Topic: Under what circumstances, if any, is it right to take a human life?

Monday, December 9, 2002

Well, it was a slightly lame show of team colors on the part of both teams, but they deserve allowances for the fact that they were the first teams to go. I'm confident that other teams will display their colors with more verve. Blue's shameless attempt at bribery by handing out candies was well-received, although it came a little late for maximum effect.

The topic was: under what circumstances, if any, is it right to take a human life? Blue started off as proposers and chose an interestingly narrow criterion that gave a slightly limited (in that it dealt only with peacetime) necessary condition - it is right only when the life that would be taken threatens the security of other lives. (Note the good work that 'other' does here - without it it would right to shoot somebody who was threatening suicide!). If I had thought that this was too narrow, I could have asked them to broaden it. But because the limitation was fairly minor, and the necessary condition that they proposed still gave a lot of room for useful critique, it was fine as it stood.

Green got off to a shaky start when they didn't see the structure of Blue's proposal - that it gave only a necessary condition. Green offered a direct c.e. in which somebody threatens another life but it would not be right to take her life. Blue seemed astonishingly ready for this (perhaps Green had planned too loudly? perhaps Blue had deliberately not made the structure of it's proposal as clear as possible? conspiracy theories abound...) and charged irrelevance. You can see that the c.e. attacks sufficiency, and since Blue's condition proposes only necessity, the charge was upheld. A lesson: Green's slip would have been avoided if they had been careful to set up the c.e. before formulating it. Of course 90 seconds is not a lot of time, and life is short.

Now Green got on track with a well-directed direct c.e. about euthanasia, as a case in which it is OK to take a life even though it doesn't threaten other lives. Blue again was ready for this - they had obviously (and wisely) held their best proposal back by way of preparation. (By the way, the counter to this tactic of a team trying to script it's proposals is to get off script with a c.e. that is so strong that it requires their best proposal to block it.) Blue blocked by restricting its proposal to unconsenting lives. The decision to block rather than to contest was a good one - the c.e. was right on target, but easy to block. At this point Green slipped again with a c.e. that was both hard to understand but also once more attacked sufficiency, not necessity. I think that if Green had articulated the c.e. a little more clearly, they would have seen that it was the wrong structure. Credit to Blue for seeing quickly that it was the wrong structure.

So after Blue's charge was upheld, Green recovered nicely with an excellent direct c.e. of the mother who kills her baby to protect her from horrible torture. I had thought as they were formulating the c.e. that they were going to shoot the torturer, not the baby. Either approach would have had its strengths, and the blocks for each would have looked quite different. The one they chose is arguably better because the person shot is innocent, and so the c.e. can't be blocked by just adding that the person killed is not innocent. But there are plenty of guilty people who should not be killed, so this is not a major advantage. In any event, now it was time for Blue to slip, charging (although not with complete clarity) that the c.e. was not compelling, on grounds that the baby would have consented if it had been of sufficient maturity to do so thoughtfully (I'm improving a little on Blue's articulation here). If Blue had held themselves more closely to the required structure here, I think they would have seen that this wasn't going to fly. In order to win a claim of uncompellingness, it would have to be doubtful in the c.e. that the baby had not consented. What it would have done if it had been more mature is really irrelevant to that (unless Blue wanted somehow to claim that the baby had tacitly consented). In any event, almost nobody was persuaded; the audience turned down Blue's charge by an overwhelming margin.

At this point I flipped the topic and asked Green to propose. Green focused on self-defense, and so limited the issue more initially than Blue had; but then they gave necessary and sufficient condition, rather than the narrower necessary condition that Blue had given. So the net effect was about the same. Green might well have considered doing less with their initial proposal in expectation of an expectable response from Blue (as Blue had evidently done with its proposal), but I was glad to see a more refined proposal since there was only about 15-20 minutes left. Green’s proposal had a condition requiring that killing in self-defense be the minimum necessary force to end the danger of the killer’s death. I rather expected Blue to request clarification on this point, and the line they started to take - a huge monster that is very hard to kill - suggested that they were indeed confused, since it seemed really off the track. But the Blue spokesperson began, in midstream, to realize that her c.e. was lame and retrenched, flirting with the possibility of charging that Green’s proposal was too narrow (a charge that, as you can tell from my comments above, would have been misplaced) or issuing a total concession. But my description of their thought as a "total concession" evidently gave them second thoughts (perhaps recalling my characterization of that as a desperate measure), and they ended up with a c.e. attacking necessity (although they didn't articulate carefully that they were attacking necessity).  Their c.e., a person who could kill an intruder with either a knife or gun but who has no obligation for the minimal option (the knife in their articulation), so that it would be OK for that person to kill in self-defense even though he was not using the minimal necessary force, had the same effect as a request for clarification, since it required Green to sharpen their notion of "minimal force" in response. I had actually expected that Blue might go after sufficiency, since there are lots of cases in which we think people are expected not to kill even to save their lives. But certainly problems with sufficiency made me glad that Blue had not issued a total concession.

Now Green gave back the advantage it had gained temporarily from Blue's confusion, trying to give a c.e. to Blue's c.e. In response to pressure from me to articulate (as required by the rules) what exactly they were charging, they too retrenched and charged that Blue's c.e. was irrelevant. I denied this charge, since Blue's c.e. did have the right structure (at least under a generous reading of "minimal force"), and consequently Green tried to spell out it's  notion of minimal force so as to block Blue's c.e. Their idea was that killing was the minimal response necessary to prevent death, not that the method of killing was the minimal response. But before this got articulated in detail (I was helping out here), time was up and we stopped.

In all this was a pretty good dialogue, especially for the first one. (You can see from it that the main challenge is in keeping clear about what's going on. It is very important to take a few seconds to set up the c.e. before trying to work it out.) Each team worked pretty well within the time limits. Some of the c.e.s and responses to them were right on target. From this point of view I especially liked Green's example of the mother who kills her baby to prevent its torture. Despite its implausibility, it raised a lot of issues that don't typically come up in discussions about the permissibility of killing. If we had had more time I would certainly have let that line proceed for a while, forcing Blue to deal with it. And while each team faltered some, they both made good recoveries, getting the point of the problems that emerged and moving on constructively. (As in the rest of life, there's much to be said for graceful recovery from error.)

On the whole, though, I give the edge to Blue. Although they stumbled some themselves, by and large they were better at keeping on track and forcing the discussion into more productive directions (this is what will happen when responses are relevant, compelling, and strong). So giving Green a score (somewhat arbitrarily) of 5, I give Blue a score of 6-. (Scores, you recall, are on a scale from 1 to 7.)