The need for a fine-grained deontology

It’s tempting to say that what justifies lethal self-defense is a wrongful lethal threat, perhaps with voluntariness and/or culpability added (see discussion and comments here).

But that’s not quite right. Suppose that a police officer, in addition to carrying her own gun, has her best friend’s gun with her, which she was taking in to a shop for minor cosmetic repairs. She promised her friend that she wouldn’t use his gun. Now, you threaten the officer, and she pulls her friend’s gun out, in blatant disregard of her promise, because she has always wanted to see what it feels like to threaten someone with this particular gun. The officer is now lethally threatening you, and doing so wrongfully, voluntarily and culpably, but that not justify lethal self-defense.

One might note here that the officer is not wronging you by breaking her promise to her best friend. So perhaps what justifies lethal self-defense is a lethal threat that wrongs you. But that can’t be the solution. If you are the best friend in question—no doubt now the former best friend—then it is you who is being wronged by the breaking of the promise. But that wrong is irrelevant to your lethal self-defense. Furthermore, we want an account of self-defense to justify to a general account of defense of innocent victims.

One might say that lethal self-defense is permitted only against a gravely wrongful threat, and this promise-breaking is not gravely wrongful. But we can tweak the case to make it be gravely wrongful. Maybe the police officer swore an oath before God and the community not to use this particular gun. That surely doesn’t justify your using lethal force to defend yourself against the officer’s threat.

Maybe what we want to say is that the kind of wrongful lethal threat that justifies lethal self-defense is one that wrongs by violating the right to life of the person threatened (rather than, say, being wrong by violating a promise). That sounds right to me. But what’s interesting about this is that it forces us to have a more fine-grained deontology. Not only do we need to talk about actions being wrong, but about actions being wrong against someone, and against someone in a particular way.

It’s interesting that considerations of self-defense require such a fine-grained deontology even if we do not think that in general every wrongful action wrongs someone.