MORAL KILLING?

Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) (From the bookjacket: "This groundbreaking book is a comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among the beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, neonates, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe, congenital, cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose." " In an attempt to understand the moral status of these beings, Jeff McMahan develops and defends distinctive accounts of the nature of personal identity, the evaluation of death, and the wrongness of killing. He contends that the morality of killing is not unitary; rather, the principles that determine the morality of killing in marginal cases are different from those those that govern the killing of persons who are self-conscious and rational." "Among the central claims of this book is that killing in marginal cases should be evaluated primarily in terms of the impact it would have on the victim at the time rather than on the value of the victim's life as a whole. What primarily matters, in other words, is how killing affects that which it would be rational for the victim to care about at the time of death." "McMahon systematically employs various foundational claims about identity, death, and killing to yield novel conclusions about such issues as abortion, prenatal injury, infanticide, the killing of animals, the significance of brain death, the termination of life support in cases of persistent vegetative state, the use of anencephalic infants as sources of transplant organs, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and advance directive in cases of dementia.").

Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 2009) (From the "Preface": "The contention of this book is that common sense beliefs about the morality of killing in war are deeply mistaken. The prevailing view is that in a state of war, the practice of killing is governed by different moral principles form those that govern acts of killing in other contexts, This presupposes that it can make a difference to the moral permissibility of killing another person whether one's political leaders have declared a state of war with that person's country. According to the prevailing view, therefore, political leaders can somehow cause other people's moral rights to disappear simply by commanding their armies to attack them. When stated in this way the received view seems obviously absurd. In explaining and elaborating this view in detail . . . , I will present it in the way its proponents do, which will of course make it seem far more sensible. But it should still be evident, even when one has read the official description that the account I have just given is accurate." "My aim in this book is to challenge the received wisdom about the morality of killing in war. Although a book in philosophy cannot be expected to have any significant effect on popular thought, I have nevertheless written this book in the hop e of promoting a reconsideration of certain beliefs that have hardened into unquestioned orthodoxies yet encourage complacency about killing in war and thus make it easier for governments to lead their countries into unjust wars. Among these beliefs is the view that moral responsibility for wrongful killing that occurs when an unjust war is fought lies solely with the political leaders whose decision it was to go tot war, Political leaders are utterly powerless to killing large numbers of people without the acquiescence of complicity of all those who rationalized, pay for and perpetrate killings." Id. at vii-viii. Also, find and listen to Buffy St. Marie singing "Universal Soldier.).

Symposium on Jeff McMahan's Killing in War, 122 Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political and Legal Philosophy 8 (October, 2011).