Consequentialism: how to justify killing someone

Why do so may countries make birds of prey their emblem?

The other day I found a dead pigeon near the front door. The neck had been eaten cleanly. One lateral half of its body had also been neatly eaten away, exposing a flat and bloody surface to the air. A ring showed that it was a homing pigeon. We couldn't tell what had attacked and eaten this bird. Not a fox, nor a cat. That evening at dusk a bang on the study window made me look outside; there, beside the newly-planted hedge, was asparrow hawk on the ground turning to eye me fiercely. The bird had come back for its prey. It did not seem pleased to find its dinner gone.

Sparrow hawks and other birds of prey show no doubts or remorse when they kill; only humans do that and then not always. Why is that? One answer might be that we feel that people have to behave according to certain rules if they are to see themselves or want to be seen by others as civilised. The ancient Greeks stressed the differences between animals and people and between people and the gods. There were borders, boundaries between these groups that we should we wary of transgressing. Kill with impunity and you would blur the distinction between humans and animals. Aspire beyond what is proper for a human being - something that was commonly regarded as a challenge to the gods - and you might bring down terrible consequences upon yourself. This is the typical pattern of tyranny. The tyrant's behaviour reduces other people to the condition of cringing animals. This is something we see examined with great subtlety in Sophocles' play, Antigone or played out over many years and ended with great brutality in the case of a tyrant like Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.

Not always, but frequently, tyrants are killed by the people they humiliated

What about T.E. Lawrence? Can his behaviour be justified? Was he right to execute the man he had just saved from the desert in order to preserve military unity? Most of us would probably say 'Yes'. Somehow we feel that there was no way out for Lawrence if he was not to compromise the military operation. We feel that that the purposes of the military operation are somehow much more important than the life of one man, even if he is one of the fighters on our own side, but what is the basis of this feeling? Does it have any firmer basis than the fact that I happen to feel that way? If I feel one way and you feel quite differently about the killing, how can we ever decide which of us is right? This is where moral philosophy starts. We'll look briefly at some of the most common approaches.

A convinced Christian, let us say, a Quaker, might take the view that all killing of human beings by human beings is wrong on the ground that it is forbidden by Holy Scripture. He or she might cite the eight commandment - 'Thou shalt not kill!' - and say that that is all there is to say on the matter. God himself has clearly forbidden us to this. The Quaker standpoint is rigorously consistent: if killing is forbidden, then you shouldn't engage in wars, even where you are resisting foreign aggression on your own homeland. The Quaker position has other consequences, for if wars and aggression are wrong then an individual who believes this must, if he or she is serious, make efforts to become the sort of person who does not act on aggressive impulses. In order to become that self-controlled person, the Quaker will no doubt be helped by other fundamental Christian commandments, noticeably the command to 'Love thy neighbour as thyself'. These two commandments do make a coherent set of guidelines for life, though there are very few of us who could claim that are committed to basing our lives on these principles. People like ourselves will want to ask at this point on what are your principles based. We admit that they do help to make an admirable form of life but we cannot see why we should commit ourselves to that pattern, especially as it would leave us open to risking injury, enslavement and death. The Quaker's response would be to invite us to share in a religious vision of what life is all about based on the example given to us by the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Not many people today, at least not people brought up in the western liberal tradition, could accept this as an adequate justification for changing our lives so radically. We want to be able to live, to live well and that might mean protecting ourselves and our own against others.

This Quaker bride leaves her husband, then turns back to help save him..

How might we then seek to justify our own attitudes, especially when as here they probably include sanctioning as something right and acceptable the murder of this man whom Lawrence saved from desert? We would probably want to talk in terms of 'consequences'. We would not want to accept the Quaker attitude because we would not want to accept the consequences that would follow on that way of living. Philosophers give this way of looking at our actions and behaviour the miserable name of consequentialism. What makes something right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable are the consequences that flow from our behaving in that way. We place a supreme value on personal survival - above all, we want to live, and we want those who are near and dear to us to live too. This is the drama we see played out in the classic western, High Noon. In the end, the bride cannot accept the consequences of following her religious convictions. Personal loyalties are for her more important. She wants her husband to live even if this means killing someone.

But there is one big objection to this approach. We can see that people compare the consequences of alternative actions and decide which has the better or least worse consequences, just as in High Noon the bride chooses her husband's life over the lives of his enemies. We understand her decision; we sympathize with her decision, but how do we justify it? Is it right to save one man at the expense of the lives of five others? Questions of this kind led people to try to find some way of ranking consequences into good and better or bad and even worse. They looked for a criterion, a means of judging different actions according to their consequences. They wanted to be able to say something more than, 'I feel this is the right thing to do!' Jeremy Bentham's solution was to say that we should judge actions according to the amount of happiness they produced. So if one action produced X amount of happiness and another 3X units of happiness, then clearly the 3X action was a better action and should be preferred. The trouble with this is that we would find it difficult if not impossible to put a numerical value on happiness, yet this is what Bentham's school of utilitarian philosophers claimed they could do. Does this really work? Does the happiness of five criminals outweigh the happiness of the Sheriff and his Quaker bride? Numerically, it looks as if we should vote for the criminals, but of course we don't. It's not clear that that this kind of happiness consequentialism is is really going to help, but this theory is and remains the dominant one in the English-speaking tradition. John Stuart Mill made it the basis of Economics.

What about T.E. Lawrence? He might claim that he had to kill that man in order to save the military mission. He might have said  - or someone might say on his behalf - that the consequences of military failure would have been far worse than the death of that one man. If asked to elaborate on this claim, he might say, 'Well, if this attack failed and the tribes dispersed, that would have meant the end of the Arab Uprising against the Ottoman empire. It would also have meat that there would be greater military pressure on the British forces advancing from Egypt towards Jerusalem. Possible future deaths justified this present murder. It just happens to look very bad because he is shot a man he knew and whose life he had saved. Most of us would probably accept this sort of argument based on estimated or imagined consequences, but we probably would not feel that our justification was unassailable. It is so easy to justify things in this way. Human beings are very good at manufacturing reasons and justifications for what they do after they have done them.

Priam begs Achilles for his son's body & Achilles sees Priam as a man like his own father

Recognizing this has led some philosophers to say that we have a natural sense of sympathy and solidarity with other human beings and hence an aversion to killings and murder. Others say we feel like this because living together in society demands that we feel like this. We hate murder because we know that if it went unchecked and unpunished life together in settled societies would become impossible. In fact it doesn't take a great number of murders in society to undermine our confidence and trust in other people, and, without that trust, civil society starts to collapse. That is the argument that leads right-wing thinkers to claim that the first duty of a government is to provide security so that people can walk the streets and plant their crops without feeling that someone will come along and rob or kill them. What do you think?