Soghomon Tehlirian and the ever-popular "Kill Baby Hitler" question
April 21, 2022 11:54 AM Subscribe
We're just a little past the 101st anniversary of the killing of Talaat Pasha, architect of the Armenian genocide.
So here's the ethical question: at what point in the process of genocide or democide does the individual gain an ethical imperative to kill or take violent action, if ever? At what point in the forecast of probabilities does such a behavior become acceptable?
Ok, I'm in a dark state of mind. As a historian and a scholar of human rights, who's written on the ICTR and the ICTY, I feel like things are heading in a very very bad state of direction. So I wanted to open a massive can of ethical worms and see where they squirm.
Would it have been ethical to kill Hitler, ever? Would it have been ethical to kill him after the Wannsee Conference? After the start of World War 2? The Nuremberg laws?
I suppose what I'm trying to discuss in regards to Putin/Milosevic/countless others is what point does the threshold get crossed? When the bombs fall? When the war begins? When there are bodies on the ground?
If you suspect there to be an imminent dictator, it becomes near impossible to take action after they have assumed dictatorial power. So at what point do you act? When they are seated as head of state? Beforehand? None of us are a mind reader or a fortune teller, but there's the adage of believing people when they tell you who they are. So how much eliminationist rhetoric is too much? What is the threshold to act?
Ok, I'm in a dark state of mind. As a historian and a scholar of human rights, who's written on the ICTR and the ICTY, I feel like things are heading in a very very bad state of direction. So I wanted to open a massive can of ethical worms and see where they squirm.
Would it have been ethical to kill Hitler, ever? Would it have been ethical to kill him after the Wannsee Conference? After the start of World War 2? The Nuremberg laws?
I suppose what I'm trying to discuss in regards to Putin/Milosevic/countless others is what point does the threshold get crossed? When the bombs fall? When the war begins? When there are bodies on the ground?
If you suspect there to be an imminent dictator, it becomes near impossible to take action after they have assumed dictatorial power. So at what point do you act? When they are seated as head of state? Beforehand? None of us are a mind reader or a fortune teller, but there's the adage of believing people when they tell you who they are. So how much eliminationist rhetoric is too much? What is the threshold to act?
I would say it would have been right to kill Hitler once he was appointed chancellor, given that Mein Kampf had already been published. It's too dangerous to have someone like that in power. Maybe it would not have been right for a government to assassinate him at that point, because it creates a risky precedent, but a lone individual, definitely.
posted by catquas at 1:32 PM on April 21, 2022
posted by catquas at 1:32 PM on April 21, 2022
I mean, not to point out the obvious, but Soghomon Tehlirian didn't stop the Armenian Genocide. If there's ever been a successful genocide-averting murder, we don't know about it. We could guess what might have happened if someone had murdered Hitler, or if Tehlirian hadn't murdered Talaat Pasha, but they'd be only guesses - and that's kind of the point.
It's never ethical to murder anyone. Murder is murder. In my opinion, it's not justifiable to murder someone because of something they did in the past (I am against the death penalty), and so it's certainly not justifiable to murder someone because of what they might do in the future. If you take this out of the realm of hypothetical historical examples and imagine it on a more ordinary scale, this would be obvious. Murdering people to stop the crimes you're sure they're about to commit is wrong because it ignores the possibility of free will. No matter how small that possibility might be, a system that didn't respect it would be fundamentally unethical - it would be like Minority Report from hell.
The reason the historical examples cloud our judgment is because they eliminate the possibility of uncertainty, which is where free will lives. In a hypothetical, or when looking back at history, you can say, sure it's okay to kill Baby Hitler (or Hitler at the start of World War II) because you know Hitler isn't going to have a change of heart and repent at the last minute; you also think you know what outcome killing him would have - a better world, a world without genocide. Great! Seems simple. Let's go.
But in real life, you don't know those things. Even if it feels obvious - even if you feel like you know in your gut that it would be better to murder Putin - you actually don't. You think he's a bad person, that you've seen who he is, and that he's beyond redemption; you think the world would be a better place without him in it and you can foresee and control the outcome of the act. And you might be right.
But in that moment when you're standing over Putin with a gun, you're in the exact same place every murderer has ever been in since the beginning of the time: you're playing God, passing judgment on the quality of someone's soul, and acting like you can see into the future. But you're not God. You are a person about to commit murder.
Now, you might get lucky! It may be expedient to kill Putin. Certainly, once you kill him, you'll never know if he could have changed his mind if you'd let him be, and if WWIII doesn't happen, you'll never know if the murder you committed is the reason, and a hundred years later you will have absolutely no idea what the consequences of your actions were; if you saved humanity or if your murder caused another war, Butterfly-Effect style.
But either way, you will have committed a murder - a murder that exists at the same ethical nexus of uncertainty as all the other murders. It's not less of a murder because the person was bad; it's not less of a murder because the outcome was good. It's just a murder - and you're responsible for it, just like you're responsible for all the other actions you've ever taken in your life, for good or ill.
That's my opinion, anyway!
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 1:59 PM on April 21, 2022 [17 favorites]
It's never ethical to murder anyone. Murder is murder. In my opinion, it's not justifiable to murder someone because of something they did in the past (I am against the death penalty), and so it's certainly not justifiable to murder someone because of what they might do in the future. If you take this out of the realm of hypothetical historical examples and imagine it on a more ordinary scale, this would be obvious. Murdering people to stop the crimes you're sure they're about to commit is wrong because it ignores the possibility of free will. No matter how small that possibility might be, a system that didn't respect it would be fundamentally unethical - it would be like Minority Report from hell.
The reason the historical examples cloud our judgment is because they eliminate the possibility of uncertainty, which is where free will lives. In a hypothetical, or when looking back at history, you can say, sure it's okay to kill Baby Hitler (or Hitler at the start of World War II) because you know Hitler isn't going to have a change of heart and repent at the last minute; you also think you know what outcome killing him would have - a better world, a world without genocide. Great! Seems simple. Let's go.
But in real life, you don't know those things. Even if it feels obvious - even if you feel like you know in your gut that it would be better to murder Putin - you actually don't. You think he's a bad person, that you've seen who he is, and that he's beyond redemption; you think the world would be a better place without him in it and you can foresee and control the outcome of the act. And you might be right.
But in that moment when you're standing over Putin with a gun, you're in the exact same place every murderer has ever been in since the beginning of the time: you're playing God, passing judgment on the quality of someone's soul, and acting like you can see into the future. But you're not God. You are a person about to commit murder.
Now, you might get lucky! It may be expedient to kill Putin. Certainly, once you kill him, you'll never know if he could have changed his mind if you'd let him be, and if WWIII doesn't happen, you'll never know if the murder you committed is the reason, and a hundred years later you will have absolutely no idea what the consequences of your actions were; if you saved humanity or if your murder caused another war, Butterfly-Effect style.
But either way, you will have committed a murder - a murder that exists at the same ethical nexus of uncertainty as all the other murders. It's not less of a murder because the person was bad; it's not less of a murder because the outcome was good. It's just a murder - and you're responsible for it, just like you're responsible for all the other actions you've ever taken in your life, for good or ill.
That's my opinion, anyway!
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 1:59 PM on April 21, 2022 [17 favorites]
I mean, there are generations of philosophy grad students writing Ph.D.s about this. But in Western philosophy, there are two predominant schools of thought, utilitarianism and deontology (sometimes called Kantianism, after its foremost exponent). Utilitarianism has the benefit of being both easier to explain and more along the lines of what you seem to be thinking, and the basic idea is a cost-benefit analysis: if killing someone would increase "the sum of human happiness", then go for it. It gets pretty complicated because, like, how do you measure that? But in a case like Hitler, who had no children, whose parents were dead before WWI, and who only had one sister and two half-siblings survive infancy (and who don't seem to have been particularly close to him), you can probably say that yeah, there aren't a lot of downsides to killing him at really any point, other than like butterfly effect stuff, so the bar would be pretty low. Incidentally, the "butterfly effect stuff" in this case would actually be pretty significant. If WWII had never broken out, would we still have developed nuclear weapons? And if we hadn't, couldn't we just take out Putin today like we took out Saddam Hussein (which, oh hey, had quite a bit of its own butterfly effect stuff)? Waaaaay too much to get into, which is why I personally find utilitarianism kind of BS.
The alternative is Kantian ethics, which is incredibly complex but boils down to why you're taking the action you're taking, and whether other people could take the same action without causing, like, societal breakdown. The "why" part is called a maxim, and other people could also act on the same maxim, the action is morally permissible. But I also think Kantianism is kind of BS, because how you define that maxim has significant repercussions. For example, if you define the maxim as "kill dangerous people", that's pretty broad and it's pretty easy to see how it could be abused. (E.g., Derek Chauvin was probably operating on something similar when he killed George Floyd.) So you have to define it more specifically: "kill dictators who might commit genocide". But who's a dictator? There are those on the far right who view Joe Biden as a dictator. And what about nongovernmental people like everyone's favorite bogeyman George Soros? And what's genocide? So you get even more specific: "kill heads of state of European descent who were originally elected to their position at the time when their armies carry out a military operation in a neighboring country". Because as much as that sounds like either Hitler or Putin, it could also include Lee Harvey Oswald killing JFK. At some point, you get so microscopically specific that the whole exercise loses validity. Society would not collapse if, say, everyone were to act on the maxim to kill one specific person at one specific time by one specific method, but that specificity kind of violates the idea of the "universal law of nature" so important to Kantian ethics.
(And also, that does nothing to address the butterfly effect issues. You could probably come up with a maxim for killing Christopher Columbus before he spread smallpox to indigenous Americans, but that same action would also have the effect of getting rid of tomato sauce on pasta, among other things. That's a facetious example, of course, but I hope you see my point.)
All of this is to say that I don't know the answer to your question any more than you do. But don't feel bad that you don't know; it's a nearly impossible question to answer. You could devote your life to answering it and still not succeed. In my opinion, as someone who has studied ethics a bit, the study of ethics is valuable not for the answers it produces, but for the critical analysis you have to subject your thoughts and ideas to. The journey, not the destination, so to speak. Safe travels.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:36 PM on April 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
The alternative is Kantian ethics, which is incredibly complex but boils down to why you're taking the action you're taking, and whether other people could take the same action without causing, like, societal breakdown. The "why" part is called a maxim, and other people could also act on the same maxim, the action is morally permissible. But I also think Kantianism is kind of BS, because how you define that maxim has significant repercussions. For example, if you define the maxim as "kill dangerous people", that's pretty broad and it's pretty easy to see how it could be abused. (E.g., Derek Chauvin was probably operating on something similar when he killed George Floyd.) So you have to define it more specifically: "kill dictators who might commit genocide". But who's a dictator? There are those on the far right who view Joe Biden as a dictator. And what about nongovernmental people like everyone's favorite bogeyman George Soros? And what's genocide? So you get even more specific: "kill heads of state of European descent who were originally elected to their position at the time when their armies carry out a military operation in a neighboring country". Because as much as that sounds like either Hitler or Putin, it could also include Lee Harvey Oswald killing JFK. At some point, you get so microscopically specific that the whole exercise loses validity. Society would not collapse if, say, everyone were to act on the maxim to kill one specific person at one specific time by one specific method, but that specificity kind of violates the idea of the "universal law of nature" so important to Kantian ethics.
(And also, that does nothing to address the butterfly effect issues. You could probably come up with a maxim for killing Christopher Columbus before he spread smallpox to indigenous Americans, but that same action would also have the effect of getting rid of tomato sauce on pasta, among other things. That's a facetious example, of course, but I hope you see my point.)
All of this is to say that I don't know the answer to your question any more than you do. But don't feel bad that you don't know; it's a nearly impossible question to answer. You could devote your life to answering it and still not succeed. In my opinion, as someone who has studied ethics a bit, the study of ethics is valuable not for the answers it produces, but for the critical analysis you have to subject your thoughts and ideas to. The journey, not the destination, so to speak. Safe travels.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:36 PM on April 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
Another thing to consider is the false positive rate for a hypothetical "will someday commit genocide" test. What is the true positive rate? It's not greater than about 1 in a billion, I'd estimate. If the specificity of your test isn't extremely high, you'll have an enormous number of false positives and invariable execute many more "not prone to commit genocide" people than "prone to commit genocide" people. While utilitarian moral thought would seem to endorse that right up until you killed more people than the genocide would have killed, I find that idea clearly abhorrent.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 4:43 PM on April 21, 2022
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 4:43 PM on April 21, 2022
Just as a thought experiment, from what I've heard, Stephen King's The Dead Zone was based on this idea: if you knew for sure someone was going to be a horrible murdering maniac, what would you do? So in this case, it's a guy who develops psychic powers via touch (I can't recall what that's called) after spending years in a coma, and picks up that a politician, Greg Stillson, is a horrendous bad dude.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:16 PM on April 21, 2022
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:16 PM on April 21, 2022
You may also want to read Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. It's a time travel book about killing Hitler. Of course, being Atkinson, it's also about a lot of other things....
posted by basalganglia at 6:51 PM on April 21, 2022
posted by basalganglia at 6:51 PM on April 21, 2022
This question would, I think, mostly pertain to people who were personally familiar with the hypothetical would-be dictator in question. A parent, spouse, sibling, or life-long best friend. How many heart-breaking questions have been asked on the green, relaying a formerly beloved person's decent into apparent madness of some stripe? And how can the questioner save them?
The answers inevitably devolve into "You can't." Well then, what if this person you love, used to be a good person? Or at least, a person, not perfect but with loveable traits. Now they're poised to take over a country. You've watched them scheme, plot, and put on an act to get where they are. What are your options. This assumes you aren't 100% onboard with the coming genocide, of course. Many people in this situation would be. Or at least, close enough that they could smother any small dissenting voices that plagued them in the night. But assume you aren't. You're horrified. You know what's coming. You've watched this person grow up, drink with their friends, say what's really in their heart when they know they're surrounded by "loved" ones. What do you do?
You can stay and go all-in on genocide at their side. You can stay, and attempt to distance yourself as much as possible from the coming horrors. You can flee, and hope at best for a quiet life far away. Or you can commit murder.
The fact that this last option is almost never taken I think speaks strongly about the interpersonal bonds people form with each other and people's ability to be blind to the worst of others who they care about. At the same time, it points out how impossible it is for some random person off the street to make this murder or no-murder choice without prior time travel knowledge. They simply will never have enough information to decide if someone's going to instigate a genocide. And the people who do, will never be able to be unbiased about it. Or if they can see the writing on the wall clearly, the vast majority of them seem to prefer to flee and leave the unfortunate about-to-be-genocided people to their fate, since killing someone in that sort of position of power is pretty much a death sentence for the murderer as well.
Is that decision right? Is it morally defensible to flee and watch from afar instead of murdering someone you are as sure as a human can be will start a genocide in the near future? I personally feel like the answer is no, but at the same time, neither I or the vast majority of the human race will ever be in that position.
Do we interview these people, assuming they're still alive when the madness has ended? What do they say?
posted by sharp pointy objects at 7:35 AM on April 22, 2022
The answers inevitably devolve into "You can't." Well then, what if this person you love, used to be a good person? Or at least, a person, not perfect but with loveable traits. Now they're poised to take over a country. You've watched them scheme, plot, and put on an act to get where they are. What are your options. This assumes you aren't 100% onboard with the coming genocide, of course. Many people in this situation would be. Or at least, close enough that they could smother any small dissenting voices that plagued them in the night. But assume you aren't. You're horrified. You know what's coming. You've watched this person grow up, drink with their friends, say what's really in their heart when they know they're surrounded by "loved" ones. What do you do?
You can stay and go all-in on genocide at their side. You can stay, and attempt to distance yourself as much as possible from the coming horrors. You can flee, and hope at best for a quiet life far away. Or you can commit murder.
The fact that this last option is almost never taken I think speaks strongly about the interpersonal bonds people form with each other and people's ability to be blind to the worst of others who they care about. At the same time, it points out how impossible it is for some random person off the street to make this murder or no-murder choice without prior time travel knowledge. They simply will never have enough information to decide if someone's going to instigate a genocide. And the people who do, will never be able to be unbiased about it. Or if they can see the writing on the wall clearly, the vast majority of them seem to prefer to flee and leave the unfortunate about-to-be-genocided people to their fate, since killing someone in that sort of position of power is pretty much a death sentence for the murderer as well.
Is that decision right? Is it morally defensible to flee and watch from afar instead of murdering someone you are as sure as a human can be will start a genocide in the near future? I personally feel like the answer is no, but at the same time, neither I or the vast majority of the human race will ever be in that position.
Do we interview these people, assuming they're still alive when the madness has ended? What do they say?
posted by sharp pointy objects at 7:35 AM on April 22, 2022
I had never heard of Tehlirian so I wiki'd him, and the entry includes this passage from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem that resonated for me:
[T]he one in the center of the play, on whom all eyes are fastened, is now the true hero, while at the same time the trial character of the proceedings is safeguarded, because it is not "a spectacle with prearranged results" but contains that element of "irreducible risk" which... is an indispensable factor in all criminal trials. Also, the J'accuse, so indispensable from the viewpoint of the victim, sounds, of course, much more convincing in the mouth of a man who has been forced to take the law into his own hands than in the voice of a government-appointed agent who risks nothing. And yet... it is more than doubtful that this solution would have been justifiable in Eichmann's case, and it is obvious that it would have been altogether unjustifiable if carried out by government agents. The point in favor of Schwartzbard and Tehlirian was that each was a member of an ethnic group that did not possess its own state and legal system, that there was no tribunal in the world to which either group could have brought its victims.
There was no state organ for the redress sought by Armenians following the genocide of 1915.
I don't think you can be the injured party if the injury has not yet occurred.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:45 AM on April 22, 2022
[T]he one in the center of the play, on whom all eyes are fastened, is now the true hero, while at the same time the trial character of the proceedings is safeguarded, because it is not "a spectacle with prearranged results" but contains that element of "irreducible risk" which... is an indispensable factor in all criminal trials. Also, the J'accuse, so indispensable from the viewpoint of the victim, sounds, of course, much more convincing in the mouth of a man who has been forced to take the law into his own hands than in the voice of a government-appointed agent who risks nothing. And yet... it is more than doubtful that this solution would have been justifiable in Eichmann's case, and it is obvious that it would have been altogether unjustifiable if carried out by government agents. The point in favor of Schwartzbard and Tehlirian was that each was a member of an ethnic group that did not possess its own state and legal system, that there was no tribunal in the world to which either group could have brought its victims.
There was no state organ for the redress sought by Armenians following the genocide of 1915.
I don't think you can be the injured party if the injury has not yet occurred.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:45 AM on April 22, 2022
Or you can commit murder.
The fact that this last option is almost never taken I think speaks strongly about the interpersonal bonds people form with each other and people's ability to be blind to the worst of others who they care about.
Well....also you may not want to go to jail and/or get murdered yourself for trying.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:54 AM on April 22, 2022
The fact that this last option is almost never taken I think speaks strongly about the interpersonal bonds people form with each other and people's ability to be blind to the worst of others who they care about.
Well....also you may not want to go to jail and/or get murdered yourself for trying.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:54 AM on April 22, 2022
Hah, jenfullmoon, I actually mentioned that at the end of the paragraph, but am honestly pretty bad at making coherent comments that have the relevant points that flow together well. But yeah, most people don't want to die, more than they don't want thousands of other people to die.
posted by sharp pointy objects at 9:03 AM on April 22, 2022
posted by sharp pointy objects at 9:03 AM on April 22, 2022
I apologize, I was dense and clearly should have figured that out and now it's too late to edit. Mods, if you want to delete my idiocy, feel free.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:26 AM on April 22, 2022
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:26 AM on April 22, 2022
There's a whole bunch of different ethical frameworks for this.
But personally, it depends on whether you still feel ethically responsible for things you allowed to happen via *inaction*.
A hell of a lot of people and philosophies seem to assume if you don't *personally* do something, then you're not really morally culpable.
Inaction is seen as blameless, rather than a choice.
If that inaction means that people are harmed or killed? Then to me, that's actually a choice... where that choice resulted in victims. You have made yourself an accomplice through your inaction.
If you had a way to stop a murderer, and you didn't take it? Then I feel like that means you have assumed some of the responsibility and guilt for that murder.
With Merricats hypothetical, it's not about whether "I'm responsible for a murder". If I fail to stop someone from killing, then yes, I am responsible. So instead, it's which murder can I prevent?
I went to a Vipassana meditation retreat. There were several moral guidelines that we were expected to abide by. I spoke to the teachers after several days because I had a big problem with one of them:
Specifically, 'no killing'.
The teachers were surprised.
But when walking in the forest around the centre, other people may have been unobservant of the signs, but I could see the absolute decimation of the surrounding forest from introduced pest species, the lack of birdlife from introduced predators. Neighbouring communities were engaging in trapping, they weren't.
I consider them responsible for the deaths of at risk species.
Thing is, philosophically, it seems that group seemed to be OK with siding against the victims, as several teachers explained to me that people only suffer because it's their karma, which is why it would be better to give money to them than to people struggling with poverty, ill health etc. 🙄
So I found them... morally repugnant overall?
It is not our fault if things in the world are broken, but if we do not act to fix them, then who will?
Things not our fault are still our collective responsibility.
Essentially, I wouldn't risk killing someone who hadn't already been responsible for killing others unless they were literally in the act of being about to kill or severely harm someone, and I had no other way of stopping them, but I would absolutely act in that circumstance. And unfortunately, the bigger and stronger someone is, the less likely it is I could stop them without hurting them or killing them. But it would be my responsibility to stop them from harming others.
If people are already dead, then I would use all avenues available in society to prevent someone from harming further people, to stop them.
If there are no available avenues in society to prevent someone from further harming/killing people, I would consider that to be a breakdown of the social compact and would try and stop that person myself given the opportunity. Notice I say 'stop'. I would consider it my responsibility to *stop* them, not to kill them, but if the only plausible way I have to stop them might result in their death, then that's what I need to do.
I hope I don't have the opportunity because it would fuck up my life.
I consider that it's also our job collectively, politically, to make sure there are *ways* that someone who is harming others can be stopped without one person having to, civil disobedience style, take that responsibility on themselves, and that we provide ways to stop, rather than making other people commit murder on our behalf - because again, we're responsible for that, collectively.
This is based on feeling responsible for what happens through inaction - for example, anti-vaccers do not feel there is responsibility through inaction, because they consider no one responsible for the many people who are harmed and die without vaccines, vs the very very few people who have bad reactions to a vaccine (who would usually be in danger from the vaccine preventable or mitigateable illness).
Yes, I would consider it mostly responsible to try to kill not just Hitler but all the attendees of the Wansee conference. I'm imagining what I'd do if I'd been a typist or something...
Probably try to poison everyone, and blow up the building.
They'd already orchestrated the murder tens of thousands of people by the Wansee conference, and were planning the' 'execution' of killing 11 million more.
I'm not sure I even get the question here... They were already so far past the line by then. The Wansee conference was 1942.
There was no good way to stop them from within Germany using the political infrastructure at that point.
The point where it became the responsibility to stop them at all costs was at most, 1934, after the Night of Long Knives, when it became clear that there was a societal breakdown, that they had killed political opponents and they would not be stopped by the justice system or society. If collective responsibility has failed, then it becomes individual responsibility.
posted by Elysum at 12:12 AM on April 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
But personally, it depends on whether you still feel ethically responsible for things you allowed to happen via *inaction*.
A hell of a lot of people and philosophies seem to assume if you don't *personally* do something, then you're not really morally culpable.
Inaction is seen as blameless, rather than a choice.
If that inaction means that people are harmed or killed? Then to me, that's actually a choice... where that choice resulted in victims. You have made yourself an accomplice through your inaction.
If you had a way to stop a murderer, and you didn't take it? Then I feel like that means you have assumed some of the responsibility and guilt for that murder.
With Merricats hypothetical, it's not about whether "I'm responsible for a murder". If I fail to stop someone from killing, then yes, I am responsible. So instead, it's which murder can I prevent?
I went to a Vipassana meditation retreat. There were several moral guidelines that we were expected to abide by. I spoke to the teachers after several days because I had a big problem with one of them:
Specifically, 'no killing'.
The teachers were surprised.
But when walking in the forest around the centre, other people may have been unobservant of the signs, but I could see the absolute decimation of the surrounding forest from introduced pest species, the lack of birdlife from introduced predators. Neighbouring communities were engaging in trapping, they weren't.
I consider them responsible for the deaths of at risk species.
Thing is, philosophically, it seems that group seemed to be OK with siding against the victims, as several teachers explained to me that people only suffer because it's their karma, which is why it would be better to give money to them than to people struggling with poverty, ill health etc. 🙄
So I found them... morally repugnant overall?
It is not our fault if things in the world are broken, but if we do not act to fix them, then who will?
Things not our fault are still our collective responsibility.
Essentially, I wouldn't risk killing someone who hadn't already been responsible for killing others unless they were literally in the act of being about to kill or severely harm someone, and I had no other way of stopping them, but I would absolutely act in that circumstance. And unfortunately, the bigger and stronger someone is, the less likely it is I could stop them without hurting them or killing them. But it would be my responsibility to stop them from harming others.
If people are already dead, then I would use all avenues available in society to prevent someone from harming further people, to stop them.
If there are no available avenues in society to prevent someone from further harming/killing people, I would consider that to be a breakdown of the social compact and would try and stop that person myself given the opportunity. Notice I say 'stop'. I would consider it my responsibility to *stop* them, not to kill them, but if the only plausible way I have to stop them might result in their death, then that's what I need to do.
I hope I don't have the opportunity because it would fuck up my life.
I consider that it's also our job collectively, politically, to make sure there are *ways* that someone who is harming others can be stopped without one person having to, civil disobedience style, take that responsibility on themselves, and that we provide ways to stop, rather than making other people commit murder on our behalf - because again, we're responsible for that, collectively.
This is based on feeling responsible for what happens through inaction - for example, anti-vaccers do not feel there is responsibility through inaction, because they consider no one responsible for the many people who are harmed and die without vaccines, vs the very very few people who have bad reactions to a vaccine (who would usually be in danger from the vaccine preventable or mitigateable illness).
Yes, I would consider it mostly responsible to try to kill not just Hitler but all the attendees of the Wansee conference. I'm imagining what I'd do if I'd been a typist or something...
Probably try to poison everyone, and blow up the building.
They'd already orchestrated the murder tens of thousands of people by the Wansee conference, and were planning the' 'execution' of killing 11 million more.
I'm not sure I even get the question here... They were already so far past the line by then. The Wansee conference was 1942.
There was no good way to stop them from within Germany using the political infrastructure at that point.
The point where it became the responsibility to stop them at all costs was at most, 1934, after the Night of Long Knives, when it became clear that there was a societal breakdown, that they had killed political opponents and they would not be stopped by the justice system or society. If collective responsibility has failed, then it becomes individual responsibility.
posted by Elysum at 12:12 AM on April 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
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My personal view is that this is similar to asking when it is ethical to kill someone who is not actively threatening your life but is likely to do so in the near future. IE, under what situations is it ethical to act as a soldier in war? If it is ethical to kill a Nazi soldier that is acting under Hitler's command, it must be ethical to attempt to kill Hitler directly. I think the general prohibition against assassination is a combination of human psychology (they're super high status so seem invincible and too valuable to kill) and social norms that are explicitly pro-elite (the elite do not want to be vulnerable to normal people).
I think where this gets morally contentious is that it's often very hard to kill someone like Hitler without causing a lot of collateral damage, because they are well protected and there's a good chance the attempt will fail. I personally do not consider it ethical to enact a plan that will definitely kill civilians but has a low chance of killing Hitler. But if there was somehow a situation where I had the opportunity to try and kill Hitler without a significant chance of causing civilian deaths I would feel an ethical imperative to attempt it.
posted by JZig at 12:16 PM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]