This isn't a concept I have really investigated much in the past, particularly as I have tried to stay away from ethics in my study of philosophy.
Let's start with a simple question. Suppose a man has murdered somebody and has been found guilty by the state, and let's also say that they confessed to the murder as well. The state has decided to execute them by hanging. Ignore the question for now about whether that's a right or wrong action. We will acknowledge the state's actions here as ethically neutral. So this man is on the gallows awaiting the executioner to pull the lever that will lead to his neck breaking. We are in the crowd some way off with a sniper rifle. Suppose that we kill the man instantly with a bullet through the head just seconds before he would die instantly of a broken neck. Also suppose that we have never met the man before and have no connection with him.
Questions:
1. Are we a murderer?
2. Are we guilty? (I am defining "guilty" here as " worthy of punishment")
3. Are we responsible for the man's death?
4. Are we morally responsible for the man's death?
(I want to clarify that in what follows, by "the murderer" I am referring to us, the shooter, and by "the man" and "the man's death" I refer to the man who was supposed to be hanged and his death.)
The answer to 1 is clearly "yes", we have murdered a man. I suppose there are possible systems of law whereby when a person is given the death penalty by a judge in a court of law, they are instantly recognised in law as no longer being a living person. Their hanging would just be a mere formality to be executed later. (More unrelated questions: does it sound condescending of me to say "no pun intended" or "pun intended" after the last sentence? If I say nothing at all there does the reader infer that I meant the pun or not?) Under that legal system I suppose a lawyer might say that I didn't murder the man because he was dead already. Maybe I would be guilty of desecration of a corpse instead? But I think we have to over-rule that lawyer, and say that the man was clearly still alive and that a court cannot proclaim a living man to be dead. The property of being alive is a biological one, and unrelated to an entity's actions.
I think question 2 is a tough one, and really we need to answer the other questions first.
question 3 is a question that Lewis attempts to answer in one of his papers. What do we mean by "the man's death"? That term can describe 3 different events here. One is the rigid designator, the death of that man. The second is the event whereby that man died of hanging and the third is the event whereby that man died of a bullet wound, more specifically, a wound inflicted by a bullet that we fired. We are responsible for the man's death by bullet, and we are also responsible for preventing the man's death by hanging. In some sick logical sense I suppose we might even claim to have saved a man's life here. But we are not responsible for the death of that man because had we not done anything then the man would have died anyway. In this example we could say that we are responsible for that man experiencing a few seconds less of life, but the example could be changed so that the man was shot just as there was one inch of rope remaining until his neck broke. The amount of life we took from this man that he would have lived had we not been present can be reduced to being insignificant to the question.
Of course we are still responsible for the man's death in the same way that every other human is responsible for it. Every human in that society tacitly accepts the death penalty by not doing all they can to stop the man from being executed. I am very very slightly responsible for the murders of teenagers killed by knives in London (even though I don't live there), simply because I didn't use my powers to the fullest to prevent those deaths. It's so small an amount of moral responsibility that I don't think I ought to feel guilty for the combined number of murders that have occurred in my lifetime. Most of us will one day encounter a scenario where somebody was murdered in a fight on a street that we were walking on, and we'll feel slightly guilty later on for not doing enough to prevent it. Our closeness to the event will emphasise to us the degree of influence we had on the event, and even though we did nothing wrong, we did not necessarily do everything right either, and sometimes a person is to be condemned for not doing what is right even when not doing what is wrong. (We would condemn a person who can swim for not doing anything when presented with a drowning person who needs their help, even though they committed no crimes or sins by not acting).
So my answer to question 3 is that our actions are a necessary cause of the event whereby the man died in almost exactly the same way (instantly, and at the same time, and knowing he would die at that moment) as he would have had we not been present. Our actions changed very little in the great scheme of things: about as much as one of the by-standers. So I think I have to conclude that we were not morally responsible for the death of the man, or at least only as morally responsible as one of the by-standers.
Which leads me back to Q2. My intuition is that we are deserving of punishment. But let's look at the reasons why and try to remove them from the example. I think we deserve punishment for two reasons. Firstly, we desecrated a corpse. Nobody agreed beforehand that this person deserved to have their body dead and with a hole through the head. Secondly, if I were the ruling body I would want to lock the shooter up because even if they are not morally responsible for the death, they have a disposition to murder people. In this one instance the murder was fine, but probabilistically speaking, the shooter has a greater chance of committing an immoral murder in the future than a by-stander does.
So let's try to remove those factors from the example and re-evaluate. We need a way for the murderer to be the cause of the death without inflicting any damage to the corpse. Suppose that the murderer is actually a heart surgeon who operated on the person to be executed
and installed a device that operated the man's heart. He also kept a remote control that can de-activate the device and instantly kill the man. And it is this remote control he uses right at the second where the man would have had his neck broken. I don't think that action would really count as desecrating a corpse even after the man's death because the heart-device is not part of the man. But it would still count as murder before the death of the man.
The second factor: how do we remove any increased probability in the murderer murdering other people as a result of his murdering this person? I can't really think of a way that doesn't reduce the amount of responsibility the murderer had in the event. If we made them an executioner or a soldier obeying a command then they are less responsible for the murder in the first place, and our lawyers would tell us that in those circumstances the death does not even count as murder.
Perhaps we make the murderer take an extensive psychological test to determine how likely it is that they will murder again, and we discover that their likelihood is less than or equal to the average person's. The problem with this is that we then cannot explain why the murderer acted in the way they did at all. Surely the test cannot be correct because normal people don't do these sorts of "amoral murders" and yet this person did. Perhaps their act can be explained by them having a desire to end somebody's life but ONLY on the condition that it not be immoral. Anybody with this desire should not be a danger to society.
I suppose the reason we would punish this person is because of some psychological theory. In reality there is no such person who has a desire to kill amorally and no desire to kill immorally. All people who have a desire to kill amorally will have a heightened desire to kill immorally. This should be explained in some law of psychology. But our question never really addressed psychology. Surely a person with a desire to kill amorally and no desire to kill immorally is a logically possible entity. Suppose that it was a computer that had been programmed to act that way, and in a society where computers and people are treated equally, with free will and moral responsibility, as Dennett would have us believe.
Of course now this issue gets clouded with the contention that perhaps no murderer deserves to be punished, because if their desires are programmed into them, they are not responsible for any of their actions. We do not want to take that position.
I'm not sure what conclusion to make here. In societies where execution occurs, there always has to be somebody who is the most responsible agent for the death of the executed person. These are jobs that most people can apply for and that are really some people's jobs in the USA today. (In prisons and abortion clinics) Therefore I suppose that we do allow and encourage these people who have desires to kill amorally to satisfy their desires by applying for these jobs and carrying out these "murders" without punishment. The problem I have is that those people are not really morally responsible for the deaths. If they didn't do it then somebody else would, and I can't really imagine a society in which they jointly condone the death penalty but no single agent will step up to carry out the actions supported by the whole group. So I really haven't solved the problem of how we should treat the shooter in this example, and will think about it further.
