Abstract:

Moral decision-making is always marred by uncertainty; in the ethics of killing, that uncertainty is especially acute and pervasive. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and yet it is often difficult, even impossible to know whether the conditions for killing to be objectively permissible are satisfied. Any successful theory of the ethics of killing should offer an account of when killing is subjectively permissible. And yet few do. In this paper, I consider two possibilities: one that focuses on thresholds, and one that fits the ethics of killing into a broader decision-theoretic framework.
I show the flaws of the first approach, and endorse the second, before exploring some of its implications and answering some objections.