I’ve recently been spending rather too much time hanging out on Leftist web sites such as Socialist Unity (where incidentally its administrator made the somewhat unfraternal suggestion that I was “over-estimating my intellectual advantage” - as if!), so I got to thinking about the nature of evil. Specifically, the following question:
Do evil people - you know, socialists, members of the British Humanist Association, Greenpeace activists, and the like - behave immorally if they defend themselves against those who wish to terminate their evil by force?
Okay, I need to flesh that out a little. Imagine the following scenario:
The members of a radical animal rights organisation - “For The Love of Dog” - are holed up in a compound in Tunbridge Wells surrounded by armed police. The following things are true:
1. They have committed terrible crimes in the name of animal rights (murder, mayhem, and the like); in the world of this thought experiment, there is no doubt that they are evil;
2. There is no escape;
3. They will be executed if they are captured;
4. The dynamic of the organisation is such that there can be no negotiated surrender at this point (partly because of point 3) - there will be a firefight;
5. For any particular member of the organisation, there is a small percentage chance that they will avoid death or capture - and live to do evil another day - if they defend themselves; there is no chance if they do not (most likely they will die in the firefight).
The question then is: is it morally wrong for the members of the terrorist organisation to defend themselves?
Possible responses:
1. Yes - There is a moral obligation to let the rule of law take its course even if this means execution at the end.
Problem: Point 4 - There will be a firefight - no single individual can just surrender (so this is a game theory type problem here). Does simply allowing authorities to execute a person in the context of a firefight (see Point 5) equate to “allowing the rule of law to take its course”? Not obvious that this is the case.
2. Yes - There is a moral obligation to forego the chance of escape, and thereby condemn oneself to death (either during the course of the firefight or by execution).
Problem: Highly counterintuitive that this is an obligation. Yes, it might be the heroic course of action, but it is implausible to suppose that we are required to act heroically. It is also certainly arguable that we have the right to defend our own life against those who wish to end it (though obviously it’s hard to nail down exactly what this entails- and this is a slightly stronger claim than I’m interested in here).
3. No - In this situation, it is not wrong for any particular evil person to try to save their own life.
Problems:
a) It might require us to argue both that it is right for the terrorist organisation to be attacked; and it is also legitimate for individual members to defend themselves against attack. At the very least, there’s a tension here.
b) The judgement seems to fly in the face of a certain kind of consequentialism; it might be that the people who do escape go on to commit further great evil.
c) It is counterintuitive to suppose that evil people might behave legitimately in resisting other people who wish to terminate their evil.
Why is all this relevant or interesting? Well maybe I’ll talk about that in a further post, but the thought here is that this kind of scenario can be developed so that it refers to the actions of nations.
So what do you think? Are evil people justified in defending themselves in this kind of scenario? I’m guessing most people will think that they are not.
Filed under: Critical Thinking, Ethics, Philosophy | 77 Comments »