Abstract
There are many ways one could try to justify the killing of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, in the public square we heard a wide variety of claims regarding the killing: that it was good because a “bad man” was now dead, or that it was a permissible act of enforcing capital punishment, or that it was simply killing a combatant in war, which is permissible under traditional just war theory. In this chapter I show some of the ways these and other justifications for killing Osama bin Laden fall short. The goal is not to give a complete rebuttal of such approaches, but, rather, to simply show that the rights-based liability account for permissible harm described in Chapter 1 is far more restrictive than these other competing accounts.
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Notes
For an interesting discussion of the justification of assassination see W.R.P. Kaufman, “Rethinking the Ban on Assassination,” in Rethinking the Just War Tradition, ed. M.W. Brough, John W. Lango, and Harry van der Linden (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). See also
Stephen Kershnar, “The Moral Argument for a Policy of Assassination,” Reason Papers 27 (2004): 45–67. For an argument that many leaders should not be treaty with non-combatant immunity but are legitimate targets, see Stephen Kershnar, “Assassination and the Immunity Theory,” Philosophia 33.4 (2005): 129–147. Presumably, UBL would fit as such a target under Kershnar’s argument. Michael Gross gives the argument that targeted killings cannot fit into a proper moral category. If they are an extension of law enforcement, they fail due process, and assassination as self-defense seems implausible, or so Gross argues. See
Gross, “Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement, Execution, or Self-Defense?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23.2 (2006): 323–335.
Similar justifications were also commonly heard for the United States invasion of Iraq, after the fact, with regard to the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Of course, Hussein’s death was significantly different from UBL’s in that his was a judicial execution following a trial in which he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Some will think this kind of reasoning, killing individuals to improve the overall aggregate good of the world, can quickly lead to reductio ad absurdum sounding conclusions. Such thinking has clear parallels with Derek Parfit’s “repugnant conclusion,” for example, and other such discussions of making the “world a better place” with or without the addition of certain people entirely apart from their individual deservedness (Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)). Some go even further and argue that the world would be better if no human beings existed whatsoever so as to avoid all human suffering. (
David Benatar, Better to Never Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)).
On the strongest capital punishment views not only is death a permissible punishment for certain particularly heinous cases, but it would be a failure of justice not to deliver death to such deserving criminals. Also, there are some views of capital punishment that do, in fact, view it not as a desert-based justification for killing but a form of self-defense. I find such views confusing and, at any rate, discussion of them exceeds the scope of this book. (Thanks to Ed Barrett for bringing this later view to my attention.) For a broader discussion of punishment and desert and a thorough engagement with these issues, see Victor Tadros, The Ends of Harm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
See, for example, Bradley J. Strawser, “Walking the Tightrope of Just War” Analysis 71 (July 2011): 533–544. And
Bradley J. Strawser, “Revisionist Just War Theory and the Real World: A Cautiously Optimistic Proposal,” in Routledge Handbook of Ethics and War, ed. Fritz Allhoff, Adam Henschke, and Nick Evans (Routledge Press, 2013).
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© 2014 Bradley Jay Strawser
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Strawser, B.J. (2014). Possible Moral Justifications. In: Killing bin Laden: A Moral Analysis. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434937_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434937_4
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