From: andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Assasination
Date: 26 Aug 92 17:24:06 GMT
Organization: Renaissance Technologies Corp., Setauket, NY.

In article <1992Aug25.011502.6924@panix.com> jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt) writes:
>>There is _no_ distinction among premeditated murders for the good of
>>some group other than if it is self defense or not [ . . . ] 
>
>You seem to say assassination in self defense is different -- why not
>assassination in defense of others? 

I call that 'self defense' as well. But I tend to limit self defense to
cover those cases where a direct threat to human life can be negated by
the intended homicide. This direct threat must be considerably more than
a possibility - it must be the result of some considerable "intersubjective
agreement". In other words, one might try to stretch the point and say that
a pre-emptive nuclear first strike by the U.S. against the U.S.S.R. might
have been considered 'self-defense', since the U.S.S.R. had considerable
means to destroy the U.S., etc. If you commit to a justification of 
assassination, you must be prepared to find somewhere a reason that this
argument is false. My "way out" is to restrict the idea of self defense
at least as far as until the threat to life which must be contravened is
unavoidable by any other means. Those who have appealed to assassination
'in the last resort' agree at least this far. But I think I go a little
farther, in that I exclude the abstraction "Justice" as a possible
justification. I only accept direct present threat to human life as a
candidate.

>As a justification for killing,
>defense of self or others requires an immediate threat to life that was
>not presented by the Tienanmen demonstrators but is by many tyrants.

I tend to agree. The problem I'm trying to point out is that who gets
to determine what direct threat to human life is is a problem even for
the restricted approach I am considering. In order even to allow for
assassination as much as I have, it is necessary to find some reason why
the putative Tienanmen excuse is invalid. (To go a point further, is there
any mass killing in recent history for which the organizers didn't arrive
at a rhetoric of self-defense?)

>Maybe the question is what counts as premeditated murder.  We've
>touched on defense of self and others.

> If capital punishment or

Capital punishment is never justified. The condemned is already rendered
a non-immediate threat to human life in almost every conceivable scenario
which you would call capital punishment. It is therefore unjustified.

The defense argument for capital punishment is that by deterrence, capital
punishment averts a direct threat to human life. The evidence is far from
universally convincing, and the specific threat cannot be documented in
any acceptable way. (i.e. if we kill this person, what death will be averted?)

This brings out another important point. Assassination is only justifiable
if in addition to necessity, it is in some sense sufficient. It is not
acceptable to kill, even if necessary to avert death, if the killing is
not sufficient to avert death. In other words in order to justify capital
punishment you have to show that there is a threat to human life which can
in no other wise be averted, _and_ that capital punishment in fact does
avert this threat. These points must be demonstrated to a standard of
clarity and universal agreement which is not evident to me.

>killing in war don't count as murder,

Many killings in war are in fact murder. It is without doubt that the
bulk of the deaths in WWI were murder, and there are enough murders in
other wars to put strong limits on the possibility of justifying war at
all. The East African tendency towards starvation as a weapon is a clear
reminder that the justification of war must be viewed with a great deal
of skepticism by anyone who thinks.

>then assassination would
>sometimes have similar justificatory features that would distinguish it
>from the Tienanmen killings. 

This is exactly my point. There is a possibility of justifying assassination,
but it needs to make these distinguishing features clear.

>As your comments suggest, a troubling thing about justifications of
>assassination, like other justifications based on the plea that in
>extreme cases we can violate rules that are normally fundamental
>obligations, is that such justifications can be readily stretched to
>cover bad things.  That's life.  Necessity is said to be the tyrant's
>plea, but when it applies it does seem to me to be a plea that can
>justify almost anything.

That's why I like to keep the notion of sufficiency on the table. If you
can argue sufficiency, it's pretty likely that you will be able to focus
on what good is accomplished, and if in all honesty there is nothing in
the justification of sufficiency which suggests that the argument for
necessity is flawed, then perhaps there has arisen that revolting constraint:
a death to be wished.

But I think that there is much truth in the idea that violence is a last
resort for those who don't have enough resorts.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc