PBA455Y: Consistent Life Ethic: The Ethics of Killing

What are we to make of a Consistent Life Ethic? How should we approach the ethics of killing on issues such as capital punishment, self-defence, tyrannicde, war, non-human animals?

• different perspectives on justice: retributive, reconciliation, mercy, punishment, deterrent, etc.
• empirical data:
  • cost of death penalty
  • wrongful convinctions
• different perspectives
  • just punishment for capital offences when there is certainty of conviction
  • err on the side of mercy when not necessary for public safety (e.g. CCC)
• abortion: difference between killing innocent and guilty people

• Moral Status of Non-Human Animals: Are they persons?
  • Peter Singer: incompatible with pro-life view
  • Tom Regan: quite compatible with pro-life view
  • Mary Midgley: This is the wrong question, there has to be more than just person versus non-person
• ConsiderVeganism.com: a question of unnecessary suffering
• abortion: pro-life position is EHP¹⁾

• Just War Tradition
  • Commonly held criteria
    • jus ad bellum
      • just case
      • competent authority
      • right intention
      • reasonable probability of success
      • proportionality
      • last resort
      • etc.
    • jus in bello
      • proportionality
      • discrimination
  • Thick concept of justice as character, virtue (incl. prudence, love, mercy, reconciliation, etc.)
  • Public Policy Checklist
  • limits
• Pacifism
  • Creative non-violent direct action
  • reasons for concern
    • collateral damage
    • technological change
    • psychological cost of killing
  • limits
• Levels
  • War / societies
  • Police / communities
  • Individual / self-defence

Abortion:

• The question of how you stop an aggressor is different than directly killing an innocent child, and even those who accept just war tradition don't accept directly killing innocents
• Violence is never acceptable for a pro-life movement, even those who accept the possibility of just war reject vigilantism

The consistent life ethic is a challenge to pro-lifers to evaluate the consistency of their opinions on the ethics of killing more broadly. There are moral distinctions that can be made, and differing coherent stances that can be taken. One position does not imply all the rest. But there is a challenge: do we consistently value the right to life in the way that we should across a wide variety of separate issues?

When we move to health care or immigration, the argument because more tenuous if it's being used as an excuse to overlook the violation of the right to life. The right to life is a fundamental prerequisite for all other rights. The notion that a pro-abortion politician would save more human lives because of other policies on health care or immigration so therefore can be excused on killing babies (1) is probably empirically false on straight numbers, (2) does not excuse the gross violation of justice in condoning abortion.

Sister Joan D. Chittister, O.S.B.

• As a moral challenge to pro-lifers to defend human rights broadly, yes
• But public policy questions of how people should get food or health care (to what extent its government or other sources) are different debates than the moral question of whether or not we need to provide food and health care, etc
• And the right to life is a necessary prerequisite and starting point, even if it's clearly not the end of human rights

There's a lazy slander to pro-lifers are not pro-life but only pro-birth and don't care about people after they're born:

First, it's rarely true that pro-lifers don't care about people after birth. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/01/2380/

Second, there's a difference between an issue like abortion where some people are arguing that pre-born children are not human persons and shouldn't have any rights, and something like a water crisis where there is a failure to provide the basics of life to children whom we all agree are human persons with rights. Step 1 is being recognized as a person with human rights. Pre-born children don't even have that yet. That doesn't mean it's the end point, but it's an important start.