On Killing as Causing Death
Common sense has that killing someone amounts to causing the death of someone. This makes killing a physical, biological, or, at best, metaphysical issue, and, as a consequence, the ethics of killing can be dealt with independently of the non-ethical issue of who the killer is. However, in this pape...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Society for the Advancement of Philosophy
2016-12-01
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| Series: | Prolegomena |
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| Online Access: | http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/263686 |
| Summary: | Common sense has that killing someone amounts to causing the death of someone. This makes killing a physical, biological, or, at best, metaphysical issue, and, as a consequence, the ethics of killing can be dealt with independently of the non-ethical issue of who the killer is. However, in this paper, we show that this is not the case. A physical/biological definition of death plus a metaphysical definition of causation does not exhaust the meaning of killing. Rather, the notion of killing per se generally presumes a notion of default, which often involves ethical considerations. |
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| ISSN: | 1333-4395 1846-0593 |