Here is another excerpt from the current draft of “When May We Kill Government Agents?”. This section appears after I’ve debunked (or tried to debunk) a range of arguments for the special immunity thesis. (The cases A-E listed below, and an explanation of what the special immunity and moral parity theses are, can be found here.)

We are still looking for reasons why it would be impermissible to kill government officials in cases D-F even though it is permissible to kill civilians in analogous cases A-C. One such objection goes as follows:

If citizens believed they were at liberty to kill democratic officials (under the principles described above), then this would cause dangerous instability and fallout. If civilians kill a bad cop, the other cops are likely to retaliate by harming other innocent people or curbing their rights. If civilians kill an evil president, future presidents or congress are likely to retaliate by harming other people or further violating their rights. Therefore, it is wrong to assassinate democratic officials.

The idea here is that morality is a strategic game. What I am permitted to do might depend on how others will respond to what I do. Perhaps what would otherwise have been a permissible action might be rendered impermissible if others will perform wrongful actions in response to it. That is, perhaps the threat of extortion might change my moral duties.

Presumably, there’s no moral duty to choose a red over a blue toothbrush. However, suppose a terrorist threatens to nuke DC unless I choose blue. Must I then choose blue?

Consider a variation on minivan shooter. Suppose Ann is about to kill the cop who is shooting at the children. However, just as she does so, another cop yells to her, “We cops stick together. If you shoot him, I’ll kill two minivans full of innocent kids. That’s not a threat; that’s a promise.” Is it still permissible for Ann to save the kids in the first van, or must she submit to the cops’ threat?

These are hard questions. How we are required to respond to extortion is bound to be controversial. Fortunately, though, I don’t need to answer these questions here. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that A) extortion or retaliation do indeed render impermissible what would otherwise would have been permissible acts, and B) that democratic governments are likely to use extortion and retaliation to prevent civilians from killing wrongdoing government agents, this still doesn’t justify the Special Immunity Thesis. Instead, it is compatible with the Moral Parity Thesis.

For the sake of argument, suppose it is impermissible for you to kill a wrongdoer if there is a real threat that others will respond by committing even greater harm or injustice. This provides us with no in-principle reason to treat democratic government officials differently from civilians. After all, civilians can and often do respond to what otherwise would have been justifiable violent self-defense or defense of others by threatening to cause even more harm. A bully on the playground might threaten to beat up two other kids if you stick up for your friend. The Mafia can and does tell people that they’ll kill even more people if their victims start to defend themselves. The Joker might threaten to bomb Gotham City if Batman tries to rescue Commissioner Gordon.

It may turn out, empirically, that democratic governments are unusually willing and able to use extortion to prevent us from defending ourselves against their wrongdoing agents. If so, it may thus turn out, empirically, that the conditions under which it is permissible to kill a wrongdoer are less likely to obtain when the wrongdoer is a government agent than when he’s a private civilian. But this remains compatible with the Moral Parity Thesis, because it allows that the conditions under which it is permissible to kill wrongdoers are the same. In both cases, we’re allowed to kill wrongdoers in certain conditions, one of those conditions being that killing the wrongdoers won’t incite other wrongdoers to commit even greater harm or injustice.

So far, I have assumed for the sake of argument that we are required to surrender to credible threats of extortion. But that’s not obviously true. It is not obvious that what would have been a permissible action becomes wrong just because someone else threatens to react badly to it. Suppose I kill the would-be Tuvalu-nuking president, even though I know my fellow citizens will react by rioting. During the riots, they kill 10,000 innocent Americans (more than the population of Tuvalu.) It’s at least not obvious that this makes the assassination wrong when it otherwise would have been right. After all, when I kill the president, my fellow citizens are obligated not to riot in response. They should instead apologize for their despicable support of war and praise my heroism.

As I noted in the introduction, many believe it is justifiable to assassinate totalitarian dictators, such as Stalin or Hitler. However, killing a totalitarian dictator or a criminal mastermind seems more likely to endanger innocent third parties than killing a democratic official. Fanni Kaplan tried but failed to assassinate Lenin in 1918. Lenin and his government responded with the Red Terror. Even if Kaplan had killed Lenin, there was a good chance Lenin would have been succeeded by someone worse or at least equally bad. Totalitarian communist regimes do not value individual human life. After a successful assassination, newly installed dictators are likely to terrorize citizens into submission.

Compare this to the United States and other democracies. Four US presidents have been assassinated, and many more have been targets. Thirteen congresspersons have been assassinated, and a few others have been targets. None of these events resulted in humanitarian disasters or terror purges. The US has committed a great many atrocities, but not in response to assassination. Assassinating Lincoln got us Andrew Johnson. The attempt to assassinate Reagan just got us stronger gun control laws. The attempted assassination of Gabriel Giffords resulted in public figures pledging (insincerely, it turned out) to use less aggressive political rhetoric. When the IRA assassinated MP Ian Gow in 1990, the British did not respond by killing innocent Irish citizens. When Swedish Prime Minister Palme was assassinated in 1986, the government convicted a suspect of the murder, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. And so on. Compared to other forms of government, democracies tend to be more concerned with their citizens’ welfare. For this very reason, assassination in democracies will tend to be relatively safe—democracies do not respond by crushing their citizens. Political scientists who study this issue empirically tend to find that democracies handle assassinations well, and the fallout from assassination is minor.[i]

Consider also the history of the civil rights movement in the U.S. Charles Cobb, Jr., and Akinyele Omowale Umoja both argue in their recent books that the success of the civil rights movement depended on civil rights activists using violence in self-defense and defense of others. According to Cobb and Umoja, the later “non-violent” phase of activism worked only because in earlier phases, blacks had armed themselves and shot back in self-defense.[ii] Whites initially responded to black activism by beating, killing, and lynching blacks. Armed blacked militias fought back, sometimes by killing cops or national guardsmen. Once whites learned that blacks would fight back, they turned to less violent forms of oppression, and blacks in turn began using the non-violent tactics with which we are familiar.[iii] Even Martin Luther King, Jr., explicitly endorsed the common law right of self-defense, had applied for concealed carry permits, and had armed guards protecting his house.[iv] Cobb, Jr., further claims that black civil rights leaders were very careful to weigh the possibility of retaliation in determining when and where to use violent self-defense.[v]

[i] For further empirical confirmation of this point, see Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, “The Political Consequences of Assassination,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52 (2008): 385-400; Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken, “Hit or Miss: The Effect of Assassination on Institutions and War,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1:2 (2009): 55-87; William Spragens, “Political Impact of Presidential Assassinations and Attempted Assassination,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 10 (1980): 336-347;

[ii] Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013.

[iii] Cobb 2014, 137-8.

[iv] Cobb 2014, 7-9.

[v] Cobb 2014, 129.