Lying and killing

It initially seems to be a strange combination of views that (a) killing in defense of the innocent is sometimes permissible, but (b) lying is never permissible, not even in defense of the innocent. Yet that is the predominant view in the Christian tradition. Does this mean that truth is more valuable than life? That doesn't sound right, at least not in general.

I want to try a very speculative solution to this paradox, one I don't want to fully endorse as it raises some further problems. Thomas Aquinas has an interesting position on the lethal defense of the innocent: only officers of the state are permitted to kill intentionally, while private citizens may use defensive means that they foresee could be lethal only if they don't intend death.

Why the difference? Well, here is my crazy thought: perhaps all instances of permissible intentionally lethal defense of the innocent are effectively instances of the death penalty. In emergency situations, where there is an imminent threat to innocents, the state authorizes its officers to execute aggressors on the spot, without the usual legal safeguards. Every instance of permissible killing in a just war is an execution--we just don't call it that, because the emergency context makes very different procedures appropriate. Note, further, that as we learn from John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae, the death penalty is only permissible when there are no other means to the defense of society. Thus the intentionally lethal means to the defense of the innocent can only be deployed as a last resort. That is why, say, prisoners of war are not killed--there is no longer a need for an emergency execution once they are disarmed.

Suppose that this eccentric theory of lethal police and military action is correct. Then it is easy to see why there is a distinction between intentional killing and lying. Permissible intentional killing is an act of justice, an imposition of a just penalty on an aggressor. If we add Boethian idea that it is an intrinsic benefit to one to have justice done to one, then the aggressor is directly benefited by being punished. But even without that idea, the distinction between a defensive act of justice and a merely defensive act seems significant. There is a fine Kantian thought that just punishment constitutes a showing of respect to the person being punished; but a lie is innately disrespectful to the rationality of the person lied to.

Still, the puzzle remains. Why is it that the greater harm of death is appropriate punishment while the lesser harm of being lied to is not? But not every harm is appropriate as a punishment, and sometimes a lesser harm is inappropriate as punishment while a greater is appropriate. Sometimes, this is for reasons of dignity. Thus, it is a lesser harm to lose one's arms than to lose one's life, but judicial amputation is barbaric and contrary to the dignity of the criminal (it is hard to fully explain this intuitive judgment). Sometimes, the lesser harm just wouldn't fit the crime, or maybe ven any crime. Suppose a politician misused her office. Public infamy could be fitting punishment. But while the harm to reputation is greater in public infamy than in gossip, it just wouldn't be a fitting punishment to have officers of the court gossip about the politician behind her back. In fact, being gossiped about simply doesn't seem to be the right sort of harm to be a punishment--maybe it is the essential isolation of it from the consciousness of the person being gossiped about that makes it be inappropriate. I have the intuition that being lied to is pretty much like that--it is essentially isolated from the consciousness of the person being lied to (it's not a lie if they tell you they're lying to you!), and it just doesn't seem the right kind of harm to be a punishment.

The difficulty with this account is that modeling intentionally lethal police and military action as a form of the death penalty suffers from serious problems. The main one is that we have good reason to think that many enemy soldiers, even if their side is opposed to justice, are likely to be non-culpable, because they are likely to be ignorant of the fact that their side is opposed to justice. Perhaps, though, in an emergency situation--and a war is always an emergency--the evidential standards can be much lower, and so we don't need to examine culpability. Another problem is that this account will not allow the police to engage in intentionally lethal action against a clearly insane attacker. But perhaps that's the right conclusion.

Pacifism

The pacifist believes that one ought not engage in problematic violence in war even if all the standard jus ad bellum conditions are satisfied. "Problematic violence" here means the level of violence that is prohibited. Probably few pacifists would think it would be wrong to push violent foreign soldiers away without hurting them. So, presumably, pushing someone painlessly away doesn't rise to the level of "problematic violence." Where the pacifist draws the line may differ from pacifist to pacifist, but I take it that lethal violence, i.e., violence that, if successful, has a high probability of resulting in the opponent's death, counts as problematic, even when the death is not intended. Thus, I take it that the pacifist will be opposed to shooting at an enemy soldier's heart even when one is using double effect and intending the disablement rather than the death of the enemy soldier. This is all stipulative of what I mean by "pacifist".

Question: Can the pacifist consistently permit problematic violence in law enforcement situations?

If not, then pacifism is seriously problematic, since it seems pretty clear that it is practically impossible to have a decent, self-sufficient community enduring over time without lethal violence to contain violent criminals.

But I think the answer to the question is in fact negative. For how could one draw a line between war and law enforcement? When the invading army marches in, burning crops and murdering citizens, they are breaking the victim country's laws. If problematic violence is permitted to enforce the laws of one's territory, it should be permissible to use problematic violence to stop them. But this seems to be a case of war. Hence, some lethal violence is permitted in some wars, contrary to what I stipulated as the view of the pacifist.

Perhaps, though, the pacifist could claim that it is only permissible to enforce a country's laws with problematic violence on the country's subjects, and an invading army does not consist of subjects. But this is deeply implausible. If it is permissible to use problematic violence to stop a citizen wife from murdering her citizen husband, it should also be permissible to use problematic violence to stop a non-citizen woman who sneaked into one's country to murder her citizen husband. Moreover, this should be permissible even if the woman was commissioned by another state to kill her husband. But if we allow that it is permissible to use problematic violence against criminals acting on behalf of foreign states, then there seems to be no way to deny that it is permissible to use problematic violence to stop invaders.

There is, though, a consistent position the someone could hold here: Problematic violence by agents of a state must be confined to that state's territory. This is not a pacifist position by my stipulation of what a "pacifist" is. But it may be thought to be a pacifist position in a broader sense. But I am not so sure. It seems that this is not so much a position against violence, as a position about jurisdiction.