Thou Shalt Not Kill? On the Justification of Killing for Liberty

you must often be prepared for lives

to be lost in some other way.^[1]

“Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20: 13). The fifth commandment puts the highest maxim of pacifism into words. In pacifism this maxim is even higher in value than one’s own life. Orwell’s quote above expresses the dilemma of inevitable loss of life and therewith opens several questions towards the tension between absolute truths, evaluation of lives, and limits of acceptability. The core question is whether there can ever be a justification of the use of violence to prevent or reduce existing violence. The realities of our world ceaselessly confront mankind with the cruelty of violence – examples of reckless and random killing without ruth in Nazism, Stalinism, or southern Sudan, Liberia, Congo, Middle East and many more do not need further explanation. In facing the reality of violence and acknowledging the ethical dilemma of situations of inevitable loss of life this essay presents a deontological approach to the justification of killing for liberty whereby the act of liberation has to be aimed at a constitution of political freedom and its chosen means must not violate humanity. This conditional limitation of killing for the sack of liberty is approached within three parts. Part I deals with the deontological quality of liberty justifying violent acts of self-defence; part II deals with this liberalising use of violence by examining its limits in the fight against oppression and part III defines valid targets of killing for liberty.

Renoncer à sa liberté c’est renoncer à sa qualité d’homme [...].

Une telle renonciation est incompatible avec la nature de l’homme [...].^[2]

Liberty is a basic need, an inalienable trait of human beings. Its worth is the capacity for free choice and the exercise of free will instead of being patronized. This is what Kant designates as determining ground of practical reason (Willkür).^[3] Berlin points to Kant’s concept of choice as the grounds for morality itself; by dealing with liberty he identifies a dissension between two systems of ideas in answering a central political question for the limits of obedience and coercion. In his famous essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’^[4] Berlin writes of two distinct senses of liberty, a fundamental moral sense and a socio-political sense. The moral sense of liberty answers questions of “Who governs me?” and “Who is to say what I am, and what I am not, to be or do?”^[5] or more generally, “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?”^[6] The answers point to the notion of “the positive liberty of self-realization”.^[7] For Berlin ‘positive’ liberty is self-determination and the freedom to do something.^[8] What concerns Berlin is its sensitivity for teleological conceptions of liberty that may subsume civil liberty to achieve some greater goal – a freedom for something.^[9] Brutal tyrannies always use ‘positive’ liberty as rhetoric cloak for the glorification of its government and with it reverse the idea of freedom into its opposite – the legitimization of collective coercion in the name of a goal or truth.

In order to avoid this pitfall, Berlin points to the open-ended ‘negative’ concept of liberty. It gives an answer to where humans are to let free of control and to what extent are they to be governed, in general terms: “What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”^[10] The danger of instrumentalization of ‘positive’ liberty is unequally greater than on part of the socio-political sense of liberty. Its stronger resistance becomes obvious by envisioning the essence of ‘negative’ liberty:

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor. To strive to be free is to seek to remove obstacles; to struggle for personal freedom is to seek to curb interference, exploitation, enslavement by men whose ends are theirs, not one’s own. Freedom, at least in its political sense, is co-terminus with the absence of bullying or domination.^[11]

‘Negative’ liberty is freedom from obstacles; it is the opportunity for actions, not the dynamic realization of actions. The focus shifts from mere freedom of decision within a given frame of options to open-ended freedom of action that is just bound by rules of humanity. It follows the logic of a defensive right. State power has to be limited for the preservation of individual autonomy. Thus, individual privacy is declared to be the original momentum of the term ‘negative’ liberty by the most eloquent defender of personal freedom – Benjamin Constant. He fills this term with inviolable rights of individual freedom like protection against arbitrariness, pleasure of ownership, freedom of opinion and its public utterance as well as religious liberty.^[12] A minimum of ‘negative’ liberty limiting the sovereign by indefeasible moral barriers is the condition for individual and corporative freedom par excellence. Berlin and Rousseau agree in the evaluation of liberty as part of human dignity: “[T] hose who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.”^[13] Further more, liberty has to be interwoven in a healthy proportion with other values like equality, justice, happiness and security. This argument for the overriding importance of ‘negative’ liberty forms the basis for the following justification of killing for liberty; makes clear why there can be such a justification at all; and sets the limits of acceptability for justified acts of liberation.

This essay presents a deontological approach as its emphasis of negative liberty excludes teleological reasoning by definition. The predicate ‘teleological’ is reserved for theories making it possible to understand the good as something immoral and the right as useful for the maximization of the immoral good. Teleological theories are special cases of consequentialism which defines the moral value of an action only by its consequences – in a teleological manner and unlike deontological theories independently of the connection between moral values and the right.^[14] That is in the words of Primoratz formulating the major problem with consequentialism: “the much too great willingness of the theory to permit, and indeed call for, various actions that would be considered morally wrong in themselves, i.e. wrong even when they would produce good results. […] deontological theories can be expected to judge it [these various actions] as wrong in itself, even when it has good consequences.”^[15]

Thus, to be excluding crimes against humanity this justification has to be deontological. But in being a justification it also excludes pacifism. The reason for that is the acknowledgement of the irresolvability of ultimate value conflicts. Theories of absolutism of rights – like pacifism – are what Weber declares Gesinnungsethik.^[16] Its motto fiat iustitia, ruat caelum (do justice even if the heavens fall), claims an acknowledgement that the true meaning of justice incorporates ignoring the consequences of acting justly.^[17] However, then justice would be an acceptance of cruelties, a situation that seems rather unbalanced – a contradiction by definition – if fate or other transcendental philosophies do not count. On the other side Held’s deontological account justifying crimes against humanity (like terrorism^[18] ) also bares a flaw in itself because it confuses equality of rights with equality of circumstances and in doing so she ignores responsibility for one’s actions as feature of fair distribution of justice:

Presumably everyone’s rights count equally. Respect for rights will never be perfect in practice, but it seems morally less justifiable that those who have already suffered great disrespect of their rights should continue to do so than that the burden of imperfect justice be fairly shared.^[19]

[...]

^[1] Orwell, George (1949): ‘Reflections on Gandhi’. First published in Partisan Review. [http://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi], 05/12/2008.

^[2] Rousseau, CS I, 4.

^[3] See Kant, Immanuel (1965): The Metaphysical Elements of Justice. Trans. Alan Ladd. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

^[4] Berlin, Isaiah (1969): ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 118-72.

^[5] Ibid., 130.

^[6] Ibid., 122.

^[7] Berlin, Isaiah (1969): ‘Introduction’ to Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. lvi.

^[8] See Berlin, 131.

^[9] Cp. ibid., 145-54.

^[10] Ibid., 121-2.

^[11] Berlin, lvi.

^[12] Cp. Constant, Benjamin (1980): Les Principes de politiques applicables à tous les gouvernements [1815]. Ed. Hofmann. Genève: Droz, p. 275.

^[13] Berlin, lx.

^[14] Nida-Rümelin, Julian (1995): Kritik des Konsequentialismus, 2nd edition. München: Oldenburg, pp. 86-7.

^[15] Primoratz, Igor (1997): ‘The Morality of Terrorism.’ Journal of Applied Philosophy 14 (3), 221-33: 222, 228.

^[16] The concept of ‘ Gesinnungsethik ’ is not easy to translate. Depending on the context it means ‘absolute ethics’, ‘ethics of conviction’ and ‘ethics of good inclination’. See Weber, Max (1964): Politik als Beruf [1919]. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

^[17] Cp. Walzer, Michael (2004): Arguing about War. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, p. 36.

^[18] Christopher Finlay formulated her argument in his review laconically: “she argues that terrorism isn’t always more unjustifiable than war, ie, if war is sometimes justified (and despite some equivocation, she seems to think it is), then it’s likely terrorism will sometimes be justified too” (Finlay, Christopher J.: ‘How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence.’ Times Higher Education, 24 July 2008. [http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=402933&sectioncode=26], 06/12/2008). If terrorism was justified, then it could not be seen as morally wrong by definition. That is why Held’s approach is called deontological. Given the assumption that terrorism is generally wrong, then it cannot be understood as deontological.

^[19] Held, Virginia (2008): How Terrorism is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, p. 90.