boat scenarios, where you have to choose between equally innocent parties.
Not because the concept would be wrong or there would be no need for it - of course a state has to be able to defend its population against attacks - but because as soon as there is a situation where it applies in war, both sides seem to stretch it to absolutely unrecognizable lengths and use it to justify essentially everything in warfare.
That's why I'm wary if someone makes a theoretical argument about personal self-defense that's tailor-made to justify killing. It feels too much like the same tactics in war propaganda.
There are nonlethal ways of defending oneself or others, too, btw. Learn martial arts, knock them out, use a taser if you have too, then grab your kid and run. None of that requires shooting them.
Agree with the general sentiments of your post. A lot of pro self-defense talks online read like thinly veiled "bad ass" fan fiction where someone salivates over the idea of killing someone in a legal manner that they face no consequences for.
But I don't think this last part is very realistic and possibly even very dangerous. Martial arts aren't anywhere near as effective as people make them out to be if you are not highly trained and essentially useless if the other person is armed even with a knife. They are better for training confidence/athleticism than self-defense. Tasers are frequently shrugged off by aggressors (no shortage of videos online showing this) and if you miss you just escalated the situation with no other way out. A gun is really the only thing that puts even the weakest victim on par with the strongest aggressor. But situational awareness for where you are and who is around you is 100x more important.
A lot of the more horrific acts of war seem designed not to defend the people who happen to live in a state, but the state apparatus (or the interests of that states stakeholders) itself.
It's the individual that generally has no right to self defense, if measured by the ability to mount an effective armed self defense. In most countries, the individual is as expendable as a red blood cell is to the overall organism. They are not prevented from fighting back per se, but this natural right is severely and harshly limited.
Morally, I'd argue they have none.
Were it so simple, police forces would simply act out Hollywood-esque movie moves. But in reality, individual officers must often resort to firearms to stop assailants, or in some countries, mass unarmed officers must swarm a single assailant.
In regards to states' self-defense claims, they have every incentive to claim it as a casus belli. It's too powerful and righteous to not try to get it to 'stick', and big lies do sometimes work. That doesn't obviate there being actual cases of self-defense, it's just not something that can be taken for granted, and when information is a battlespace all its own, I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
When you kill that person, you have joined them in also sinning against God — irrespective of what your reason was.
I'm not taking a side here but just pointing out that Quakers have a very clear directive that goes, more or less, thou shalt not kill.
(It's perhaps a bigger surprise that countless other Christian religions have all kinds of addendums that I guess allow for that one.)