Justified murder and the ethics of "the greater good"

Is it ever ok to kill another human being?

This is one of the oldest and trickiest moral questions in the universe. Most people will say that yes, under certain circumstances, the taking of human life is justified. The most common cases where people are willing to accept killing seem to be self-defense, war and the death penalty (this one seems to mostly apply to Americans). Some people will go further, and some people are opposed to any type of killing. But the vast majority of humans seem to recognize that under certain circumstances, the taking of human life might be the lesser of two evils.

Even in situations where we might personally feel uncomfortable justifying murder, most of us can sympathize with the motivations of murderers. In both high school and college, I had classes where we read Beloved. In the book, Sethe (an escaped slave) kills her infant daughter to keep her from being sent back into slavery when slavecatchers come looking for the family. Most of the students discussing the book felt that in the same situation, we probably wouldn’t have had the guts to kill our children. A few people said that Sethe’s actions were morally wrong. But almost everyone sympathized with her motivations. The popular author Jodi Picoult (author of My Sister’s Keeper, among other things) has written several books whose plot basically revolves around unusual murder cases—the husband who smothers his wife with a pillow because she’s dying of cancer and they both agree that it would be easier to have her die quickly at home than suffer first; the teenage couple so entwined that when Emily gets depressed and wants to end her life but doesn’t have the courage to do it, her boyfriend pulls the trigger for her because he can’t bear to see her suffer anymore. Dexter is a popular TV show which revolves around a man who can’t control his impulse to kill, so he channels it by killing other serial killers. The idea of “moral” murder runs deep in our popular culture.

To me, the ethics of murder get most interesting when you’re talking about preventing a greater wrong. Most people would agree that if we had a time machine, it would be a good idea to go back in time and shoot Hitler in the face. But beyond that, the ethics get more complicated. I want to be an activist, and I’m not inherently nonviolent in my ideology. I believe that violence is justified in defense of human rights when other nonviolent measures have been exhausted. This might sound like a radical statement in this day and age, but I think it’s really just a question of degrees. Ask almost any American today if they believe that slaves fighting back against their masters were justified in killing them, and you’ll get a yes. Ask the same question about indigenous people in the Amazon killing oil company representatives who refuse to leave and refuse to stop polluting their land and destroying their way of life, and you’ll get a much wider spectrum of answers. (I’m still undecided on this one, by the way.) I once read a book which addressed the age-old question of what you would do if you knew you only had a week to live. The woman writing said she had a friend who had a simple answer. She wouldn’t go base jumping or spend time with loved ones. She would hunt down the men who had raped the people she cared about, and she would kill them one by one. I can’t say I’d do the same, but at the same time, I can’t really argue with her motivation. I’ve never been raped, and to my knowledge, neither have any of my close friends. If I were in her position, though, I imagine I would feel similarly.

Like many people, I think moral rightness should trump legality. What I mean by that is that if there are laws which are clearly wrong or immoral, it’s an obligation for responsible citizens to oppose them. Most social change in the US has come about through this premise—slave revolts, lunch counter sit-ins, draft card burning, workers going on strike before it was legal. If the Keystone XL pipeline does get approved, I’m counting on other activists to join me in stopping its construction, by any means necessary. I believe that the importance of having a livable planet trumps any laws which guarantee property rights to people building the pipeline. Likewise, if Ecuador decides to open Yasuní National Park for oil extraction, I’m hoping that the communities that live there will fight back, both legally and literally, if necessary.

The morality-over-legality idea is what inspires many vigilante groups, as well as activists willing to use illegal tactics. It’s the reason the Minutemen are patrolling the US’s southern border to keep out illegal immigrants and, in some cases, poisoning water left out in the desert to keep people from dying of dehydration. It’s the reason the Animal Liberation Front is willing to bomb animal research labs and rescue animals from slaughterhouses. Usually, I’m inspired by actions like this. I respect the convictions of people who believe enough in what they’re doing that they’re willing to go to jail for their ideals, even if I don’t personally agree with their tactics. I’m inspired by the idea of being on the right side of history later even if you’re on the wrong side of the law now.

But there’s one increasingly common action being taken by activists in the US that makes it very hard for me to agree with the morality-over-legality idea. For people who engage in this action, it’s the only way they have to stop a much greater evil. They’re at the fringes of a large movement, and while many within that movement claim to renounce the violence of their tactics, many are also secretly grateful that some people are willing to stand behind their convictions.

I’m referring, of course, to the pro-life/anti-abortion activists who have murdered abortion providers. The most recent inductee into this crowd was Scott Roeder, who shot Dr. George Tiller in church in 2009. Dr. Tiller was one of three doctors in the United States who performed late-term, third trimester abortions, almost entirely to save women’s lives or because the fetuses had debilitating disorders which would cause them to die shortly after birth. Roeder was a long-time anti-abortion advocate, and he accomplished in one day what Operation Rescue and all the rest of the non-radical activists on his side hadn’t been able to do in thirty years of protest and lawsuits—he shut down Tiller’s clinic.

I can’t really argue with Roeder’s tactics. I don’t believe in any kind of eye-for-an-eye justice—I’m talking about murder as a tactic to prevent further loss of life in a literal, immediate sense. If you believe that abortion is wrongfully killing a human life, if you believe that it’s murder, and you know that the law isn’t on your side, you don’t have a lot of options. Decades of lobbying hasn’t made abortion illegal (though it hasn’t made it dramatically less accessible, especially to low-income women). And when you’re talking about murder, you don’t really want to stand around and wait for the state to do the right thing. You want to stop it by any means necessary. I partially understand this conviction, because I know that if abortion were illegal, I’d drop everything I was doing to go to medical school so I could set up a safe and illegal abortion clinic. That’s how strongly I feel about the importance of access to reproductive healthcare.

The pro-choice crowd wants people like Roeder to be classified as domestic terrorists, something the US government has been unwilling to do. Beyond their support for access to abortion, pro-choicers argue that part of living in a civil society is obeying its laws, whether you agree with them personally or not. Mostly, I think this premise is true. You don’t run red lights even if you want to, because you respect that other people need to get places in an orderly fashion too. You pay your taxes which go to fund all kinds of shit you don’t agree with (wars, abstinence-only education, executions, food stamps, the US Department of Education), regardless of your political affiliation. But when morality gets introduced into the equation, it gets harder to make this argument. Civil society, sure, but you don’t stand by while sentient beings are being murdered. You refuse to be drafted even if it means getting arrested, you break into labs to free monkeys being tortured, or you murder abortion providers to keep them from killing.

At the end of the day, my convictions that doing right should be our highest calling trump my belief in the importance of civil society. This puts me in an uncomfortable position with people like Roeder, because holding this position means saying that I don’t disagree with his tactics, only the beliefs that motivated them. One of the points of laws is that they represent societal norms. They protect all of us by not allowing one person to impose their view of morality on the rest of us, at least most of the time. But still, I can’t make the argument that following laws we know to be morally wrong is the right thing to do. Morality has always been and will always be subjective. There are often no easy answers. One person’s guerilla is another person’s freedom fighter, and one person’s domestic terrorist is another person’s moral crusader. And while I can hope that those who choose to take the law into their own hands share my conceptions of what is moral, I can’t really fault those who disagree with me for doing the same.