What would you want somebody else to do in that position?
When I first hastily glanced at your comment, I thought it’d meant that you wished the assassin had believed in “Thou shalt not kill” principle, and that it was the “Greater good” concept that was motivating him.
Likewise any desire to stop the assassin without actually knowing anything about the politics of the senator in question will have to originate more directly from the “Thou shalt not kill” principle, not from the “Greater Good” principle. To not have the former principle at all would have to mean that I’d need to calculate at that exact moment what the “greater good” in the situation actually is, and by the time the calculation is complete, the assassin would have gone about his business and I’d be unable to stop him.
Hence rule utilitarianism, the thing to do when possessing a mind of finite capabilities...
I want to stop the assassin because I don’t want to live in a world where people can just assassinate those they don’t like. As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none. The only way that the politics of the senator would matter is if the senator is so bad that assassinating him is overall a good thing even considering that this increases the overall acceptability of assassination. This scenario is impossible barring very unlikely scenarios (which I will ignore, because of Pascal’s Mugging). So I don’t need to do any calculations at the time.
As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none.
Digressing somewhat… how confident are you of that?
Or, put another way… how much less plausible is this than creating a society where “good” armed-agents-patrolling-residential-areas-to-punish-rulebreakers are permitted but “bad” ones are not, or where “good” armed-groups-capable-of-large-scale-interventions are permitted but “bad” ones are not?
Because a lot of people seem confident that police forces and armies in the real world are practical approximate implementations of those targets. And, sure, I probably can’t go out and start my own police force or army, but it’s clear that such things do get started somehow or other. Similarly, a society where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not doesn’t seem unachievable.
I meant, of course, a world where “good” assassins resembling the type described in the post exist and “bad” ones resembling the type in the post exist. I wasn’t intending to rule out killing enemy leaders in war.
I’m not sure that changes my question. Does the situation change if the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war?
In other words, Jiro is implicitly defining assassination as violence that improperly escalates a conflict from one where violence is not justified to one where violence is permissible. Under such a definition, the US didn’t assassinate Yamamoto, it simply targeted him specifically for killing.
It seems plausible to me that this definition cuts the world at its joints, but there could be edge cases I haven’t considered.
That’s not my answer. My answer is that the checks and balances inherent in having a democratic government make it permissible for the government to decide to kill people under circumstances where I would not want to let random individuals go around killing people. (This doesn’t mean that I approve of all government killing—just that I approve of a wider range of government killing than killing by individuals.)
Whether you want to say that for the government to kill someone in a war counts as assassination is just a question of semantics.
If the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war, and he is aiming at the senator as part of a campaign orchestrated by that population’s government, then yes, the situation does change. (That doesn’t mean I’d approve of the killing, just that the specific reason I gave above for not approving doesn’t apply. There might still be other reasons.)
...and we’re implicitly assuming that ArisKatsaris’ example is of an individual engaging in improper escalation… e.g., that the senator being targeted is not herself engaging in violence (in which case shooting her might be OK), but rather in some less-intense form of conflict (such as rational debate, on your account) to which violence is not a justifiable response?
OK, fair enough.
I’m not really on board with your definitions of “rational debate” or “assassin”, but I’m not sure it matters, so I’m happy to leave that to one side.
And I endorse some notion of proportional response, certainly, though the details are tricky.
This looks as if it’s in agreement with my own position above—but the tone of your comment felt like a disagreement, so has one of us misunderstood something, or did I simply suffer from momentary tone-deafness?.
When I first hastily glanced at your comment, I thought it’d meant that you wished the assassin had believed in “Thou shalt not kill” principle, and that it was the “Greater good” concept that was motivating him.
Likewise any desire to stop the assassin without actually knowing anything about the politics of the senator in question will have to originate more directly from the “Thou shalt not kill” principle, not from the “Greater Good” principle. To not have the former principle at all would have to mean that I’d need to calculate at that exact moment what the “greater good” in the situation actually is, and by the time the calculation is complete, the assassin would have gone about his business and I’d be unable to stop him.
Hence rule utilitarianism, the thing to do when possessing a mind of finite capabilities...
I want to stop the assassin because I don’t want to live in a world where people can just assassinate those they don’t like. As I have no practical way of creating a world where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not, the only choice is all assassinations or none. The only way that the politics of the senator would matter is if the senator is so bad that assassinating him is overall a good thing even considering that this increases the overall acceptability of assassination. This scenario is impossible barring very unlikely scenarios (which I will ignore, because of Pascal’s Mugging). So I don’t need to do any calculations at the time.
Digressing somewhat… how confident are you of that?
Or, put another way… how much less plausible is this than creating a society where “good” armed-agents-patrolling-residential-areas-to-punish-rulebreakers are permitted but “bad” ones are not, or where “good” armed-groups-capable-of-large-scale-interventions are permitted but “bad” ones are not?
Because a lot of people seem confident that police forces and armies in the real world are practical approximate implementations of those targets. And, sure, I probably can’t go out and start my own police force or army, but it’s clear that such things do get started somehow or other. Similarly, a society where “good” assassins are permitted but “bad” ones are not doesn’t seem unachievable.
I meant, of course, a world where “good” assassins resembling the type described in the post exist and “bad” ones resembling the type in the post exist. I wasn’t intending to rule out killing enemy leaders in war.
I’m not sure that changes my question. Does the situation change if the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war?
I’m not Jiro, but I think the best answer involves creating a scale of intensity of a conflict, and then drawing a line such that rational debate is never an intense enough conflict to justify violence. (by definition of rational debate).
In other words, Jiro is implicitly defining assassination as violence that improperly escalates a conflict from one where violence is not justified to one where violence is permissible. Under such a definition, the US didn’t assassinate Yamamoto, it simply targeted him specifically for killing.
It seems plausible to me that this definition cuts the world at its joints, but there could be edge cases I haven’t considered.
That’s not my answer. My answer is that the checks and balances inherent in having a democratic government make it permissible for the government to decide to kill people under circumstances where I would not want to let random individuals go around killing people. (This doesn’t mean that I approve of all government killing—just that I approve of a wider range of government killing than killing by individuals.)
Whether you want to say that for the government to kill someone in a war counts as assassination is just a question of semantics.
If the guy in the lobby identifies with a population with which the senator’s nation is at war, and he is aiming at the senator as part of a campaign orchestrated by that population’s government, then yes, the situation does change. (That doesn’t mean I’d approve of the killing, just that the specific reason I gave above for not approving doesn’t apply. There might still be other reasons.)
...and we’re implicitly assuming that ArisKatsaris’ example is of an individual engaging in improper escalation… e.g., that the senator being targeted is not herself engaging in violence (in which case shooting her might be OK), but rather in some less-intense form of conflict (such as rational debate, on your account) to which violence is not a justifiable response?
OK, fair enough.
I’m not really on board with your definitions of “rational debate” or “assassin”, but I’m not sure it matters, so I’m happy to leave that to one side.
And I endorse some notion of proportional response, certainly, though the details are tricky.
This looks as if it’s in agreement with my own position above—but the tone of your comment felt like a disagreement, so has one of us misunderstood something, or did I simply suffer from momentary tone-deafness?.