On Killing as Causing Death

Common sense has that killing someone amounts to causing the death of someone . This makes killing a physical, biological, or, at best, metaphysical issue, and, as a consequence, the ethics of killing can be dealt with independently of the non-ethical issue of who the killer is . However, in this paper, we show that this is not the case . A physical/biological definition of death plus a metaphysical definition of causation does not exhaust the meaning of killing . Rather, the notion of killing per se generally presumes a notion of default, which often involves ethical considerations . key words: Causation, death, killing, social norm . The ethics of killing has been a hotly debated subject in ethics ever since, even well before the publication of McMahan’s seminal book, The Ethics of Killing, Problems at the Margins of Life (McMahan 2002), and Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller (2013)’s urging for the dropping of the Dead Donor Rule, the sympathetic attitude of Giubilini and Minerva (2013) towards infanticide, and some furious reactions to their papers demonstrate that there is little sign of convergence in the debate . We, however, deem it desirable to clarify how much of the debate really belongs to ethics . Surely some issues in the debate can be dealt with non-ethically . In particular, the identification of a killer seems to be outside the realm of ethics . One can imagine a project being proposed to settle the metaphysics of killing before being concerned with the ethics of killing . In this paper we show that this attempt is likely to be futile . More specifically, the target of our attack will be the identification of the notion of killing with a metaphysical notion of causing death . Before we proceed demonstrating this point, the following simple observation serves as a hint that a metaphysical account of killing is indeed difficult, if not impossible, to set up . 164 Prolegomena 15 (2) 2016 Who killed Jesus? The Roman soldiers who nailed him to the cross? Pilate, who approved his execution? The Jews who demanded his death? Judas, who betrayed Jesus and handed him over to the Romans? All sinners like you and me, for whose sins Jesus went up to the cross? Or, none of the above at all, it was God who killed him, as God is the ultimate cause of all things . Or, rather, Jesus voluntarily killed himself . We would not try to answer this question here, but would only stress that, at least, the matter of identifying a killer cannot be settled on physical/metaphysical ground alone . 1. Killing as Causing Death Understanding killing as causing death amounts to separate an account of killing into two portions: an account of death and an account of causation . To make our project manageable, we will, in this paper, assume that we already have a theory of death1 – presumably a physical/biological account – and concentrate on how one person’s act can be related to another person’s death, without worrying about whether the person has been dead in borderline cases such as those arising in brain death, total-disability, infanticide, abortion, and related situations, and be concerned only with how one can classify some acts as causing death, while some others as not . Recall that the possibly simplest account of killing is as follows, [C] A kills B if and only if A causes the death of B . Indeed, if one can grasp the meaning of causation then [C] is a promising candidate for a theory of killing .2 Nevertheless, we will see that the notion of causation itself is difficult to be framed within the realm of metaphysics, despite that philosophers have spilled much ink writing about it over the years, see Paul and Hall (2013) for a comprehensive treatment of the subject .3 We will illustrate this point in three sections . Sec . 2 maintains that physics does not provide any ground for a notion of causation; Sec . 3 stresses that resorting to necessary and sufficient conditions does not help either; and finally Sec . 4 points out that killing generally involves a deviation from a socially constructed default, so it cannot be explained merely by a metaphysical notion of causation – unless we are prepared to develop a new notion of causation that involves a social norm . 1 A more thorough investigation of how UDDA (Uniform Determination of Death Act) can be interpreted and defended will appear elsewhere . 2 Here, A can be an agent or an event, depending on how we would like to develop the account . 3 The present paper can, in a sense, be seen as exploring possible interpretations for the arrows in that book . 165 C .-C . TSAI: On Killing as Causing Death Before we proceed with the detailed analysis, some remarks are at hand . Concerning Section 2, many people seem to believe that causation is a notion founded on physics and one simply needs to examine its bearing on social issues when it comes to ethics . However, this is not the case . Concerning Section 3, resorting to necessary and/or sufficient conditions would not help either, and this is supported by three facts, namely, neither being a necessary condition nor being a sufficient condition is sufficient for causation [3 .1]; neither being a necessary condition nor being a sufficient condition is necessary for causation [3 .2]; and even in an ideal situation where an if-and-only-if (iff) correlation has been established between two events, one still could not assert that one event “causes” the other [3 .3] . Concerning Section 4, we claim that a key ingredient for an account of killing is the notion of default or null action, and this notion of default can neither be grounded physically nor metaphysically . 2. Physics Does not Provide any Ground for a