I agree, a car isn’t as valuable as a human life. I don’t see how that matters a great deal in this particular case though.
How are you supposed to decide whether attackers want to kill you or not? Two years ago, I was chased down by 5 teenagers, whom I am pretty sure did not want to make friends. This 54-year old guy outran 3 of them, but the other 2 kicked and beat the shit out of me until some strangers came along and saved me. I was actually afraid for my life.
So how are you to know when it is “OK” to use the gun or not?
Wait until you are in that situation, and your opinion may change.
No, and no. On the other hand, if you used non-deadly force and ended up killing the guy in a manner not reasonably foreseeable (say, you push him away, he trips over a curb, and splits his skull open) I don’t have a problem with that.
I’m not generally of the opinion that force may only be used in exact proportion in self-defense (or the defense of others), but I do think it should be reasonable. If the punching guy appears capable and likely to cause severe injury, then the pistol could be justifiable.
That would be part of what I said varies between jurisdictions.
That’s the reasonable part of it. You have to be able to convince a jury that you had a reasonable fear that you were in danger of being killed or seriously injured and that you were unable to escape otherwise. Saying a guy was significantly bigger than you, or you were outnumbered, or he was acting all crazy can all be reasonable grounds to make the point that you felt you were in serious danger.
But if you try to tell a jury, “We were arguing about football in a bar and he punched me. But I thought he might have a knive and he could pull it out and stab me. So I pulled out my gun and shot him.” don’t be surprised if you don’t convince them your thoughts were reasonable.
I’ve probably been in more serious fights than anyone else in this thread.
As the punchline goes, I had a car like that once.
I’m pretty sure that use of deadly force in self defense is morally justifiable.
I can’t shoot you for flicking my ear but if you are about to shoot me, I have no moral duty to die rather than kill you.
I’m assuming MrDibble is talking about his personal beliefs rather than the general rule.
Even there, I’d have some issue with his principle. I can accept (although not agree with) somebody who’s willing to die rather than take the life of the person who’s trying to kill him. But I can’t see how anyone can justify letting somebody else die rather than taking the life of the person trying to kill that other person. You can turn your own cheek but you can’t offer up somebody else’s.
My understanding is that in the U.S., most states as long as you can demonstrate you were acting to protect life and limb, or that you reasonably felt you were acting so, you can use deadly force to defend yourself.
Some states have statutes that make things more explicit and take it further. Castle doctrine, make my day laws and et cetera.
I think the “general” concept of “protecting life and limb” is basically a good moral qualification.
You can definitely use deadly force in response to someone “just hitting you”, because it is all context. If I’ve gotten into a verbal argument with someone in a bar, and we enter “mutual combat” or I “incite him to violence” I’ve entered into a situation of my own making. Generally it would be very hard to legally win a case of self defense when you had a part in starting the fight.
If I’m walking down the street and someone randomly and with no provocation attacks me and starts beating on me, legally you could probably successfully argue you needed to use self defense because it’s not totally unreasonable to suggest that a totally random attacker is a very rare situation and persons who perpetuate such things are often out to do serious harm.
A good place to start is with a military use of force matrix, in this case the Air Force. All are substantially the same, and all jibe pretty well with police procedures.
The bottom line is that deadly force is only justified when you are faced with an action that, in your judgment, will result in imminent bodily harm or death. The applicable principle is reasonableness.
This concept not only applies to the situation if it happens to you but also if you are defending someone else. You can’t blow a guy out of his shoes for waving a Kit-Kat at your wife, but if you don’t know it’s a Kit-Kat and he pulls it out suddenly, if you believe it’s a gun you can shoot with the provision that you will be judged based upon your actions and beliefs at the time. You better be ready to back that up or you’re going away for a long, long time otherwise.
Yep - but the OP was phrased as a personal question.
Of course you can. What you mean to say is *you * (and the hypothetical victim, I guess) don’t like me doing it. That’s fine, it doesn’t impact my stance at all. I accept no moral blame for the actions of someone else. It would be different (to me,) morally, if I didn’t act out of fear or something else.
Not that I buy into that “turn the other cheek” crap. If someone wrongs me, damn sure I’m going to try and do something about it - financial, social, cultural. Just not violently.
not to me.
You’re hinting at a false dichotomy. There are many, many actions I could take, that fall on a continuum between “passively waiting for a bullet” and “kill a bitch”, and I wouldn’t hesitate to try many of them. But yeah, in the end, I consider it more right to be killed than to kill (in the case of human-on-human violence only - or sophont-on-sophont, I guess).
I have little to no sympathy for anyone who initiates an unprovoked attack/rape/mugging/etc. so I would justify use of all force necessary in that moment to prevent the perpetrator from committing their crime.
Theoretically, I believe deadly force is absolutely justified if it’s the only option to prevent murder/rape of you or someone else. Whether I would actually use it, I don’t know. I’d be really freaked out in such a situation and my decisions and judgements would be hard to predict beforehand.
As for mugging:
If someone tried to mug me, I imagine that I would use a lot of force to prevent them if necessary (like, if I had to punch them in the face repeatedly, so be it). To have my wallet stolen would have such a devastating affect on my life (and has happened before) that there is no way that I’m just going to “let it go” in fear of hurting the perpetrator. Ultimately, they made the choice to assault me, so I wouldn’t feel bad abut beating the crap out of them.
Then again, in reality I wouldn’t be able to pull anything like that off as I’m a rather weak female of barely 100 lbs.
So you’re saying that if you came across a deathfight between a gorilla and a killer whale you would just stand by and watch it happen?
And not videotape it for YouTube?
Yes I was asking for your personal opinion. But what’s so wrong about cracking in the skull of someone who tries to take your life? Especially consider this-if you don’t kill him what if he or she kills again? Basically you’re saying we should have played dead for Hitler and not resisted violently to his wars of conquest and genocide.
Because I am not a violent man. I believe violence only begets more violence - the only way to improve the world is to say No.
Because killing’s the only way to end killing? Not even you believe that.
“playing dead” =/= “not resist violently”.
No killing is not the only way to end killing. But killing must often be the immediate response whatever later response may be. Ghandi and Rev. King, for example, with all due respect, only succeedeed in their pacifist campaigns because there was strong support internationally and the governments they sought to change respected the rule of law and the sanctity of life. If such positions had been used to resist Hitler, he’d just have laughed and hauled the proponents off to the concentration camps. Only massive Allied and Soviet military power crushed the Nazis in the end.
One important thing about nonviolent resistance is that its effectiveness depends largely on how many people are participating in it, as well as on the humaneness of their opponents.
British leaders in colonial India and segregationists in the US did not always respect the sanctity of life, as events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre make abundantly clear. But when they were repeatedly faced with large groups of the population nonviolently resisting them, they were overall too humane, and too afraid of the consequences, to commit violence on the scale that would have been required to eradicate the resistance.
Nazi reactions to nonviolent resistance would certainly have been much less humane. But that doesn’t prove that a concerted large-scale nonviolent resistance movement couldn’t have prevailed even against Nazis, eventually. I think it almost certainly would have ended up costing more lives, but that’s not the same thing as being fundamentally incapable of succeeding at all.
That’s a matter of personal opinion. People committed to nonviolence hold that killing must never be the immediate response, and they’re entitled to that opinion.
Of course, killing and nonviolence will have different consequences in the short term. I think it’s fair to say that killing will generally minimize the violence inflicted by the initial attack.
Someone starts to attack you, you kill him, he’s not inflicting any more violence on you: that’s guaranteed. Whereas if someone starts to attack you and you resist him nonviolently, he may well go on being violent, even fatally so.
But none of that means that killing rather than nonviolent resistance must be used as a response even to a deadly attack. If the person being attacked chooses nonviolence, that’s their right.
Except when if the violent person goes on to kill more people the dead person is not just responsible for his or her own death but those other people’s.
That’s a matter of personal opinion too. Personally, although I’m by no means a total pacifist, I completely repudiate the idea that responding nonviolently to an attack somehow makes the responder responsible for any subsequent violence the attacker manages to commit.
I think that if some brutal fucker goes around attacking people, the responsibility for the consequences of that is totally on them. Nobody gets to put any of the attacker’s responsibility for wrongdoing onto anybody else.
We have a moral obligation to resist violence, but we don’t have a moral obligation to resist violently if we consider it wrong. Not even if violent resistance would be more effective in stopping the attack.
If acts of violence are not stood up to then they will continue.
While I understand the desire not to harm another person there is a point of departure when that makes no sense. Pacifism harms society as a whole when evil is not countered.
I would prefer to go through life without ever bringing harm on another person but I would do whatever is necessary to protect my family.
I don’t know of any pacifists who think that they don’t have a moral duty to counter evil and stand up against violence. They just believe that they must not resist violence with violence in return.
That may be more likely to get the pacifists themselves hurt or killed, but it doesn’t make them responsible for the actions of the person(s) doing the hurting and killing.
Again, while I respect (and to a significant extent share) non-pacifist beliefs, I don’t have any respect for a rationale that attempts to blame pacifists or their beliefs for the evil violent deeds of others.
No, it’s not pacifism that harms society as a whole. It’s evil and violent attacks on the innocent that harm society as a whole. If pacifists choose to counter that by renouncing violence altogether in their resistance, that doesn’t make them complicit in the evil of their attackers. Anyway, I don’t think you need have any fear that massive numbers of people are going to follow their example.