Not sure about a couple of these, particularly 2 seems to be wrong, especially in Kantian deontology. 4 seems off, too. But you might find Bernard Williams' _Moral Luck_ interesting.
I agree, it is not okay by deontology. The ends aren't considered, only the means, and mens rea. Firing indiscriminately into a crowd is always* immoral.
*okay, firing into a crowd of enemy soldiers during a just war would be ok, but you know what I mean.
Actually, the goal of deterrence isn't properly served in an absence of due process. It isn't enough just to whack a bad guy; neutral bystanders and even one's own supporters need to be convinced via an objective, public legal process applying just laws that the bad guy really is bad, so that one's use of force is viewed by rational observers as being a legitimate form of retaliation and not as an act of aggression. One certainly doesn't want to make a martyr out of someone as bad as Hitler.
In 1960, when the Mossad caught up with Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, they didn't kill him. Instead, they abducted him and brought him to Israel to stand trial. It was only after being convicted and his appeals exhausted that the Ramla prison authorities then hanged him.
This is nonsense. The Israelis kill terrorists without due process all the time, and it works just fine in establishing detterance. Abu Iyad was the number-two man in the PLO, and they had no problem killing him without due process.
The difference is that Eichmann was a criminal of a thoroughly defeated enemy organization. The PLO is still in power to this day. It'd be almost impossible to have a trial for any of its high-ranking members due to the ability of the org to intimidate, bribe, and even kill witnesses, and the general hatred Arabs feel towards Jews. Killing terrorists without trial thus is not only the right decision practically, but morally as well.
Honestly, we should do the same thing in the Western world for the likes of returning ISIS terrorists. There's no redeeming any of those people, and it'd be even harder to put them on trial than the PLO terrorists. But our clown-world government is completely unsuited to the needs of counterterrorism, and thus, psychopathic killers live comfortably and with impunity in our borders. In many cases, right next to the very people they victimized.
Implying that the Second Yom Kippur War was ignited because the Israelis have been killing too many terrorists?
This is nonsense. The last time a significant number of Palestinean terrorists were killed was 2014, and the last time a significant number of Israelis were killed was 2002. Clearly, the problem is that not enough terrorists have been killed in the last ten years, which is the least-surprising thing in the world if you've actually been paying attention to the gains of the Global Jihadi Movement of the past decade, particularly as it concerns the IRGC, for whom Hamas, Hizballah, Asad, and the Houthis are fully-integrated components, and the KGB-agent led PLO, the Russians, the Pakis, the Red Chinese, the Norks, and the Talib-Qaeda regime in Afghanistan are all in alliance with, or active members of, as well. Not to mention the Islamic State, which has never truly been the enemy of either Assad nor Iran nor the Russians, despite much mythmaking to the contrary.
We've been way too fucking lenient. We need to kill a lot more fucking terrorists to keep this shit from ever happening again.
What I am implying is that the lawless treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state (and by the hard-line para-state organizations often indulged by the Israeli state) over the past three-quarters of a century has been an important factor in spawning terrorism against Israelis by large numbers of Palestinians.
Obviously it is not the only factor, since as you mentioned there have always been foreign powers willing and able to provide material and political support to Palestinian terrorist organizations. Still, killing one cohort of terrorists has never prevented or deterred subsequent generations from thirsting for martyrdom and forming yet another cohort willing to commit fresh outrages. Many Palestinians would rather die than tamely suffer the continual humiliations and wretched dead-end existence of life in refugee camps or in villages or densely-packed urban areas walled-off from the world and with few decent jobs available.
I would agree that compelling a respect for individual rights does ultimately mean killing outlaws who resolutely refuse to do so. However, an important corollary of this principle is that non-outlaws should not be killed or otherwise have their rights summarily violated, nor should enforcement of their rights be seriously compromised by unjust laws or by a lack of due process.
A refusal to sharply discriminate between the rights-respecting and the non-rights-respecting, and to make such a distinction perfectly clear to everyone else who cares about the situation by submitting disputes to impartial adjudication under just laws, only incentivizes one's targets to disrespect one's rights. It is the source of grievances that terrorist organizations thrive on.
If this were remotely the case, we would've seen significant killings of Palestineans by Israelis in the last ten years to insight this. We haven't. The war had been at a lowpoint in violence over the last ten years, with no significant Israeli casualties in roughly the last twenty years, neither. Fuck, far more Palestineans have been killed within this century by Assad than the Israelis, and yet we don't see this kind of behavior by the jihadists against Assad. They actively co-operate with him! The very same people who carried out this attack control his regime!
And the "blockade" has been a joke. Plenty of truckloads of material get into Gaza every day. It's just skimmed by the same terrorists who perpetrated this massacre, yet you don't see mass protests against the IRGC's colonial outpost government or calls for jihad against Persians. Certainly nothing like you see against Jews.
The only solution to revolutionary terrorism and criminality is violence. It's always been the only solution. Only a life of extreme privilege could possibly make you question this fact. We should've decapitated the Khomeini'ist Snake a long fucking time ago.
The point of instituting a rule of law and due process isn't to shield terrorists and criminals from retaliatory violence. Rather, it is to shield the innocent from such violence. If you punish the innocent as if they were criminals, what incentive do they (or their surviving family and friends, etc.) have to not become criminals themselves?
Of course, if you kill everyone in a community, then it doesn't matter who among them was innocent and who was guilty. No one will be left to give you any more trouble then. However, it is hard to understand how someone implementing a policy of _Caedite eos--Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius_ can themselves be meaningfully distinguished from a genocidal terrorist.
I'm sure you'll be happy to know that the border crossing at Rafah has been hit with multiple air strikes, and that the Egyptians have been warned not to send any relief convoys. Gaza will likely be leveled, even if two million residents happen to be inconveniently in the way with nowhere to run to.
He argues that when waging war, even for a nominally good cause, huge civilian casualties are baked in, and positive consequences on the same scale are mostly a matter of luck.
The problem with this take is it totally divorces warfare from context. Indeed, Caplan himself did that by bringing up the World War I example. There were ample opportunities to avoid war as a result of Franz Ferdinand's assassination, but the German Empire sabotaged every one of tgese opportunities because they wanted to trigger a war of conquest to establish themselves as the supreme power on the continent no matter how many millions had to die as a result. Hence why, after declaring war on Russia, they attacked France (a neutral country) by invading Belgium (another neutral country), and they would also sponsor domestic terrorists against their enemies throughout the war -- most notably by sponsoring the Bolsheviks coup against the Provisional Government, which would go on to cause more murder and suffering than any other event in human history -- while conducting terrorism of their own via their unrestricted submarine warfare:
We in the Anglosphere had no choice but to either enter the war or submit to Russo-Teutonic world despotism and the sacrifice of untold millions to death and slavery. Our great mistake was submitting the krauts to too lenient a treaty and in not pressing to Moscow until we rounded up the Bolshies to a man and shot them in the streets. Pacifism is a hideous, amoral philosophy that relies on either rewarding aggression or having someone else fight in your place. It deserves zero respect, and survives about as well under scrutiny as a snowcone survives an asphalt driveway at high noon.
Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), has a section on the role of Jim's "fortune" (luck) in our estimation of Jim's merit (or, in other words, on our moral sentiments about Jim's conduct).
In the course I teach on TMS, I give an assignment on that section.
It is also the case that the last two of Smith's four sources of moral approval address the goodness of the act on the basises of "Is this done in the proper way?" and "Would this be good if it were commonly done this way?" (Paraphrasing a bit, there.) In both cases the answer is pretty clearly no, as firing randomly hoping to kill Hitler is a bad way to try and kill Hitler (the good outcome achieved) and we don't generally want people randomly firing into crowds with the hopes of killing terrible people in the process.
So, whether or not we know the motive (source 1, which is definitely a big negative if known), if we know the process was randomly firing into the crowd, we can pretty easily agree that the act was very bad because of the how it was done and how much we would really prefer people not do that.
About the only way the perpetrator comes out looking praiseworthy is if we neither know the motive nor the methods, that is if we believe him when he says "I totally meant to do that, and only that!"
Let me add that Smith implies (pp. 104–108) that IF JIM'S INTENTION IS CERTAIN, and especially if it is COMMON KNOWLEDGE, then luck plays only a small role in the formation of our moral sentiments.
Bryan posits certainty of the shooter Jim's intentions. Obviously, on that assumption, we will and should deem his conduct to be bad, even if, in this case, by freak accident, it was beneficial.
When knowledge of intention is not certain, luck has more influence on our moral sentiments, by way of results or consequences, because results or consequences are one of the indicators of intentions. We don't always we have good indicators.
It takes two wings to fly. Proper ethics treats deontology and consequentialism as two wings, to be developed in conjunction with one another. Our understanding of good conduct and our understanding of what's good for the whole are developed so as to correspond to one another. Pitting deontology against consequentialism is wrongheaded.
Still, in actualities, luck can create some space between good conduct and beneficialness.
Richard, your example presents some interesting questions. Are you assuming that had he not been shot, he would have gone on to figure in the murder millions? Well, why? It is obvious from your example that that future is merely possible and not actual. Why assume it is nonetheless the counterfactual future? The one that would be actual? For all we can determine in the example, had he not been shot, he would have died in an accident shortly thereafter. There is no telling from the example.
Recently a former Ukrainian Nazi* from WWII was honored and then reviled in quick succession. Yet likely his direct descendants that share much of his ideology and motivations and perhaps even revere what he did are considered heroes. Wanting to be a Nazi good, actually being a Nazi evil.
The whole war seems a lot like firing into a crowd of Russians and hoping you hit Putin (whose not even in the crowd).
*Ironically I think its absurd that some west Ukranian peasant that was being starved by the soviets picks up a gun and fights with the enemy of his enemy and all of a sudden he's a completely untouchable monster 75 years later (that apparently was living his life just fine before being used as a political prop). Sucks to have randomly been in the wrong place at the wrong time and got associated with fighting for histories bad guys (against another of histories bad guys that we've determined are forgiven).
---
Anyway, this hypothetical seems somewhat worthless. Killing Hitler in 1946 doesn't really do much for the world. No lives will be saved. It seems unlikely to me that Hitler would be enjoying himself much in Argentina or have long left to live. If there is even a small chance of an innocent being killed for the chance to kill Hitler that seems like risking the lives of innocents to engage in a revenge killing for ones personal enjoyment.
If its the year 1936 and you have some decent reason for believing things are going to turn out the way they did but would turn out different without Hitler, then maybe some utilitarian case could be made for murdering him even at the risk of a few innocent lives.
Later on many German officers would make this calculation time and time again and try to kill Hitler in ways that would kill innocents.
The difficulty of course is the uncertainty of the outcome of ones actions. You don't know FOR A FACT that killing Hitler in 1936 without foresight will be a massive EV positive. And if everyone is supposed to do that calculation in your head and everyone has different views of the utility calculation then it only takes one of millions to reach the conclusion that it's a good thing to start shooting. Sounds good with Hitler but try using the logic for anything else. Do you want to Unabomber's judgment on whether industrialists need to be killed by bombs?
Your example is relying on the theory that Hitler did not kill himself in 1945, but rather escaped to Argentina, no? Maybe an earlier event would be beneficial, like the 1936 Berlin Olympics, if only because it would stop people from saying "Wait... Hitler wasn't alive in 1946. What was he doing in Argentina?"
I think that's a feature, not a bug. A lot of people believe (with good reason) that Hitler might have made it to South America. Not at the time, of course - but in hindsight. In your modern case, the moral argument is even *better* because your 1946 "random fire into a crowd" would have had, you assume, ZERO chance of hitting Hitler. As in, there's no possible moral upside.
If you set up the question differently, it plays out differently. Consider if you didn't know what Hitler looked like, but instead were told "There's about 150 people in that crowd. You have one bullet -- one of the people is definitely, 100%, absolutely, a mass murderer and one of humanity's greatest historical monsters."
That's a different question, though still an interesting one. If you had a 1/150 chance of firing randomly into a crowd and killing Hitler, do you?
That's a good point. I suppose also that in 1936 people didn't know Hitler was going to be the Hitler we know of. Then again, by 1946 the value of killing Hitler is much smaller than it is in 1936, as you are not preventing any of his evils. (That we know of?) The story in a way requires going back in time for the moral lesson to reach its full potential, as 1936 Hitler is merely a moderately icky guy but with an incredibly horrible future ahead of him, more valuable to kill for the good of humanity but with fewer known reasons for doing so, whereas 1946 Hitler has his horrible acts that demand retribution, but the damage is done and he is apparently going to live out the rest of his life in obscurity and irrelevance, so the future benefits are low. At that point, it is arguably better to arrest him so that a trial could be held before execution.
From the practical perspective, I agree. Shooting him randomly in the head wouldn't change anything and wouldn't give anybody a sense of real vindication. I'm certain that in 1946 there would be plenty of people who could be more creative about retribution.
However, the context of Bryan's original thought experiment still holds true. I don't think we need to overcomplicate it more than the original premise:
1. You fire into a crowd of people
2. That bullet accidently kills Hitler.
3. Would a jury convict you of murder? It seems extraordinarily unlikely they would, but not because what you did wasn't terrible -- it just had a desired outcome.
I could think of other thought experiments that are more modern than a Hitler one. Lets say that a multinational chemical company willfully releases thousands of tons of poison into the atmosphere over the East Coast. But it turns out, it only kills Spotted Laternflies and causes no other harm whatsoever. That is, an extremely desired (but incidental) outcome.
I am not sure that it really is overcomplicating it, rather that most philosophical moral experiments make a lot of simplifying assumptions that don't hold where we care about it, in real human experience.
I actually do believe people would convict someone of killing Hitler in 1946 via the method of firing randomly into a crowd. The chemical company in your example would certainly be convicted (or fined most likely.) Without being able to show their intent to do the "right thing" they would likely be seen as engaging in some manner of "reckless endangerment," and probably would even if they did prove their intent. (Although I can't think of any particular examples, I doubt many people who kill eg. convicted criminals as vigilantes get off via jury nullification. I might be wrong about that, however.)
Now, I am arguing moral intuition and what people would feel, not what people should feel (descriptive, not prescriptive) but it does seem to me that the seeming paradox in this case is only one when looking purely at the consequentialist outcomes, ignoring most of how humans actually make moral judgements. We generally do not give a full pass in our judgements when people do something likely to cause harm but manage to luck out, just the same as we generally place little blame on those who do great harm by accident when doing something normally considered safe.
> I am not sure that it really is overcomplicating it, rather that most philosophical
> moral experiments make a lot of simplifying assumptions that don't hold where
> we care about it, in real human experience.
That's the point of a thought experiment, though. Given a premise which is held to be true for the point of the experiment, you first nit-picked the specifics of the premise - which by definition is held to be true. Otherwise there's no thought experiment. You've gotten sucked in by the metaphor.
By the way, I mean "you" in the indirect sense -- because half of the comments on this posting are people saying the same thing. "Hitler died in 1945 so this thought experiment is stupid." Which utterly misses the point of the entire exercise.
Regardless, I agree with you about the chemical release. I'm not sure about murdering Hitler. I think you could find a venue where the jury would say, "yes, he attempted to commit murder, but there's no way I'm going to sentence somebody to life in prison for killing Hitler. Even if it was accidental." The sensible prosecutor would instead go for hundreds of counts of attempted murder, probably?
My argument for that is, if the last act Stalin or Mao had done was shooting Hitler in the face, live on television, a bunch of people would take the stance of, "Sure, the Cultural Revolution was terrible.... but did you see that time he shot Hitler in the face during that live BBC broadcast?"
Re: thought experiments: I get what you are saying, I am just saying that those sorts of thought experiments are a big part of what is wrong with moral philosophy as practiced in academia with rare exception. They are roughly the equivalent of doing a thought experiment in physics where you say "Imagine a whole lot of stuff. Oh, and quantum tunneling is super easy, assume that," then point out that people's intuitions on what would happen don't work. Of course they don't, because a critical part of reality as we understand it is changed. In this case, the surrounding reality would determine a great bit about how people would actually react in forming their moral judgements. Those judgements are always highly context dependent. In this particular case, it is hard to imagine any case where someone firing randomly into a crowd killed any previously horrible person and is not punished for firing randomly into a crowd, and that punishment being approved of by the majority of people. Even if everyone believes they intended that outcome, humans generally are not really happy with killing someone who is not a clear and present danger in such a fashion as puts lots of other innocent people at risk. After all, there are probably lots of really bad guys that could be offed to the benefit of humanity that we don't risk other people's lives to kill. (And when governments do, via say drone strikes, they act as though we are super embarrassed and try not to let anyone know, which implies they expect moral distaste for the act.)
I think that is, in part, tied to Caplan's point here, but from the other side: philosophy is giving odd answers out of step with our intuitions because philosophy is making strange assumptions and treating them as reality.
To your last paragraph, I think you are wrong there. After all, we don't say "Hey, ol' Adolf did a lot of bad stuff, but at least he killed Hitler." :D
Why not begin "The year is 1936. You’re in Berlin"? What does the counterfactual of Hitler being alive in 1946 in Argentina add to the moral question you're trying to explore?
As others have pointed out, nearly all of the reasons for Hitler deserving to die happened after 1936. Many world leaders today - including some most people would balk at openly endorsing assassination of - have done worse than Hitler had done by 36.
It was already obvious Hitler's plans for where to take Germany were as ugly as Lenin's plans for where to take the Russian Empire by '36. Not that he was alone, as the krauts had already extensively violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles from the moment it was signed even during the pre-Nazi days, complete with borrowing money from us to pay their war reparations and declaring bankruptcy to avoid having to spend a penny of their own in recompense for the rape of France and Belgium; but the signs were not difficult to read, and you didn't need to be a time traveller to morally justify killing Hitler in '36.
It's much harder to do the consequentialist reasoning if you kill Hitler in 1936. What happens to Nazi Germany if you do that? Who knows, maybe you'd still get WW2, but with a more competent leadership.
Also relevant to assessing the force of alleged "counterexamples" to utilitarianism (which often involve comparable levels of lucky recklessness), as I explain through a similar series of questions, here: https://rychappell.substack.com/p/ethical-theory-and-practice
The mistake is in point #3. You did not make the world better in consequentialist terms. You created an incentive for people to keep shooting at random crowds that will far outweigh the benefit of having killed one bad person. The consequentialist answer is to condem this act given it's future expected consequences.
Only by your premise that the consequence is the incentive for random shootings. That being a real consequence seems profoundly unlikely - far more probable is people believing the shooter targeted Hitler intentionally, then lied about it.
Besides, Hitler was already dead in 1946, so the actual chance of hitting him wasn't merely infinitesimal - it was zero..
It's a useful metaphor, but Point 4 makes no sense to me. I'm not sure what analytic philosophy is, but if it's deducible from its principles that it's morally OK to fire into a crowd without knowing or caring who the bullet might hit if it just happens to hit someone evil there's something wrong with the principles.
I think it has to do with the difference of an act being a moral good versus the person acting morally.
If we take the inverse, a person intending to do good by shooting Hitler in the crowd and ending up killing everyone but Hitler, we could say that the person was trying to act morally, but the act itself (what actually happened) was immoral.
I don't think the original act of shooting into a crowd maliciously even though it only ended up killing Hitler is deductible to say that it is okay to do, unless there happens to be a certainty that shooting in the crowd would only kill murders. If there is not a 100% certainty, you would be gambling with others' lives, and would be responsible for their deaths.
I doubt that anyone in his right mind would argue that shooting randomly into a crowd of strangers without caring who gets hit could be morally justified by the outcome.
If the bullet happens to strike a mass murderer one might call that a just result, whether or not the bullet wound proves fatal. By the same token one could say that anything unpleasant that befalls a mass murderer is a plus on the scales of justice: falling off a cliff, getting bit by a rabid dog, contracting colon cancer, suffering a toothache, losing big in a poker game, stubbing a toe, whatever. Of course, nothing that happens to the murderer would be of any benefit to his victims. Friends and relatives of the murder victims and others who were horrified by the crimes might take some small satisfaction in learning that the murderer subsequently suffered some unrelated mishap, but presumably most of them would derive much more satisfaction from learning that punishment had been deliberately imposed on him and that the punishment was commensurate with the gravity of his crimes. And I daresay any penalty short of capital punishment would be insufficient to afford most of those concerned with a sense that justice had been done.
1. I disagree: the act was virtuous, of course! But the actor did not possess relevant moral knowledge of said virtue. One might say only God knew what would transpire, and He was Good. In meditation circles, one speaks of separating emotion from action, motive from cognition. Here, we can culturally express without shame that Hitler’s death was a happy accident. This intuition seems right to me.
4. This argument suffers from an issue of undefined contingency: if we accept all contingencies as argumentatively admissible, we come away with logical relativism. If not, we require a metaphysical primitive by which to explain the flexibility range of contingencies.
5. I agree with your conclusion here, intuitively. But it’s the moral attitude founded on human naturalism that is wrong. Given a God-determined Universe, ‘randomness’ wouldn’t exist and perhaps one’s maniacal flight of fancy was really an act of God’s benevolent will.
By this logic, if one randomly shoots into a crowd and kills someone’s, why can’t we deduce that the person deserved it? This is problem with all ‘it was God’s plan’ arguments. You wait to decide in retrospect whether you like the result to decide whether it was God’s plan, or human malice. It’s like waiting until after the results of an experiment are in to decide what result would confirm your hypothesis (and moreover, it’s a hypothesis that is impossible to disprove, making it meaningless).
Not sure about a couple of these, particularly 2 seems to be wrong, especially in Kantian deontology. 4 seems off, too. But you might find Bernard Williams' _Moral Luck_ interesting.
I think Bryan means desert here, not deontology per se.
I agree, it is not okay by deontology. The ends aren't considered, only the means, and mens rea. Firing indiscriminately into a crowd is always* immoral.
*okay, firing into a crowd of enemy soldiers during a just war would be ok, but you know what I mean.
Actually, the goal of deterrence isn't properly served in an absence of due process. It isn't enough just to whack a bad guy; neutral bystanders and even one's own supporters need to be convinced via an objective, public legal process applying just laws that the bad guy really is bad, so that one's use of force is viewed by rational observers as being a legitimate form of retaliation and not as an act of aggression. One certainly doesn't want to make a martyr out of someone as bad as Hitler.
In 1960, when the Mossad caught up with Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, they didn't kill him. Instead, they abducted him and brought him to Israel to stand trial. It was only after being convicted and his appeals exhausted that the Ramla prison authorities then hanged him.
This is nonsense. The Israelis kill terrorists without due process all the time, and it works just fine in establishing detterance. Abu Iyad was the number-two man in the PLO, and they had no problem killing him without due process.
The difference is that Eichmann was a criminal of a thoroughly defeated enemy organization. The PLO is still in power to this day. It'd be almost impossible to have a trial for any of its high-ranking members due to the ability of the org to intimidate, bribe, and even kill witnesses, and the general hatred Arabs feel towards Jews. Killing terrorists without trial thus is not only the right decision practically, but morally as well.
Honestly, we should do the same thing in the Western world for the likes of returning ISIS terrorists. There's no redeeming any of those people, and it'd be even harder to put them on trial than the PLO terrorists. But our clown-world government is completely unsuited to the needs of counterterrorism, and thus, psychopathic killers live comfortably and with impunity in our borders. In many cases, right next to the very people they victimized.
". . . it works just fine in establishing deterrence."
I don't think I need to dwell on the events that have occurred in Israel since you wrote your reply. The news speaks for itself.
Implying that the Second Yom Kippur War was ignited because the Israelis have been killing too many terrorists?
This is nonsense. The last time a significant number of Palestinean terrorists were killed was 2014, and the last time a significant number of Israelis were killed was 2002. Clearly, the problem is that not enough terrorists have been killed in the last ten years, which is the least-surprising thing in the world if you've actually been paying attention to the gains of the Global Jihadi Movement of the past decade, particularly as it concerns the IRGC, for whom Hamas, Hizballah, Asad, and the Houthis are fully-integrated components, and the KGB-agent led PLO, the Russians, the Pakis, the Red Chinese, the Norks, and the Talib-Qaeda regime in Afghanistan are all in alliance with, or active members of, as well. Not to mention the Islamic State, which has never truly been the enemy of either Assad nor Iran nor the Russians, despite much mythmaking to the contrary.
We've been way too fucking lenient. We need to kill a lot more fucking terrorists to keep this shit from ever happening again.
What I am implying is that the lawless treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state (and by the hard-line para-state organizations often indulged by the Israeli state) over the past three-quarters of a century has been an important factor in spawning terrorism against Israelis by large numbers of Palestinians.
Obviously it is not the only factor, since as you mentioned there have always been foreign powers willing and able to provide material and political support to Palestinian terrorist organizations. Still, killing one cohort of terrorists has never prevented or deterred subsequent generations from thirsting for martyrdom and forming yet another cohort willing to commit fresh outrages. Many Palestinians would rather die than tamely suffer the continual humiliations and wretched dead-end existence of life in refugee camps or in villages or densely-packed urban areas walled-off from the world and with few decent jobs available.
I would agree that compelling a respect for individual rights does ultimately mean killing outlaws who resolutely refuse to do so. However, an important corollary of this principle is that non-outlaws should not be killed or otherwise have their rights summarily violated, nor should enforcement of their rights be seriously compromised by unjust laws or by a lack of due process.
A refusal to sharply discriminate between the rights-respecting and the non-rights-respecting, and to make such a distinction perfectly clear to everyone else who cares about the situation by submitting disputes to impartial adjudication under just laws, only incentivizes one's targets to disrespect one's rights. It is the source of grievances that terrorist organizations thrive on.
If this were remotely the case, we would've seen significant killings of Palestineans by Israelis in the last ten years to insight this. We haven't. The war had been at a lowpoint in violence over the last ten years, with no significant Israeli casualties in roughly the last twenty years, neither. Fuck, far more Palestineans have been killed within this century by Assad than the Israelis, and yet we don't see this kind of behavior by the jihadists against Assad. They actively co-operate with him! The very same people who carried out this attack control his regime!
And the "blockade" has been a joke. Plenty of truckloads of material get into Gaza every day. It's just skimmed by the same terrorists who perpetrated this massacre, yet you don't see mass protests against the IRGC's colonial outpost government or calls for jihad against Persians. Certainly nothing like you see against Jews.
The only solution to revolutionary terrorism and criminality is violence. It's always been the only solution. Only a life of extreme privilege could possibly make you question this fact. We should've decapitated the Khomeini'ist Snake a long fucking time ago.
The point of instituting a rule of law and due process isn't to shield terrorists and criminals from retaliatory violence. Rather, it is to shield the innocent from such violence. If you punish the innocent as if they were criminals, what incentive do they (or their surviving family and friends, etc.) have to not become criminals themselves?
Of course, if you kill everyone in a community, then it doesn't matter who among them was innocent and who was guilty. No one will be left to give you any more trouble then. However, it is hard to understand how someone implementing a policy of _Caedite eos--Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius_ can themselves be meaningfully distinguished from a genocidal terrorist.
I'm sure you'll be happy to know that the border crossing at Rafah has been hit with multiple air strikes, and that the Egyptians have been warned not to send any relief convoys. Gaza will likely be leveled, even if two million residents happen to be inconveniently in the way with nowhere to run to.
I can't recall Caplan pointing to similar situations/arguments in real life that this would be relevant for.
Caplan's argument for pacifism is a weaker form of this, although he doesn't invoke this example: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/04/the_common-sens.html.
He argues that when waging war, even for a nominally good cause, huge civilian casualties are baked in, and positive consequences on the same scale are mostly a matter of luck.
The problem with this take is it totally divorces warfare from context. Indeed, Caplan himself did that by bringing up the World War I example. There were ample opportunities to avoid war as a result of Franz Ferdinand's assassination, but the German Empire sabotaged every one of tgese opportunities because they wanted to trigger a war of conquest to establish themselves as the supreme power on the continent no matter how many millions had to die as a result. Hence why, after declaring war on Russia, they attacked France (a neutral country) by invading Belgium (another neutral country), and they would also sponsor domestic terrorists against their enemies throughout the war -- most notably by sponsoring the Bolsheviks coup against the Provisional Government, which would go on to cause more murder and suffering than any other event in human history -- while conducting terrorism of their own via their unrestricted submarine warfare:
https://kyleorton.co.uk/2021/12/15/russia-and-the-outbreak-of-the-great-war/
We in the Anglosphere had no choice but to either enter the war or submit to Russo-Teutonic world despotism and the sacrifice of untold millions to death and slavery. Our great mistake was submitting the krauts to too lenient a treaty and in not pressing to Moscow until we rounded up the Bolshies to a man and shot them in the streets. Pacifism is a hideous, amoral philosophy that relies on either rewarding aggression or having someone else fight in your place. It deserves zero respect, and survives about as well under scrutiny as a snowcone survives an asphalt driveway at high noon.
Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), has a section on the role of Jim's "fortune" (luck) in our estimation of Jim's merit (or, in other words, on our moral sentiments about Jim's conduct).
In the course I teach on TMS, I give an assignment on that section.
I have just now posted the assignment here:
https://dklein780.medium.com/influence-of-fortune-on-moral-sentiments-assignment-4f301b9abc08
It is also the case that the last two of Smith's four sources of moral approval address the goodness of the act on the basises of "Is this done in the proper way?" and "Would this be good if it were commonly done this way?" (Paraphrasing a bit, there.) In both cases the answer is pretty clearly no, as firing randomly hoping to kill Hitler is a bad way to try and kill Hitler (the good outcome achieved) and we don't generally want people randomly firing into crowds with the hopes of killing terrible people in the process.
So, whether or not we know the motive (source 1, which is definitely a big negative if known), if we know the process was randomly firing into the crowd, we can pretty easily agree that the act was very bad because of the how it was done and how much we would really prefer people not do that.
About the only way the perpetrator comes out looking praiseworthy is if we neither know the motive nor the methods, that is if we believe him when he says "I totally meant to do that, and only that!"
Yepp!
Let me add that Smith implies (pp. 104–108) that IF JIM'S INTENTION IS CERTAIN, and especially if it is COMMON KNOWLEDGE, then luck plays only a small role in the formation of our moral sentiments.
Bryan posits certainty of the shooter Jim's intentions. Obviously, on that assumption, we will and should deem his conduct to be bad, even if, in this case, by freak accident, it was beneficial.
When knowledge of intention is not certain, luck has more influence on our moral sentiments, by way of results or consequences, because results or consequences are one of the indicators of intentions. We don't always we have good indicators.
It takes two wings to fly. Proper ethics treats deontology and consequentialism as two wings, to be developed in conjunction with one another. Our understanding of good conduct and our understanding of what's good for the whole are developed so as to correspond to one another. Pitting deontology against consequentialism is wrongheaded.
Still, in actualities, luck can create some space between good conduct and beneficialness.
"Proper ethics treats deontology and consequentialism as two wings, to be developed in conjunction with one another."
Exactly right:
https://jclester.substack.com/p/consequentialism-deontologism-and?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fconsequentialism&utm_medium=reader2
I'll make this assertion as an aside with no thought to context or additional information provided in TMS.
There is no such thing as luck or fortune. It is a supernatural concept that can only be used in an arbitrary or trivial fashion.
True, but when people use those words they usually mean something like "unpredictable coincidence".
Richard, your example presents some interesting questions. Are you assuming that had he not been shot, he would have gone on to figure in the murder millions? Well, why? It is obvious from your example that that future is merely possible and not actual. Why assume it is nonetheless the counterfactual future? The one that would be actual? For all we can determine in the example, had he not been shot, he would have died in an accident shortly thereafter. There is no telling from the example.
Appropriate: https://www.tor.com/2011/08/31/wikihistory/
Recently a former Ukrainian Nazi* from WWII was honored and then reviled in quick succession. Yet likely his direct descendants that share much of his ideology and motivations and perhaps even revere what he did are considered heroes. Wanting to be a Nazi good, actually being a Nazi evil.
The whole war seems a lot like firing into a crowd of Russians and hoping you hit Putin (whose not even in the crowd).
*Ironically I think its absurd that some west Ukranian peasant that was being starved by the soviets picks up a gun and fights with the enemy of his enemy and all of a sudden he's a completely untouchable monster 75 years later (that apparently was living his life just fine before being used as a political prop). Sucks to have randomly been in the wrong place at the wrong time and got associated with fighting for histories bad guys (against another of histories bad guys that we've determined are forgiven).
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Anyway, this hypothetical seems somewhat worthless. Killing Hitler in 1946 doesn't really do much for the world. No lives will be saved. It seems unlikely to me that Hitler would be enjoying himself much in Argentina or have long left to live. If there is even a small chance of an innocent being killed for the chance to kill Hitler that seems like risking the lives of innocents to engage in a revenge killing for ones personal enjoyment.
If its the year 1936 and you have some decent reason for believing things are going to turn out the way they did but would turn out different without Hitler, then maybe some utilitarian case could be made for murdering him even at the risk of a few innocent lives.
Later on many German officers would make this calculation time and time again and try to kill Hitler in ways that would kill innocents.
The difficulty of course is the uncertainty of the outcome of ones actions. You don't know FOR A FACT that killing Hitler in 1936 without foresight will be a massive EV positive. And if everyone is supposed to do that calculation in your head and everyone has different views of the utility calculation then it only takes one of millions to reach the conclusion that it's a good thing to start shooting. Sounds good with Hitler but try using the logic for anything else. Do you want to Unabomber's judgment on whether industrialists need to be killed by bombs?
Its Taxi Driver your are lifting from. Good lift.
Your example is relying on the theory that Hitler did not kill himself in 1945, but rather escaped to Argentina, no? Maybe an earlier event would be beneficial, like the 1936 Berlin Olympics, if only because it would stop people from saying "Wait... Hitler wasn't alive in 1946. What was he doing in Argentina?"
I think that's a feature, not a bug. A lot of people believe (with good reason) that Hitler might have made it to South America. Not at the time, of course - but in hindsight. In your modern case, the moral argument is even *better* because your 1946 "random fire into a crowd" would have had, you assume, ZERO chance of hitting Hitler. As in, there's no possible moral upside.
If you set up the question differently, it plays out differently. Consider if you didn't know what Hitler looked like, but instead were told "There's about 150 people in that crowd. You have one bullet -- one of the people is definitely, 100%, absolutely, a mass murderer and one of humanity's greatest historical monsters."
That's a different question, though still an interesting one. If you had a 1/150 chance of firing randomly into a crowd and killing Hitler, do you?
That's a good point. I suppose also that in 1936 people didn't know Hitler was going to be the Hitler we know of. Then again, by 1946 the value of killing Hitler is much smaller than it is in 1936, as you are not preventing any of his evils. (That we know of?) The story in a way requires going back in time for the moral lesson to reach its full potential, as 1936 Hitler is merely a moderately icky guy but with an incredibly horrible future ahead of him, more valuable to kill for the good of humanity but with fewer known reasons for doing so, whereas 1946 Hitler has his horrible acts that demand retribution, but the damage is done and he is apparently going to live out the rest of his life in obscurity and irrelevance, so the future benefits are low. At that point, it is arguably better to arrest him so that a trial could be held before execution.
From the practical perspective, I agree. Shooting him randomly in the head wouldn't change anything and wouldn't give anybody a sense of real vindication. I'm certain that in 1946 there would be plenty of people who could be more creative about retribution.
However, the context of Bryan's original thought experiment still holds true. I don't think we need to overcomplicate it more than the original premise:
1. You fire into a crowd of people
2. That bullet accidently kills Hitler.
3. Would a jury convict you of murder? It seems extraordinarily unlikely they would, but not because what you did wasn't terrible -- it just had a desired outcome.
I could think of other thought experiments that are more modern than a Hitler one. Lets say that a multinational chemical company willfully releases thousands of tons of poison into the atmosphere over the East Coast. But it turns out, it only kills Spotted Laternflies and causes no other harm whatsoever. That is, an extremely desired (but incidental) outcome.
Convict?
I am not sure that it really is overcomplicating it, rather that most philosophical moral experiments make a lot of simplifying assumptions that don't hold where we care about it, in real human experience.
I actually do believe people would convict someone of killing Hitler in 1946 via the method of firing randomly into a crowd. The chemical company in your example would certainly be convicted (or fined most likely.) Without being able to show their intent to do the "right thing" they would likely be seen as engaging in some manner of "reckless endangerment," and probably would even if they did prove their intent. (Although I can't think of any particular examples, I doubt many people who kill eg. convicted criminals as vigilantes get off via jury nullification. I might be wrong about that, however.)
Now, I am arguing moral intuition and what people would feel, not what people should feel (descriptive, not prescriptive) but it does seem to me that the seeming paradox in this case is only one when looking purely at the consequentialist outcomes, ignoring most of how humans actually make moral judgements. We generally do not give a full pass in our judgements when people do something likely to cause harm but manage to luck out, just the same as we generally place little blame on those who do great harm by accident when doing something normally considered safe.
> I am not sure that it really is overcomplicating it, rather that most philosophical
> moral experiments make a lot of simplifying assumptions that don't hold where
> we care about it, in real human experience.
That's the point of a thought experiment, though. Given a premise which is held to be true for the point of the experiment, you first nit-picked the specifics of the premise - which by definition is held to be true. Otherwise there's no thought experiment. You've gotten sucked in by the metaphor.
By the way, I mean "you" in the indirect sense -- because half of the comments on this posting are people saying the same thing. "Hitler died in 1945 so this thought experiment is stupid." Which utterly misses the point of the entire exercise.
Regardless, I agree with you about the chemical release. I'm not sure about murdering Hitler. I think you could find a venue where the jury would say, "yes, he attempted to commit murder, but there's no way I'm going to sentence somebody to life in prison for killing Hitler. Even if it was accidental." The sensible prosecutor would instead go for hundreds of counts of attempted murder, probably?
My argument for that is, if the last act Stalin or Mao had done was shooting Hitler in the face, live on television, a bunch of people would take the stance of, "Sure, the Cultural Revolution was terrible.... but did you see that time he shot Hitler in the face during that live BBC broadcast?"
Re: thought experiments: I get what you are saying, I am just saying that those sorts of thought experiments are a big part of what is wrong with moral philosophy as practiced in academia with rare exception. They are roughly the equivalent of doing a thought experiment in physics where you say "Imagine a whole lot of stuff. Oh, and quantum tunneling is super easy, assume that," then point out that people's intuitions on what would happen don't work. Of course they don't, because a critical part of reality as we understand it is changed. In this case, the surrounding reality would determine a great bit about how people would actually react in forming their moral judgements. Those judgements are always highly context dependent. In this particular case, it is hard to imagine any case where someone firing randomly into a crowd killed any previously horrible person and is not punished for firing randomly into a crowd, and that punishment being approved of by the majority of people. Even if everyone believes they intended that outcome, humans generally are not really happy with killing someone who is not a clear and present danger in such a fashion as puts lots of other innocent people at risk. After all, there are probably lots of really bad guys that could be offed to the benefit of humanity that we don't risk other people's lives to kill. (And when governments do, via say drone strikes, they act as though we are super embarrassed and try not to let anyone know, which implies they expect moral distaste for the act.)
I think that is, in part, tied to Caplan's point here, but from the other side: philosophy is giving odd answers out of step with our intuitions because philosophy is making strange assumptions and treating them as reality.
To your last paragraph, I think you are wrong there. After all, we don't say "Hey, ol' Adolf did a lot of bad stuff, but at least he killed Hitler." :D
Why not begin "The year is 1936. You’re in Berlin"? What does the counterfactual of Hitler being alive in 1946 in Argentina add to the moral question you're trying to explore?
As others have pointed out, nearly all of the reasons for Hitler deserving to die happened after 1936. Many world leaders today - including some most people would balk at openly endorsing assassination of - have done worse than Hitler had done by 36.
It was already obvious Hitler's plans for where to take Germany were as ugly as Lenin's plans for where to take the Russian Empire by '36. Not that he was alone, as the krauts had already extensively violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles from the moment it was signed even during the pre-Nazi days, complete with borrowing money from us to pay their war reparations and declaring bankruptcy to avoid having to spend a penny of their own in recompense for the rape of France and Belgium; but the signs were not difficult to read, and you didn't need to be a time traveller to morally justify killing Hitler in '36.
It's much harder to do the consequentialist reasoning if you kill Hitler in 1936. What happens to Nazi Germany if you do that? Who knows, maybe you'd still get WW2, but with a more competent leadership.
Also relevant to assessing the force of alleged "counterexamples" to utilitarianism (which often involve comparable levels of lucky recklessness), as I explain through a similar series of questions, here: https://rychappell.substack.com/p/ethical-theory-and-practice
The mistake is in point #3. You did not make the world better in consequentialist terms. You created an incentive for people to keep shooting at random crowds that will far outweigh the benefit of having killed one bad person. The consequentialist answer is to condem this act given it's future expected consequences.
Only by your premise that the consequence is the incentive for random shootings. That being a real consequence seems profoundly unlikely - far more probable is people believing the shooter targeted Hitler intentionally, then lied about it.
Besides, Hitler was already dead in 1946, so the actual chance of hitting him wasn't merely infinitesimal - it was zero..
Great stuff!
It's a useful metaphor, but Point 4 makes no sense to me. I'm not sure what analytic philosophy is, but if it's deducible from its principles that it's morally OK to fire into a crowd without knowing or caring who the bullet might hit if it just happens to hit someone evil there's something wrong with the principles.
I think it has to do with the difference of an act being a moral good versus the person acting morally.
If we take the inverse, a person intending to do good by shooting Hitler in the crowd and ending up killing everyone but Hitler, we could say that the person was trying to act morally, but the act itself (what actually happened) was immoral.
I don't think the original act of shooting into a crowd maliciously even though it only ended up killing Hitler is deductible to say that it is okay to do, unless there happens to be a certainty that shooting in the crowd would only kill murders. If there is not a 100% certainty, you would be gambling with others' lives, and would be responsible for their deaths.
I doubt that anyone in his right mind would argue that shooting randomly into a crowd of strangers without caring who gets hit could be morally justified by the outcome.
If the bullet happens to strike a mass murderer one might call that a just result, whether or not the bullet wound proves fatal. By the same token one could say that anything unpleasant that befalls a mass murderer is a plus on the scales of justice: falling off a cliff, getting bit by a rabid dog, contracting colon cancer, suffering a toothache, losing big in a poker game, stubbing a toe, whatever. Of course, nothing that happens to the murderer would be of any benefit to his victims. Friends and relatives of the murder victims and others who were horrified by the crimes might take some small satisfaction in learning that the murderer subsequently suffered some unrelated mishap, but presumably most of them would derive much more satisfaction from learning that punishment had been deliberately imposed on him and that the punishment was commensurate with the gravity of his crimes. And I daresay any penalty short of capital punishment would be insufficient to afford most of those concerned with a sense that justice had been done.
1. I disagree: the act was virtuous, of course! But the actor did not possess relevant moral knowledge of said virtue. One might say only God knew what would transpire, and He was Good. In meditation circles, one speaks of separating emotion from action, motive from cognition. Here, we can culturally express without shame that Hitler’s death was a happy accident. This intuition seems right to me.
4. This argument suffers from an issue of undefined contingency: if we accept all contingencies as argumentatively admissible, we come away with logical relativism. If not, we require a metaphysical primitive by which to explain the flexibility range of contingencies.
5. I agree with your conclusion here, intuitively. But it’s the moral attitude founded on human naturalism that is wrong. Given a God-determined Universe, ‘randomness’ wouldn’t exist and perhaps one’s maniacal flight of fancy was really an act of God’s benevolent will.
By this logic, if one randomly shoots into a crowd and kills someone’s, why can’t we deduce that the person deserved it? This is problem with all ‘it was God’s plan’ arguments. You wait to decide in retrospect whether you like the result to decide whether it was God’s plan, or human malice. It’s like waiting until after the results of an experiment are in to decide what result would confirm your hypothesis (and moreover, it’s a hypothesis that is impossible to disprove, making it meaningless).
Depends on whether God’s will can be known, say through a theory of moral realism.
Also, there’s a difference between ‘it was God’s plan’ and ‘perhaps it was God’s plan’. Modal operators do change truth interpretations.