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Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Frank Miller's article is an intelligent, interesting and important discussion.1 Its central thesis is that what makes killing wrong is not that killing causes death or loss of consciousness, but that killing causes an individual to be completely, irreversibly disabled. The first of two main implications is that it is not even pro tanto wrong to kill someone who is already in such a thoroughly disabled state. The second is that the dead donor rule in the context of vital organ transplantation should be abandoned.
I embrace the second main implication. As the authors argue, the dead donor rule is routinely violated in contemporary vital organ procurement; but what should change are not the standard practices in which the rule is violated, but the rule itself. In general, I believe that the practical implications of the authors’ account of the wrongness of killing are more justified than the account itself. My judgment is possible because their account has mostly the same implications as what I take to be the best account—at least regarding the killing of human beings. I turn now to points of disagreement.
First, the authors argue that the wrongness of killing is a function of harming and that, because ‘a loss of autonomy is a kind of harm, broadly construed…,’ violating autonomy is not an independent ground. I suggest, to the contrary, that while the pro tanto wrongness of killing sentient beings in general (including persons) is a function of harming, violating autonomy is usually an additional ground for the wrongness of killing persons. Imagine a person who is rationally suicidal: given his own values, priorities and realistic appraisal of his options and prospects, he would prefer to die soon. If I kill this person without his permission, minutes before his planned suicide, what is wrong with my action is not that I harm him—presumably I don't—but that I violate his autonomy.
Second, the authors hold that killing someone makes her completely disabled. I disagree. On the view that I defend and I think common sense supports, you and I will never be corpses or piles of ashes. Betty cannot exist as either. If I am right that there is no afterlife, then we go out of existence at the time of death; despite spatiotemporal continuity with the individual who was, the corpse or ashes is not that individual. My assertion is connected with the thesis that we are essentially living human animals.2i Note that, even if there is an afterlife, Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller's claim that Betty becomes disabled at death is mistaken because, in an afterlife, Betty would become either an immaterial substance without a body or an ‘after-living’ fresh body. (What good would an afterlife be if one existed indefinitely as wormfood or ashes?) A friendly amendment to the authors’ view could remove the present difficulty. The view could state that the wrong-making harm of killing is to make it the case that one no longer exists with any abilities. This is true.
Yet, I do not think it optimally captures what's wrong with killing. The best account, I think, holds that the harm of killing—in those ordinary cases in which killing does harm—involves robbing an individual of the opportunities for good living that continued life would afford.ii (In the case of persons, killing is also wrong insofar as it violates the person's autonomy). I do not claim that the ‘dead person’ exists as someone bereft of valuable opportunities. Rather, by ending the victim's existence when she had decent prospects, the killer makes the victim's life as a whole less good than it probably would have been—a deprivation that constitutes harm. Admittedly, the difference between the authors’ account and mine is subtle, but the account I defend gets to the heart of the matter without overstating the role of abilities in quality of life.
A fourth point of (minor, tentative) disagreement concerns the first implication of the author's thesis: that it is not even pro tanto wrong to kill someone who is completely, irreversibly disabled. What if someone values consciousness so much that she would prefer to stay alive, so long as she remains conscious, even if her consciousness is thoroughly incoherent? I wouldn't value such an existence, and neither would the authors, but some people might. If so, then continuing a life of complete, irreversible disability with consciousness would arguably have some value for that person, and killing him would at least slightly harm him by taking away something that is of value to him. My point here is not just that killing such an individual might violate his autonomy (a point the authors note), but that killing him might actually constitute a harm. The idea here is that one's values affect the shape of one's interests and, therefore, the ways in which one can be harmed.
Now for the fifth point of disagreement. We agree that the moral rule ‘Do not kill’ cannot sensibly apply to all living things. Traditionally, it applies to human beings; and moral progress suggests that it may extend (perhaps with special qualifications) to sentient animals. It doesn't apply to plants. Why? The authors’ account of the rule's scope is infelicitous: ‘The natural answer is that humans (and sentient animals) have greater abilities than plants, and those abilities give human lives more value.’ A better answer is that all and only sentient beings have interests and, therefore, something to lose from dying: a life that would be of continuing value for them.3 One advantage of the sentience-interests account is that it obviates the awkward attempt to identify ‘a minimal threshold that is above plants,’ which leaves unexplained how we should regard insentient animals. These creatures have certain abilities that plants don't but, crucially, they can't feel anything or care about anything, and never will, so they don't have interests and a continued stake in living. It is not even pro tanto wrong to kill such beings unless doing so would cause problems for persons and/or other sentient beings.
Footnotes
iSee also Olson ET. The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
iiMy view is complicated by its incorporation of the ‘time-relative interests account’ of the harm of death, which applies to sentient nonpersons—and possibly potentially sentient beings (see, e.g., DeGrazia D. The harm of death, time-relative interests, and abortion. Philos Forum 2007;38:57–80.).
Competing interests None.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
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