Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Killing versus totally disabling: a reply to critics
  1. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong1,
  2. Franklin G Miller2
  1. 1Philosophy Department, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
  2. 2Department of Bioethics, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
  1. Correspondence to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Philosophy Department, Duke University, Box 90432, Durham, NC 27708, USA; ws66{at}duke.edu

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

We are very grateful to the commentators for taking the time to respond to our little article, ‘What Makes Killing Wrong?’ They raise many points, so we cannot respond to them all, but we do want to head off a few misinterpretations.

Our critics in this journal avoid one careless misinterpretation, but less informed readers (including Glenn Beck) have pressed this misinterpretation in popular venues, so we need to start by renouncing it. We do not deny that killing humans is morally wrong. To the contrary, we argue that killing humans is almost always morally wrong, because killing humans is almost always disabling, and disabling is morally wrong (pro tanto—that is, without an adequate justification or excuse). Here we do not disagree with common sense. We also do not deny that killing partially or even profoundly disabled humans is morally wrong (again, pro tanto). People who are disabled in some ways still retain many other valuable abilities. This should be obvious. To kill a person with some disabilities but many other valuable abilities is to disable that person, so that is morally wrong (again, pro tanto—we will stop adding this qualification although it is crucial in special cases, such as voluntary active euthanasia). Here again we do not disagree with common sense. The one and only surprising application of our theory is to humans who are alive but totally disabled. We argue that, apart from special circumstances, it is not morally wrong to kill live humans who are totally disabled, whereas many people think that it would be morally wrong to kill even in these extreme and unusual cases, because they assume that killing is morally wrong for reasons apart from disabling.

What could those reasons be? DeGrazia mentions three possibilities. First, ‘the harm of killing—in those ordinary cases in …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Disclaimer The opinions expressed are the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the National Institutes of Health, the Public Health Service, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

  • Competing interests None.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

Linked Articles

  • Commentaries
    Julia Driver
  • Commentaries
    David DeGrazia
  • Commentaries
    Jeff McMahan
  • Feature article
    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Franklin G Miller
  • Current controversy
    Michael Bevins

Other content recommended for you