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Abstract the Wrongness of Killing Copyright Rainer Ebert May 2016 Abstract The Wrongness of Killing by Rainer Ebert There are few moral convictions that enjoy the same intuitive plausibility and level of acceptance both within and across nations, cultures, and traditions as the conviction that, normally, it is morally wrong to kill people. Attempts to provide a philosophical explanation of why that is so broadly fall into three groups: Consequentialists argue that killing is morally wrong, when it is wrong, because of the harm it inflicts on society in general, or the victim in particular, whereas personhood and human dignity accounts see the wrongness of killing people in its typically involving a failure to show due respect for the victim and his or her intrinsic moral worth. I argue that none of these attempts to explain the wrongness of killing is successful. Consequentialism generates too many moral reasons to kill, cannot account for deeply felt and widely shared intuitions about the comparative wrongness of killing, and gives the wrong kind of explanation of the wrongness of killing. Personhood and human dignity accounts each draw a line that is arbitrary and entirely unremarkable in terms of empirical reality, and hence ill-suited to carry the moral weight of the difference in moral status between the individuals below and above it. Paying close attention to the different ways in which existing accounts fail to convince, I identify a number of conditions that any plausible account of the wrongness of killing must meet. I then go on to propose an account that does. iv I suggest that the reason that typically makes killing normal human adults wrong equally applies to atypical human beings and a wide range of non-human animals, and hence challenge the idea that killing a non-human animal is normally easier to justify than killing a human being. This idea has persisted in Western philosophy from Aristotle to the present, and even progressive moral thinkers and animal advocates such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan are committed to it. I conclude by discussing some important practical implications of my account. To the memory of my grandmother, Theresia Ebert (15 December 1928, Baranyajenő – 7 October 2008, Gaishardt), my second uncle, Stefan Blumenschein (3 August 1943, Baranyajenő – 17 July 2010, Ulm), my grand-aunt, Katharina Emerling (15 February 1925, Baranyajenő – 24 October 2011, Schrezheim), my grandfather, Robert Ohr (19 March 1928, Pfahlheim – 11 April 2013, Ellwangen), and my grandmother, Hedwig Ohr (17 January 1929, Neuler – 9 February 2015, Aalen), who would have been proud. I was very lucky to have had such caring, loving, and kind- hearted people in my life, and I will always remember them fondly. Acknowledgements My thanks go, first and foremost, to my dissertation advisor, George Sher, who has continuously provided essential criticism, advice, encouragement, and support from the first day I have met him at Rice University in 2010. He is an outstanding teacher, and I can only hope to someday live up to his example. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Baruch Brody and Cary Wolfe. When my motivation was down, Baruch urged me to persevere, and to trust him that I am where I belong. I did, and here I am. As a teacher, he was tough but always fair and helpful, and I think I am now a better philosopher for it. I am grateful to the philosophy faculty and graduate students at Rice University, who made my time there a memorable and worthwhile experience, and from whom I have learned to read, think, write, and speak better. I wish to single out for special acknowledgement Richard Grandy, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., and Hanoch Sheinman, who have provided insightful comments on papers I have written, some of which have since been published, and many much-appreciated words of encouragement. I also want to thank Minranda Robinson-Davis. She keeps things running smoothly at the Department, patiently guided me through bureaucratic hurdles more than once, and always has a warm smile for everyone. I presented some of the ideas in this dissertation at the La libération animale, quarante ans plus tard conference at the University of Rennes 2, in Rennes, and at Hindu College and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi, and the third Minding vii Animals conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi. I would like to thank the audiences present on those occasions for their valuable questions and comments, which made this dissertation better than it would otherwise have been. Thanks to Rice University for being my intellectual home for the past six years, and a friendly and stimulating one at that, and to the wonderful Adria Baker and her colleagues from the Office of International Students and Scholars, who have provided invaluable help with immigration issues. I owe a special debt to Tom Regan, Tibor R. Machan, and Mylan Engel Jr., whose inspiring example led me to deepen my appreciation of the practical significance of philosophical inquiry. If I had not met them, I might have never applied to graduate school in philosophy. Peter Singer – whose book, Animal Liberation, was one of the first philosophy books I have read in my life – also had a significant impact on my decision to pursue the life of a philosopher, and so did Peter McLaughlin and Miriam Wildenauer, whom I was very lucky to have as my philosophical mentors as an undergraduate student at Heidelberg University in Germany. I wish to thank my wife, Maqsuda Afroz, for her love and support, and for countless valuable discussions of matters of philosophy, and pretty much everything else. I could not have done this without her. The same is true for my parents, Anton and Margit Ebert, who have always believed in me and supported me in whatever I wanted to do. I am privileged to have a fantastic family and great friends. I cannot name them all here, but I do want to mention Ankit Sethi, who never got tired of answering my questions about the English language. viii Trips to Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, particularly Bangladesh, during summer and winter breaks provided much-needed perspective, and adventure. I thank my many friends in those beautiful places for their hospitality and friendship. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support from the Department of Philosophy at Rice University during the time I spent in its doctoral program, and I thank the Humanities Research Center and the Graduate Student Association at Rice University for travel grants that enabled me to attend conferences in France and India, from which this dissertation benefitted. Table of contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ vi Table of contents ................................................................................................................ ix Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Killing as wrong because of what it does.......................................................... 8 1.1. Classical utilitarianism regards as morally right what is wrong ........................ 11 1.2. Classical utilitarianism arrives at right conclusions for the wrong reasons ....... 19 1.3. Classical utilitarianism gets the comparative wrongness of killing wrong ........ 29 1.4. Rethinking well-being: non-hedonistic act-utilitarianism .................................. 39 1.5. Good – but not good for anyone: non-utilitarian maximizing act- consequentialism ........................................................................................................... 48 1.6. The pro tanto reason to promote the good.......................................................... 52 1.7. Recasting the relationship between the normative status of acts and value ....... 55 1.8. Harm-to-the-victim accounts of the wrongness of killing ................................. 60 1.9. Rule-consequentialism ....................................................................................... 68 Chapter 2: Killing as wrong because of what it is ............................................................ 78 2.1. McMahan’s two-tiered account of the wrongness of killing.............................. 83 2.2. The first tier: the time-relative interest account of the wrongness of killing ..... 84 x 2.3. The distinction between persons and non-persons, and its moral significance .. 96 2.4. The second tier: the intrinsic worth account of the wrongness of killing ........ 108 Chapter 3: Are human beings more equal than other animals? ...................................... 117 3.1. Two strategies to justify equal human worth ................................................... 120 3.2. Strategy One: the argument from substantial identity ...................................... 124 3.3. The genetic basis for moral agency account of rightholding ........................... 138 3.4. Strategy Two: the nature-of-a-kind argument .................................................. 153 Chapter 4: Being a world unto one’s self: a new perspective on the wrongness of killing, and some of its implications ........................................................................................... 164 4.1. What we have argued thus far, and an outline of what lies ahead ................... 167 4.2. Being a somebody as a matter of phenomenal consciousness ........................
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