Morality of Life and Death

Morality of Life and Death

Morality is often presented as a list of commandments, imperatives, duties, requirements, rules. Among these we have the commandment not to kill—along with commandments not to steal, lie, betray, break promises, be ungrateful, etc. These are treated as much on a par; together they form a moral whole—a code, a system. In some presentations unity is imposed, as in utilitarianism and Kantianism. In particular, the prohibition against killing is regarded as just one duty among others (as in W.D. Ross’s catalogue of prima facie duties or obligations). Killing is not singled out for special treatment. But surely it stands out as special, not just one commandment among many. I want to suggest that morality should be bifurcated so as to record and respect the special character of the wrongness of killing. There is stealing and lying (etc.) on the one hand and killing on the other. These are distinct moral kinds, superficially similar but actually deeply different. We might speak of “normative dualism” as we speak of “substance dualism”. Let’s not lump everything together as if morality were a homogeneous domain. Some of morality is concerned with rules concerning the conduct of life, but some relates to the business of death. Some is about how to live with other people (also animals) and some is about the morality of ending life.

The most obvious point of difference is that killing is far more serious than other immoral acts—deserving of the greatest censure. Lying and stealing are wrong, but killing isn’t just wrong—it’s really seriously wrong. It sounds oddly understated to describe killing as the wrong thing to do. The word “wrong” is inadequate to express its moral badness (the word “bad” isn’t much better). Here we reach for words like “heinous”, “abominable”, “evil”, “wicked”—none of these apply to garden-variety cases of lying and stealing. Taking a life is in a class of its own. Life is “sacred”, we say, unlike property. We underrate its badness by classifying it along with other bad acts. The prohibition against killing is particularly strong, not easily overridden. Hence, the kind of severe punishment reserved for it alone.

Second, the other moral rules cluster around the notion of harm or unhappiness: lying and stealing make people suffer, cause unhappiness, reduce utility. They make the recipient worse off. But killing doesn’t make the victim unhappy—it makes the victim no more, not even capable of being unhappy. A broadly utilitarian account of the non-killing norms sounds reasonable, but we can’t explain the wrongness of killing by appeal to how the victim feels after being killed. The state of being dead is not an unhappy state. The killing itself may cause pain, but the result isn’t more future suffering. This makes killing a very special kind of wrong.

Third, it is not easy to say precisely what is bad about being dead, whereas it is easy to say what is bad about being stolen from or lied to. The badness of suffering is no mystery, but the badness of not being able to suffer (because dead) is perplexing. The sophistical murderer may contend that he has spared his victim future misery, and that is certainly true, since all human life has its quota of misery. It is common to say that the wrongness of killing consists in depriving the victim of future pleasures, and that is intelligible enough; but killing is much worse than, and quite different from, just preventing future pleasures—that could be achieved simply by moving the person to an unpleasant environment. Killing is really bad even if the victim’s life isn’t all that pleasurable. Taking a life is much worse than depriving a person of pleasure. But it is hard to say what this special badness amounts to—which is not to say that it amounts to nothing.

So, the prohibition against killing cannot be assimilated to the other prohibitions; it is sui generis. Killing is seriously bad, inexplicable in terms of utility, and somewhat mysterious as to the ground of its wrongness. I would also say that it is much more shocking than other misdeeds, even torture. It is nihilistic, extreme, inexcusable. Of course, there are contexts in which it is not wrong, such as self-defense (or other-defense), just as there are contexts in which stealing and lying are not wrong. But when killing is wrong, it is shockingly wrong. Slavery is no doubt very wrong, but genocide is shockingly wrong (think how feeble it sounds to describe genocide as “wrong”). It isn’t just one of those things one shouldn’t do; it is outside the range of normal human wrongdoing. We don’t say to our children, “Don’t tell lies, and while we’re at it don’t murder either!” That’s not something we feel we need to warn them against. We don’t say, “Don’t torment your sister, and don’t kill her either!”

One might reasonably insist that the injunction against killing is not a moral rule at all, not a piece of moral guidance or advice; it goes deeper than that. It is a self-evident moral truth recognized by every sane halfway decent person. It really doesn’t need a commandment to back it up. A natural response to “Thou shalt not kill!” is “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know”. You don’t need to be educated into that piece of moral knowledge, whereas the standard moral rules do require a bit of prodding and instruction. To describe the prohibition against murder as a “prima facie duty” sounds hopelessly inadequate and quaint, the result of trying to impose unity on a heterogeneous bunch of moral no-nos. You don’t owe it to people not to kill them, as you owe it to people not to lie to them, or not to steal from them, or not to be ungrateful for what they have done to benefit you.

I thus recommend that we have two lists of moral injunctions: one list contains all the standard injunctions, arranged alphabetically and printed in black ink; the other contains only the injunction against killing, written in italics and red ink. Then people will see that it is not just any old piece of moral sermonizing (perfectly justified as that may be) but a special moral principle deserving a position of its own. Metaethically, we should subscribe to moral dualism.[1]

[1] One wonders whether the traditional list reflects the fact that in the old days people didn’t really distinguish the wrongness of killing from other sorts of wrong act. Killing was far more commonplace and indiscriminate; it took centuries before we realized how bad it actually is. Now we see that it is a different kind of immoral act—it has a different “real essence”. But we persist with the outmoded list, as if killing were not much worse than telling the odd fib or stealing apples from an orchard (“scrumping”). As Ryle would say, it belongs in a different category.