Abstract
How should deontologists concerned with the ethics of killing apply their moral theory when we don’t know all the facts relevant to the permissibility of our action? Though the stakes couldn’t be higher, and uncertainty is endemic where killing is concerned, few deontologists have an answer to this question. In this paper I canvass two possibilities: that we should apply a threshold standard, equivalent to the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard applied for criminal punishment; and that we should fit our deontological ethical theory into the apparatus of decision theory. I show that the first approach faces insurmountable obstacles, while the second holds much more promise for deontologists than they (and their critics) might first have assumed.
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Notes
My efforts here are part of a broader project on deontological decision theory, see for example (Lazar 2015a, 2016, 2017b). While this paper was under review at Philosophical Studies, I was made aware of a paper by Horacio Spector (2016) which reaches similar conclusion to mine in this paper, albeit by a different route.
I cannot defend my reasons for ignoring moral uncertainty in detail here, but, in broad strokes, they are mostly consistent with those set out in Hedden (2016).
This summary is intended to be general enough that most contemporary deontological theorists of killing can broadly endorse it.
Alec Walen, personal communication.
This is true, for example, of Christian Barry, Kai Draper, Cécile Fabre, Adil Haque, Jeff McMahan, Jonathan Quong, David Rodin, Victor Tadros, Suzanne Uniacke. I genuinely cannot think of a single author working actively in this area, besides Walen, who is an absolutist.
It's worth stressing that this is how the necessity constraint should be understood for the objective permissibility of killing.
Note that although each of these questions is of course a moral question, they each depend on non-moral facts, so we are still in the realm of non-moral uncertainty. Of course, we might also be uncertain about which standard of liability (for example) to apply. But as already noted, I am setting aside moral uncertainty in this paper.
Thanks to a referee for pressing me on the best formulation of the Threshold View. I have agonised over this point. There are potentially many different threshold views—for example, one could parse out all the elements of one's objective theory of the permissibility of killing, and apply a threshold to each of them. One obvious choice: intentional killing is subjectively permissible only if either (i) it is sufficiently likely your target is objectively liable, that killing her is objectively necessary, and that killing her is objectively proportionate or (ii) it is sufficiently likely that killing your target will realise enough objective good to be objectively permissible as a lesser evil. Alternatively one could use thresholds only for some of those conditions, or fold some of those conditions into the liability standard, and no doubt pursue other possibilities as well. However, I do not want to be accused of creating a straw man to knock down, so I have focused on that element of the Threshold View that others have defended in print.
We can assume that 'expected good' is calculated in the usual way, by weighting the good achieved in the different possible outcomes of the act by the likelihood that each will come about.
Jackson and Smith (2006) agree that this is not a serious worry.
For example, McMahan (2009).
Incidentally, though it is a bit awkward—to say the least!—a subjectivist necessity constraint could still be internal to an objective liability standard. Thanks to a referee for pressing me on this point.
See especially McMahan (2009).
Thanks to a referee for this response.
No doubt there are some complex issues here, which I address in detail in (Lazar and Lee-Stronach 2016). But the basic point is quite simple.
See, for example, Pascal's Wager, in the Pensées, part III, Section 233.
For simplicity I use terminology familiar from Savage's (1954) decision theory, but do not thereby pin my flag to that mast.
Each of these concepts undoubtedly raises innumerable complexities, but I doubt whether any will be relevant to my practical purposes in this paper. So I ignore them with a clear conscience!
Contra the concluding remarks in Oddie and Milne (1991). In a paper that responds, in part, to this one, Douglas Portmore (2016). argues that the existence of fundamental indeterminacy might ultimately undermine this claim. Though it seems unlikely that the outcome of the most fundamental debate in normative ethics could turn on metaphysical claims about indeterminacy, I agree with Portmore that deontologists need a response to his arguments, but will not broach that topic in this paper. My concern here is much more pragmatic: I want a criterion of subjective permissibility that works for people with the kind of deontological view described in Sect. 2. More fundamental questions about what ultimately grounds our moral reasons are, I think, inevitably intractable, as well as beyond the scope of my enquiry.
The first exception is discussed below; the second has to do with deontological opposition to aggregation. I think it's quite plausible that deontologists should resist some kinds of aggregation—for example, when we must choose between saving one person's life, or sparing some much larger number a much more trivial harm. I show elsewhere (Lazar 2017a) that representing this kind of view within a decision-theoretic framework is extremely difficult to do.
Thus my argument is part of what Andrew Schroeder (Forthcoming) would call the 'pragmatic' case for consequentialising.
This move is unavailable to adherents to the Threshold View. If they think necessity is internal to liability, then it is not sufficiently likely that Ruth is liable (even if it is highly likely, indeed known, that she is culpable). If necessity is external to liability, but still a necessary condition for permissibility, then it is still subjectively impermissible to proceed because it is not sufficiently likely to be necessary, again, regardless of whether we know that Ruth is liable. Thanks to a referee for pressing for clarification here.
Much more could be said here, of course. For a valiant attempt to operationalise a subjectivist version of the wide proportionality constraint, in the spirit of the thresholders, see Patrick Tomlin's MS, 'Proportionality and Probability'.
This is simply intended to illustrate the point that if we view killing innocent Bill as the most stringently prohibited kind of killing, then we will be forced to adopt a very high threshold of confidence that he is liable in order for killing him to be subjectively permissible. Obviously this kind of repetition would raise some other issues as well, but they would not undermine this general point.
These worries abound within decision theory too.
One possible avenue: argue that morality includes some in-built risk-aversion (or risk-seeking) like that modelled in Lara Buchak's (2013) risk-weighted expected utility theory.
See, for example, (Nover and Hájek 2004).
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Acknowledgments
This paper was inspired by discussions with Kim Ferzan, Jeff McMahan, Mike Otsuka, Jon Quong and Alec Walen in Princeton in 2013. Thanks to each of them, and to the Centre for Human Values, at Princeton, for hosting us. Since writing it up I have presented versions at: the Wallenberg Foundation’s Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace conference in May 2014; the ANU’s Departmental Seminar; the University of Toronto Philosophy Departmental Seminar; and the Program in Ethics and Public Affairs Seminar at Princeton (all also in 2014). Thanks to Helen Frowe, Hanti Lin, Andrew Sepielli, Charles Beitz, and the audiences at these talks for their comments. For particularly helpful discussions, and for reading drafts of the paper, thanks to Christian Barry, Ed Elliot, Johann Frick, Anne Gelling, Alan Hájek, Adil Haque, Tom Hurka, Frank Jackson, Melissa Lane, Leon Leontyev, Jeff McMahan, Philip Pettit, Jon Quong, Andreas Schmidt, Wolfgang Schwartz, Annie Stilz, Brian Talbot, Sergio Tenenbaum, and Bas van der Vossen. Work on this paper was supported by Australian Research Council DECRA Grant DE130100811 and Discovery Grant DP170101394.
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A terminological point: throughout this paper I use ‘uncertainty’ in its ordinary meaning to cover all species of imperfect information. I do not distinguish as economists and decision theorists often do between risk (when subjective probabilities are defined) and uncertainty (when they are not).
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Lazar, S. In dubious battle: uncertainty and the ethics of killing. Philos Stud 175, 859–883 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0896-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0896-3