yet more “death” “business”

Irilyth writes, in a comment on the whole death business, that he finds appealing the rights-based approach,

That your right to life derives from your respect for other people's right to life, and if you violate someone else's right, you no longer have a valid claim on your own (unless you can make such a claim, like self-defense or whatever)

He later says that it’s the philosophical simplicity that appeals to him, but the practice of it he finds bothersome. And he’s taking some shots for it, and I hope he’ll enjoy them, and this, and all my “scare” “quotes”.

I’ll take a quick moment here to point out my problem with the whole idea of it, that if Smith kills Jones, then Smith waives his “right to life”. Of course, that allows Rodriguez to kill Smith with moral impunity, particularly if Rodriguez acts for the State. I understand that Rodriguez, then, doesn’t waive his “right to life” by killing Smith, as Rodriguez didn’t violate Smith’s already-waived “right to life”. On the other hand, presumably Rodriguez (or the state that employs him) must gauge whether Smith really did waive that “right”, as it’s possible Jones had already waived his “right to life”, granting Smith’s killing legitimacy. I suppose, of course, that Jones’ status is, or ought to be fairly quickly verifiable. But what if it isn’t? What if Smith thinks that Jones killed Pak, but actually it was Tendulkar? Or what if Jones contributed, perhaps through negligence, to Pak’s death, and Smith feels that this constitutes a waiver, but Rodriguez does not? Alternately, what if Jones and Pak and Rodriguez all feel that the only way to waive one’s “right to life” is by murder, but Smith and Tendulkar feel that acts of cruelty such as rape and torture constitute such a waiver? Smith, then, is (in Rodriguez’s’s eyes) culpable for killing Jones (who raped Pak), but in Tendulkar’s eyes, Rodriguez is culpable for killing Smith. No, this system, as symmetrical as it appears, works only if everybody in it agrees on (a) exactly what constitutes a waiver of the “right to life”, and (b) exactly how to determine if such a waiver has been granted. Even then, of course, you must begin by stating that such a right is intrinsically alienable. I don’t exactly know how to defend that idea.

I mean, my own view, that such a right is not alienable in theory although alienating it may on rare occasion be the most moral choice available, is essentially derived from Scripture, and as such should not be persuasive to, say, Irilyth. I looked into the idea of natural rights a couple of years ago, and the more I looked into it, the more problem I had with knowing what they might be, and how to define them. How do we acquire those rights? How can they be violated? How do we enforce them? How do we waive them? How do we claim them? Even the most basic one, this “right to life”, eluded me, particularly as it is sure to be violated by something, sometime, for everybody. For now at any rate, I went back to a Scriptural idea that sidesteps the question entirely: murder is not a violation of the victim’s “right to life”, but a sin against the Creator. As such, it cannot be waived, except by the Creator (this gets us around the Scriptural attitude to capital punishment). Again, situations may exist (and may be easily imagined) where that sin is the least sinful of the available options, but as we learn from the beginning of Tobit, sometimes you do have to get your hands dirty, but that necessity doesn’t clean your hands.

I’m not sure how to derive any idea of an inherent “right to life” that is alienable without dirtying the hands of the killer. One could, of course, say that such a right doesn’t exist (isn’t inherent), but that for a variety of reasons it’s a good idea to act as if it did exist. This seems obvious to me; if we all agree that to pretend that everybody has an equal right to life, it increases the chances that my own life, and the lives of those dear to me, will be held inviolate by others in their attempt to prop up the fantasy which in turn protects their own lives. In this scheme, however, what endangers the system is not any actual killing that takes place (which, after all, does not violate anybody’s actual “right to life”), but any doubt that comes into the system. To be specific, any killing that takes place necessarily shakes the agreed-upon fiction, and must be punished. It must be punished, though, only insofar as it does endanger the system; other kinds of blasphemy may be just as dangerous but not involve actually killing people. And, surely, the very idea that this “right” can be waived shakes the system as much as actual killing does, so we all must pretend that the “right to life” not only exists, but is inalienable, which gets us right back where we started.

On the other hand, that problematic system is the one I endorse. I could phrase it less annoyingly, pointing out that killing can be bad without violating a right. We could all agree that the destruction of something of value is bad, even if we don’t grant that the thing (say, a tree, or a painting) had some sort of ‘right to existence’. Therefore, killing is destruction, and punishable, as long as we declare life to have some positive value, a much less difficult proposition than a “right to life”, and one that could even be in some sense objective, or at least based on observable phenomena. One could even make a claim to assess that value, and that the actions of the person could reduce that value, although such a claim would be pretty damn’ difficult to substantiate. Still, to claim that we could destroy a particular life with moral impunity is, under this system, tantamount to saying that such a life is worthless, which would be very tricky indeed, I think.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.