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State-Sanctioned Killing

ONLY NICE THINGS

22:01 / 02.12.02

Elsewhere:

(One) could start a thread called "State-sanctioned killing", that might include both war and the death penalty. Also espionage, trade agreements, the availability of firearms and the availability of abortion, depending on where you wanted to draw the line.

Essentially, this is a continaution fo that thought. States allow their citizens to kill, or actively encourage them to kill, in certain situations. Citizens in the military can kill citizens of other countires in wartime, and under certain circumstances citizens of their own country as well. Citizens employed by their government's secret services or police forces may find themselves instructed to use deadly or potentially deadly force againsttheir own countrymen or citizens of other nations.

But there are other, more contentious forms of state-sanctioned killing. Some states might allow citizens to participate in the killing of elderly and infirm relatives. Others allow the free sale of guns, thus massively increasing the chance of a citizen being killed by gunshot wound. Abortion could be seen, depending on your views, as a state-sanctioned act of killing, wheter or not you go for the more emotive term "murder".

And so on, and so on. So, what is the happy balance? Where does the obligation of a state to protect its citizens end, and when, conversely, does the state's obligation to protect its citizens against harm, even if that harm is willingly inflicted, begin? Is this even a meaningful distinction?

22:45 / 02.12.02

Haus, you need a specific example. There's no one ethical model that can be applied to all situations.

ONLY NICE THINGS

23:11 / 02.12.02

Oh, don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud. You go for it. When do you find it acceptable for your state to restrict your freedoms in order to protect your own life or that of others?

23:47 / 02.12.02

Er, traffic speed limits?

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:04 / 03.12.02

Good one. I'm not sure if this is going anywhere, but....the state imposes traffic speed limits so that, if the car we are driving hits something, or if we are hit by another car that somebody else is driving, the chance of death or serious injury is reduced. So far so good.

Except that in certain circumstances civilian officers of the law are allowed not only to exceed that limt, but also to drive into people at speed. Specifically, high speeds in built-up areas are allowed during "hot pursuit", and if they hit and kill somebody while pursuing hotly, they are protected from the usual opprobrium and criminal procedings. Is this a sort of threat balancing? That you risk killing somebody while in hot pursuit because the pursued would be likely to kill more than one person if they get away? This must be the logic, and yet it occurs to me that it's fairly infrequent that those being pursued are murderers...

Hoom.

10:58 / 03.12.02

Indeed. This is the problem with drawing a line in the ethical sand. You could say that speed limits are justified by a simple utilitarian ethic. That same ethic entitles the police to break speed limits -- leaving aside the fact that many irresponsible or drunk drivers are by definition potential murderers and that police rushing to attend an assault or robbery may be saving a life -- it is for the good of the greater part that the law (is seen to) be enforced. (BTW, IIRC, police in hot pursuit are technically still breaking the law but conventionally are not charged. There have been a few occasions (many would argue too few) when officers have been charged/disciplined after accidents.) Of course, doctors, ambulance crews and firefighters are also allowed to break the law in the course of their job.

Speed limits, then, are generally accepted to be a good thing for utilitarian reasons. But, and this is why I wrote we needed specific examples, it would be offensive (to me at least) to use the same reasons to support e.g. euthanasia.

11:09 / 03.12.02

Also interesting that "the car we are driving hits something," but police are "allowed ... to drive into people at speed." I'm no pork-lover, but we have to strip away moral prejudice before we start to build an ethic.

11:56 / 03.12.02

Police chases are discretionary but are discourage. Recklessly chasing after a suspect will get a police officer in trouble, though not as much as it would the fleeing suspect. An especially deadly chase in Houston, Texas, forced a change in policy, so that chases were to be avoided if possible. Now cops are looking into things like localized EMP scrambling of the electronics of a fleeing car, or (for all I know) building a disabling feature into new cars.

One grey area of (U.S.) state-sponsored violence could be the CIA's recent air-to-surface missile strike in Yemen, against some al-Qaeda honchos riding in a car, with help from the Yemeni government. No trial, only execution. I'll gladly see scorpions laying eggs in their bowels for eternity, but this sets a bad precedent. While my government weakens the rule of law at home, considering secret military terrorism trials a necessity, it does the same abroad, conducting terroris bug hunts in the Middle East and refusing an international justice apparatus. It only helps to make more terrorist attacks almost legal.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:00 / 03.12.02

I don't see the moral prejudice. If a person drives into another person at speed and is not charged for doing so, it occurs to me that they are being allowed so to do. I think the police do a great job, me.

So, a doctor is allowed (morally rather than legally?) to break the law by driving at high speed (despite presumbaly not having the extra formal training of a police driver) to treat a sick patient, but is not allowed to break the law by ending the life of a patient who wants to die, and whose death would benefit not only themself (the cessation of discomfort and thus unhappiness) but also the family having to suffer through their loved one's agony, and the generla public who will no longer have to support the cost of the patient's drugs and treatment? This, I would suggest, is the problem with a utilitarian perspective in this context - it can be used to justify almost anything.

12:43 / 03.12.02

Haus -- I was making the point that your language implied that "civilian" traffic accidents were caused by random chance (our cars hit things) and police accidents were caused by recklessness (police drive into people), when in fact any traffic accident not caused by unforeseeable mechanical failure is due to personal recklessness. An ethic based on your distinction would be faulty. For clarity, I shouldn't have included "allowed" in the second quote. Sorry.

The contradiction the doctor faces illustrate my point above -- there is no single ethic that can be applied to every situation. I will argue though that utilitarianism does not put too much stock in the desires of the individual so, in the case of the euthanasia patient, we should only cite the desires of the family and friends and the cost to the public. That ain't reason enough to off someone. This is why utilitarianism, though useful, cannot be used to justify every decision.

Anyway, speaking of ethical dilemmas, I have one of my own this afternoon: Either I spend the afternoon butchering then mincing ethics with you, or I finish a job application. Courtesy requires I stay on Barbelith, self-interest and the need to find funds for my ISP bill requires I open up Word.

If you can think of an ethic that can be applied to every sitch, I'll see you here maybe tomorrow, otherwise, see you around.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:20 / 03.12.02

Why can nobody stay on-topic around here anymore?

Utilitiarianism is a system of ethics based on the procurement of the greatest possible good, or happiness depending on whether you are starting from Bentham or Mill, for the greatest possible number. Therefore, the patient is one of the number, and his wishes are therefore relevant. The patient is also relevant because it is an action performed upon him that will affect the possible good accruing to the number. Presumably, if he does not give consent, then the doctor is killing him, presumably not of benefit to the family or, for reasons of general practice, probably not of benefit to the wider public.

Therefore, the patient's wishes are not just relevant, but pretty much key, as far as I can tell...

16:02 / 03.12.02

There's a guy in Brooklyn named Howard Bloom who compares society to a big colony of sea-anenomes that does what it must to thrive. When it bumps up against other colonies, it tries to kill them or take them over. When it is internally disorganized, it isolates and consumes the disorganized parts. I don't know whether this evolutionary perspective is original -- in fact, now that I think of it, it's probably not, I just don't know where to trace it -- but it does seem to let some of the gas out of the ethical-quandary balloon. In a system as complicated as an anenome colony, the parts can't know why things are happening as they are, but the whole organism 'knows'. Ethically, we can only be concerned with our own behavior -- we work to be 'organized' while we leave the generalizations to work themselves out. Granted, that's not very comforting if we've been run over by a police car or something.

16:20 / 03.12.02

No one's OT. Check the abstract and your first post. The remit's wider than the M1.

Can't be bothered to pick up the once-loved copy of Mill looking plaintively at me from the shelf, so I'm going to say, yes you're right about the terminally-ill patient ... who wants to die and and thinks euthanasia is a good thing and whose joy at being bumped off will measurably outweigh everyone else's feelings. Next patient, please.

I'm off to the post box.