Self-Defense, Pacifism, and The Possibility of Killing Cheyney C. Ryan

Self-Defense, Pacifism,
and the Possibility of Killing*
CheyneyC. Ryan
A decade and a half ago, on my eighteenth birthday, I registered as a
conscientious objector with the Selective Service System. The sources of
my pacifism were more philosophical than religious: it seemed to me
then that no adequatejustification could be given for the taking of human
life and that the arguments commonly offered in defense of killing were
uniformly bad ones. I made my first attempt at conveying these sentiments
to my government by filling out its Special Form for Conscientious Objectors
(form SSS 150)-I say "attempt" here because the form allotted you
something like five column inches to express your convictions. The ensuing
hearing before my draft board promised to give me a more adequate
forum for my views. Hence on a rainy weekday afternoon I confronted
the trio that would decide my fate-three rather wizened old men, one
of whom failed to look up for the full two hours from the stack of forms
he was signing. What followed could be best described as mutual bewil-
derment. I felt like the man whose nose had fallen off and who was now
subjected to the pokes and proddings of incredulous onlookers. In any
event I did not get to present my case for pacifism because the draft
board was not interested in it. They were most concerned with uncovering
the latent hostility I held toward my parents which, they assumed, must
be the true source of my heretical and bizarre beliefs. It was lucky for
me that I was off to college that year, and the board could postpone any
decision until after my student deferment ran out. On leaving school,
some three years later, I received yet another form SSS 150 from my
board. But by then my thoughts on these matters had changed, and so
I threw the form away. Classified I-A, I opted to take my chances with
everybody else.
I have often been reminded of my draft board experience when
reading the attacks that philosophers have made, in recent years, against
the pacifist viewpoint. One senses the same assumption that the pacifist
* For their help in writing this paper, I would like to thank Lisa Greif, Barbara Caulfield,
Dan Farrell, Mike Martin, and especially Tone Ristorcelli. My thinking on some of the
later points in this paper has been influenced, in ways she may not recognize, by Cora
Diamond. Parts of this paper were presented at the December 1978 meeting of the American
Philosophical Association, Reed College, and Northwestern University.
Ethics 93 (April 1983): 508-524
( 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/83/9303-0003$01.00
508
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Ryan Pacifism 509
is some sort of ethical moron, promulgator of an insidious doctrine,
whose views are silly enough to be stated and dismissed in the space of
a shortjournal article. If this account sounds extreme, consider the following
remarks' as samples:
Pacifism and the respect for pacifism is [sic] not the only thing that
has led to a universal forgetfulness of the law against killing the
innocent; but it has had a great share in it. [Anscombe]
Pacifism has corrupted enormous numbers of people who will not
act according to its tenets. [Anscombe]
The people who assess conscientious objection as cowardice or worse
are taking an understandable step: from an intuitive feeling that
the pacifist does not really believe what he is saying they infer that
his actions (or inaction) must be due to cowardice. What I am
suggesting is that this is not correct: The actions are due, not to
cowardice, but to confusion. [Jan Narveson]
To regard the pacifist's belief as "bizzare and vaguely ludicrous" is,
perhaps, to put it mildly. [Tom Regan]
What renders these attitudes irksome is, I suppose, that they totally
fail to convey the powerful attraction that pacifism can have, on both an
intellectual and emotional level. But this is not my only cause for finding
them disturbing. If these attempts fail to refute the pacifist's position-
and insofar as they try, they do fail-then a refutation of pacifism from
some more sympathetic source must be forthcoming. I say "must" here
to express two facts about myself: my current conviction that pacifism is
wrong and my seeming inability to find the arguments within me to show
that it is wrong. It should be no surprise that I find this situation unsettling,
cause for reexamining the thinking that created it. This has led, in turn,
to this article.
Pacifism has been construed by some as the view that all violence
or coercion is wrong. This seems to be too broad, though undoubtedly
some pacifists have held to this position. I shall focus here on the pacifist's
opposition to killing, which stands at the heart of his opposition to war
in any form. This problem must itself be pruned down to size. I shall
approach it in two stages:
In Parts I and II, I shall construe pacifism as a skepticalposition. Its
general claim is that the proponent of killing cannot produce a single
compelling argument for why killing another person is permissible. I
shall sustain this charge as it applies to the justification of self-defense
1. G. E. M. Anscombe, "Warand Murder," in Moral Problems,ed. James Rachels (New

York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 269-83 (quotations appear on pp. 279 and 278); Jan
Narveson, "Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis," in Today'sMoral Problems,ed. Richard Was-
serstrom (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1975), pp. 450-63 (quotation appears on
p. 451); Tom Regan, "A Defense of Pacifism," in Today's Moral Problems, pp. 464-69
(quotation appears p. 465).

510 Ethics April 1983
and shall not touch on the two other types of instances in which killing
seems clearly permissible: taking an Aggressor's life to save an innocent
third party and taking the life of one person to save the lives of a great
many others. Draft boards were traditionally partial to third-party cases:
one was invariably asked, in seeking exemption from military service,
what you would do if your aged grandmother was attacked by muggers
before your eyes. I have two reasons for focusing on self-defense: first,
because the other cases would seem to stand or fall with it (if one thinks
about it for a moment, if your poor old grandmother does not herself
possess the right to defend herself, it is difficult to see why you could
justifiably defend her); second, since the pacifist's primary concern is
war, and war is almost always justified as self-defense, such a focus goes
to the heart of the case. In the final part, I go beyond mere skepticism
to consider the positive motivations behind the pacifist's position. These
motivations, I argue, in fact lead to contradictory conclusions about killing.
The dilemma thereby described need not, however, establish the unten-
ability of the pacifist's position; it may establish instead an inherently
tragic element in the moral situation of us all.
I. SELF-DEFENSE AND THE RIGHT TO KILL

The problem of self-defense, as the pacifist sees it, is this: Aggressor is
threatening to take Victim's life. Victim has the means to stop him, but
it involves taking Aggressor's life -killing him in self-defense. In the eyes
of most, Victim is surely justified in killing Aggressor if that is the only
way that he can save himself. But, the pacifist asks, why is he justified?
If both Victim and Aggressor have a right to live (hence a right not to
be killed), why is it permissible for Victim to kill Aggressor, yet imper-
missible for Aggressor to kill Victim? If Victim kills Aggressor, isn't he
guilty of the same action which Aggressor threatened to commit against
him?
Most people will be unmoved by these questions, for they will feel
that the asymmetry of the situation is obvious. A problem arises only if
we accord equal weight to Aggressor's and Victim's right to live. But
surely Aggressor's actions have caused him to forfeit his right to live, or
have rendered his right less stringent than Victim's-thus making per-
missible Victim's action. This will hardly pacify the pacifist, though, for
he will demand an account of why Aggressor has forfeited his right or
why his actions have rendered his right less stringent. This may seem
like a simple task, but it is not. I shall argue in this part that we cannot
make sense of the self-defense situation by looking either to a forfeit of
rights on Aggressor's part or to the possession of a right to kill on Victim's
part. In fact, the most promising approach to dealing with the pacifist's
problem involves avoiding the question of rights entirely. I shall turn to
this approach in Part II.

Ryan Pacifism 511
Forfeit
Those who hold that Aggressor forfeits his right to live by his actions
must give an account of why his actions have caused such a forfeiture.
Presumably it is the criminal nature of his act which strips Aggressor of
his right-but what is the crime which Aggressor commits? As Judith
Jarvis Thomson has pointed out, Aggressor has only attemptedto take
someone's life, he has not in fact committed murder.2 To punish someone
with loss of life for merely attempting to take the life of another would
be a harsh code indeed. Thus Thomson: "I doubt that those who think
of death as an acceptable penalty (for murder-CR) would think it an
acceptable penalty for an (unsuccessful) attempt on the life of another,
and it will be remembered that an (unsuccessful) attempt is all that
Aggressor is guilty of."3
Aggressor need not even be guilty of that. Consider the case of a
feigned threat: Aggressor tells you that if he sees you with his wife again,
he will blow your brains out. Caught in an indiscretion, you observe him
advancing toward you, gun on shoulder. In fact, his gun is a fake-it is
a realistic toy that belongs to his son-and his intent is only to scare you.
Believing your life in danger, with good reason, you are legally permitted
to kill in self-defense. But Aggressor's "crime" here-which presumably
forfeits his right to live-is certainly a minor one (feigning a threat).
There are further instances of permissible killing where Aggressor need
not be guilty of any crime at all. Suppose I administer a mind-controlling
drug to Janet and order her to kill you. Seeing the threat, you kill Janet
in self-defense. Those who would permit such an action by appealing to
Aggressor's forfeit of her right to live must tell us what inJanet's behavior
warrants such a forfeit. She has intended no evil, and though her actions
threaten your well-being she is not responsible for them. Even more
problematic than this case of innocent threat is what may be called a
mistakenthreat. One may permissibly kill in self-defense if one has good
grounds for believing that it is necessary to save one's life against unlawful
attack; as the case of feigned threat illustrated, it is the reasonableness
of the belief in the threat, and not the reality of the threat itself, which
is important. One could imagine a case, then, where through coincidence
or happenstance "Victim" is given perfectly good grounds for believing
that another's actions constitute a threat to his life, when in fact there is
no threat or even feigned threat on "Aggressor's" part. "Aggressor" may
be no aggressor at all, but the reasonableness of "Victim's"mistake may
render his unnecessary killing of "Aggressor" permissible.
2. Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Self-Defense and Rights," The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Publications, 1976), p. 5. I should like to express my indebtedness
to Thomson's paper, which prompted me after several years to think once again about the
problem of self-defense.
3. Ibid.

Cases of feigned, innocent, and mistaken threats are so troublesome
for the problem of self-defense that one may try to isolate them from
the start. Suppose we partitionedthe right to self-defense, so as to regard
the right to protect against malicious, real threats as a different right
from that we possess in, say, innocent threat situations. Whatever difficulties
we might have in making sense of the latter need not, then, affect the
former. Such a move would be, I think, extremely artificial and ad hoc,
but it might prove useful if one could thereby make a case for forfeit in
instances of malicious threat. But such a case, even if successful, would
still be insufficient, as the following examples show.
Regardless of the kind of threat to Victim, Victim cannot kill in self-
defense if he can avoid the threat by retreating. Suppose that Aggressor,
threatens Victim,, who because he is lame cannot escape over the wall
behind him. Aggressor2, in exactly the same circumstances, threatens
Victim2, who is a champion high jumper and can easily vault the wall.
In the morally relevant respects the two aggressors would seem to be
guilty of the same thing, hence if there is a forfeit of right in the former
case there would seem to be a forfeit in the latter case as well. But only
in the former case can Victim permissibly kill: the forfeit of the right
to life, in other words, need not imply the right to kill on another's part.
Even when it does, it must still be established where that right lies. If a
condemned murderer has forfeited his right to live, it does not follow
that just anyone can kill him. Once the right to kill him is established it
must still be shown who possesses that right, in this case the power to
execute.
Now our initial concern in looking at the forfeit question was to
determine why Victim can permissibly kill in self-defense situations,
while the malicious Aggressor cannot. We have just seen that a forfeit
on Aggressor's part is by itself insufficient to establish Victim's right to
kill, while earlier arguments showed that Victim may permissibly kill
even when there has been no forfeit on Aggressor's part at all. What
this suggests to me is that the whole focus on forfeit is misguided and
that we would be better off concentrating directly on Victim's right to
kill, which (when it is present) exists somewhat independently of Aggressor's
forfeit of right. Such a shift in focus would hold that the asymmetry of
the self-defense situation rests not in the fact that Aggressor has forfeited
a right which Victim maintains but that Victim possesses or has acquired
a right (to kill) while Aggressor lacks such a right. Let us see where this
takes us.
The Right to Kill
Those who would argue that Victim possesses a right to kill Aggressor
must give an account of why Victim possesses such a right. This seems
easy enough. Victim possesses the right to life, and this entitles him to
any actions necessary to preserve that right, in this case killing another.
One might question the connection between the right to live and the

Ryan Pacifism 513
right to kill in defense of that right-need the one necessarily imply the
other? I shall not explore the connection here, but instead I shall assume
it exists and consider how far it gets us in understanding self-defense.
Not very far. The difficulty is this: when Aggressor's actions threaten
Victim's right to life, Victim is entitled to kill in defense of that right.
But once Victim initiates defensive actions against Aggressor, Aggressor's
right to life is threatened, hence he is at that point justified in killing
Victim! This is not in itself a contradiction, for one can imagine cases
in which two people each have the right to kill each other (as in the
episode in Spartacus where two slaves are forced to fight to the death by
their masters). But clearly in the case of malicious threat this is not the
conclusion the proponent of self-defense wishes, and so we must find
some way of avoiding it.
There would seem to be three major avenues available. The first is
to claim that Aggressor is not entitled to kill in defense of his right to
live because he has, through his actions, forfeited his right to live (or
the right to kill in defense of that right). But then we are back where we
started in the previous section, with the task of showing why Aggressor
has forfeited. Perhaps Aggressor has forfeited the right to defend himself
because he has intentionally provoked Victim's threatening actions. This
would explain why the law disallows the plea of self-defense where one
party goads the other into threatening him. But does such provocation
really warrant denying someone the right to live (or the right to kill in
defense of that right)? Suppose that Jones provokes Smith to make an
attempt-an unsuccessful attempt, remember-on Hubert's life. Would
this warrant stripping Jones of his right to defend his life against Smith,
or Hubert, or anyone for that matter? I should think not. But then it is
unclear why Aggressor's "provocation" of Victim should warrant denying
Aggressor the right to defend himself against Victim.4
A second possibility is to modify the enforcement principle above
to distinguish just" from "unjust"infringements of the right: the right to
live entitles you to any action necessary to prevent unjust infringements
of that right. But this merely relabels the problem, it gives us no inkling
of how to solve it. We have assumed all along that the proponent of self-
defense views Aggressor's actions as "unjust" and Victim's actions "just."
The pacifist's challenge has been to explain this distinction; appealing to
a right not to be "unjustly killed" would appear to be a dead end if there
ever was one. A third possibility is to modify the enforcement principle
through some sort of "factual specification" (the phrase is Thomson's):
the right to live entitles you to any actions necessary to preserve that
right, where the threat to that right is not due to any actions you have
taken toward another . . . , etc. While spelling out the "factualspecifications"
4. I assume here, lest it be charged that Aggressor's motive has nothing to do with
self-defense (hence he cannot employ that excuse), that Aggressor's reasons for killing
include the wish to protect himself.

may tell us when we may kill in defense of our right, it still tells us
nothing about why we may kill under those circumstances. What the
pacifist wants to know, in other words, is why those circumstances make
all the difference between just and unjust killing. Remember, after all,
how broad these factual specifications will be. Aggressor need not intend
evil by his act, he need not even be aware of what he is doing, all he
need do is by his actions initiate the threat. Doesn't this put a tremendous
(perhaps arbitrary) emphasis on who starts it?
Nothing said here shows conclusively that a coherent case for the
right to kill cannot be spelled out, but perhaps enough has been said to
suggest the deceptive difficulty in doing this. In recent years, prompted
largely by an article of Jan Narveson's, there has been a good deal of
clucking about the "inconsistency" and "incoherence" of the pacifist po-
sition.5 Not one of the critics of pacifism has attempted to spell out the
right to kill in a way that would meet the objections just noted; nevertheless
their objections deserve some attention. Narveson's argument, in a nutshell,
is that, if the pacifist grants people the right not to be subjected to
violence, or the right not to be killed in my reading, then by logic he
must accord them the right to engage in any actions (hence, those involving
killing) to protect that right. This argument fails for a number of reasons,6
but the most interesting one involves the protective status of right. Pos-
session of a right generally entitles one to take some actions in defense
of that right, but clearly there are limits to the actions one may take. To
get back the washcloth which you have stolen from me, I cannot bludgeon
you to death; even if this were the only way I had of securing my right
to the washcloth, I could not do it. What the pacifist and the nonpacifist
disagree about, then, are the limits to which one may go in defending
one's right to life, or any other right. The "logic of rights" alone will
not settle this disagreement, and such logic certainly does not render the
pacifist's restrictions incoherent. That position might be incoherent, in
Narveson's sense, if the pacifist allowed no actions in defense of the right
to life, but this is not his position. The pacifist's position does seem to
violate a fairly intuitive principle of proportionality, that in defense of
one's rights one may take actions whose severity is equal to, though not
greater than, the threat against one. This rules out the bludgeoning case
but allows killing so as not to be killed. The pacifist can respond, though,
that this principle becomes rather suspect as we move to more extreme
actions. It is not obviouslypermissible to torture another so as not to be
tortured or to rain nuclear holocaust on another country to prevent such
5. See Narveson.
6. Narveson claims that the right to X entitles you to whatever is necessary to protect
that right. It would follow that there can be no real problem about civil disobedience, since
logic alone tells us that if the state infringes on our rights we can take whatever measures
are required to protect them, including defying the state. But surely the problem is more
complicated than this. Hence it is reasonable to reject the claim about the "logic"of rights
which leads to such a facile conclusion.

Ryan Pacifism 515
a fate for oneself. Thus when the pacifist rejects the proportionality
principle in cases of killing, insisting that such cases are themselves most
extreme, the principle he thereby rejects hardly has the status of a self-
evident truth.
I have touched on this issue not merely to point out the shallowness
of some recent arguments against pacifism but because I believe that any
argument pro or con which hinges on the issue of rights is likely to get
us nowhere. I shall now describe an argument which shows that the
asymmetry of the self-defense situation lies neither in Aggressor's forfeit
of a right which Victim maintains, nor in Victim's possessing a right
which Aggressor lacks, nor in the area of rights at all.
II. THE RESPONSIBILITY ARGUMENT
Up to now we have assumed that Aggressor and Victim are responsible
for the same sort of action (the taking of a human life) and that they
differ only in their rights to that action. I should now like to try a new
approach and argue that the asymmetry of the self-defense situation lies
in the realm of responsibility.
Consider this case, suggested by an episode in John Fowles's novel,
The Magus. Soldiers of the occupying German army have apprehended
four or five members of the resistance in a small Grecian town. They
have told the town's mayor that he is to decide which of these persons
must die, and he must carry out the execution himself. There is no way
that he can avoid the decision, since they have promised him that if he
fails to carry out the action they will execute all the resistance fighters
and thirty or forty citizens besides. And so he shoots one of the captives.
What responsibility does the mayor bear for his actions? He must certainly
answer for the decision to shoot the person he did-perhaps there are
compelling political reasons for sparing some members of the captive
group over others. But while he pulled the trigger, the mayor is certainly
not to blame for the fact that a resistance fighter was killed, for the
Germans, not the mayor, are the ones truly responsible. (We might say:
it was not his decision to kill that person, though it was his decision to
kill that person.) An appeal to the circumstances in this case would not
show that the mayor was "justified" in his act of killing, it would rather
show that it was not his act of killing.7
This case helps us put the self-defense situation in perspective, since
Victim's position seems to be analogous to the mayor's. When Aggressor
threatens Victim, his actions have created a situation in which someone's
life will be lost (he hopes Victim's). Victim is not responsible for this
situation, it is merely presented to him. But given it, Victim can determine
whose life is lost, and in choosing to defend himself Victim determines
7. Joel Feinberg, I have recently discovered, formulates a point about responsibility

in much the same way in his essay "Abortion," in Matters of Life and Death, ed. Tom Regan
(New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 183-215. Cf. particularly p. 208.

that it will be Aggressor's life. In this sense the true responsibility for
the taking of life rests not with Victim, for Aggressor's actions have made
this inevitable. In pointing this out, the appeal to self-defense shows that
the real blame for Aggressor's losing his life rests with Aggressor himself.
We must still explain why Victim is justified in choosing to save his
own life over Aggressor's, but first let me consider some respects in which
this approach to self-defense is illuminating.
It reveals, I think, the true asymmetry of the self-defense situation.
Victim decides which life is lost, and while he may decide incorrectly,
his crime in so doing is infinitely less than the malicious Aggressor's.
Interestingly enough, it is a mistake on this view to speak of a right to
self-defense, for if the appeal to self-defense serves to absolve one of the
responsibility for taking human life, as I have suggested, it cannot at the
same time give one the right to take another's life (except, perhaps, in
the weaker Hohfeldian sense of liberty). This approach also reconfirms
earlier intuitions about the relevance, or rather irrelevance, of Aggressor's
right to life. Think of it this way: when the mayor is asked to account
for the killing of the resistance fighter he chose to kill, must he show
that that person forfeited his right to life? Perhaps his choice would be
easier if this could be shown, but the propriety of his action does not
rest on it. In this same sense the propriety of Victim's actions need not
presume any forfeit on Aggressor's part.
So much for the right to live. What remains to be considered is what
guides the choice that Victim makes, why he may decide that it is Ag-
gressor's life and not his own which should be sacrificed.
The Causer Pays

A basic principle of the law of torts is that, where a loss has been incurred,
between two innocents the causer pays. Thus where Jones has mistakenly
damaged Smith's property, Jones must reimburse Smith and absorb the
loss himself because his actions have caused it, even though there is no
criminal fault or negligence on his part. Now applying this principle to
the case of self-defense would seem to justify Victim's sacrificing Aggressor's
life rather than his own, since Aggressor's actions are ultimately responsible
for causing a loss of life. Note that the principle at work here does not
presume any prior forfeit of rights and is broad enough tojustify Victim's
defensive actions whether or not the threat against him is innocent or
malicious.8
That Victim's actions are supported by a basic principle of our civil
law, one which has its intuitive attractions, seems a strong count in their
favor. But obviously the "causer-pays" principle cannot be taken at face
8. It is a commonplace in the law of torts that someone be held accountable, and have
to pay damages, for actions or events that have resulted through no fault of their own.
Such cases are further examples of someone's being deprived of rights (the property rights
they must give up, as damages) even though they have done nothing to merit forfeiture.

Ryan Pacifism 517
value, and any full account of this justification would have to consider
the objections to which that principle is susceptible. Those objections
cannot be rehearsed here, but one point is worth noting. The value of
the causer-pays principle, for justifying self-defense at least, is that it
suspends questions of fault. The problem is that, having set aside such
matters, it is difficult to imagine what positive grounds could be given for
this principle. An obvious consideration might be utility. But in the case
of property damage, a famous theorem of Ronald Coase suggests that
social welfare is not affected by the acceptance or rejection of the causer-
pays principle.9 And certainly in the case of self-defense involving an
innocent aggressor, it is not obvious at all that social welfare is enhanced
by having Aggressor rather than Victim lose his life.
So far I have considered, in the causer-pays principle, the grounds
which Victim might offer for choosing to sacrifice Aggressor. But even
if the pacifist can undermine any such grounds the self-defender offers
for sacrificing Aggressor, it does not follow that the pacifist has successfully
undermined the justification for self-defense in toto. All that the proponent
of self-defense need show is that Victim is under no obligation to sacrifice
himself. The causer-pays principle holds that it is Aggressor who deserves
to die, but if this principle proves groundless it does not follow that it is
Victimwho deserves to die. All that follows is that the choice is arbitrary,
which is to say that Victim can sacrifice Aggressor if he so pleases. In
this respect the responsibility argument has shifted the burden of proof
onto the pacifist, to show that there is a positive presumption for Victim
to sacrifice himself and not Aggressor. Let us see what the pacifist has
to offer.
Innocent Victims
Consider this case. The Corleone family wishes to dispose of Mayor Koch,
who, they feel, is threatening their interests through his bungling of the
city financial system. It is very difficult to assassinate a mayor, however,
because the people who guard him are very familiar with the members
of the Corleone family, the "soldiers," who would carry out such a job.
And so they devise to kidnap someone-you-and threaten you with
death if you do not carry out the execution of the mayor. Let us assume
that they are not kidding, that you know they have already murdered
three or four other people who have refused to submit to their threats.
Would you be justified in carrying out the killing to save your own life?
This is a difficult situation, and I suspect that our intuitions here
are unclear. Let us look at what the law would say about it, for the law
seems to capture both our instincts and our uncertainties on this matter.
The law states that you would not be blameless in saving your own
life by killing the mayor. One could view this situation as either one of
9. Ronald H. Coase, "The Problem of Social Cost," Journal of Law and Economics 3
(1960): 1-44.

"duress" or what lawyers call "choice of evils." Now many states do not
regard an appeal to duress as ever admissible where the crime committed
is that of homicide. The Model Penal Code is somewhat more lenient
on this matter, but while it allows for the duress appeal where (say) one's
whole family is threatened, it does not recognize such a defense where
one's life alone is at stake. A choice of evils is just that: it allows one to
defend one's (putatively) criminal actions by showing how they led to
the prevention of a greater evil. This defense would also be available
where one killed to defend one's family, but it would not be available
where one killed to defend one's own life, for there the evil prevented
is not greater than the evil carried out. To say that these trying circumstances
do not absolve you of guilt (if you choose to kill Mayor Koch) is not to
say that they are irrelevant to evaluating your action. They would un-
doubtedly make the difference between your being convicted of first-
degree murder and some lesser charge, such as manslaughter. Neverthe-
less the law would hold you guilty of a crime for succumbing to this
threat. '"
There are limits to what you may do to save your own life. If you
are dying of heart disease, you cannot kidnap another person, drug them,
and remove those vital organs necessary to keep you alive. Nor can you
kill a third party if that is the only way you can prevent yourself from
being killed. Now the pacifist will ask, at this point, why the limits apply
in these cases and not in cases of self-defense. In choosing which life to
save in the Corleone case, there is a definite presumptionagainst taking
another's life to save one's own. Why does this presumption disappear
in instances of self-defense?
I think the answer is not as simple as it would seem. Consider what
features could distinguish these cases and render Victim's killing of Ag-
gressor permissible. To begin with, it cannot be merely Aggressor's evil
intentions. You would be no more justified in killing Mayor Koch if he
happened to be a long-time enemy of yours and wished mightily that
you were dead. The answer must lie in the realm of responsibility, but
this notion must itself be pinned down. Is Victim justified in killing
Aggressor simply because his actions have played some causal role in
bringing about the threat to Victim's life (and killing him is now the only
way of saving his own life). Imagine this case. You are a famous physician
who, with your assistant Smith, has been studying a rare form of disease-
carrying mosquito on- a remote Pacific island. One night while you are
asleep, Smith mistakenly opens a jar containing these mosquitoes, and
one of them stings you. It turns out that the only antidote to the disease
you contract is some fluid which is extracted from the human liver, and
10. See the Model Penal Code, sec. 3.02 and comments. The situation as here described
resembles the typical "life boat" case. See, e.g., The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens, L.R.
14 Q.B. (1884). On the appeal to duress to excuse murder, see the cases cited in James
Vorenburg, ed., Criminal Law and Procedure (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1975),
pp. 355-60.

Ryan Pacifism 519
the only way you can get this in time is to kill Smith and take it from
him. Despite what we may call Smith's inadvertentresponsibilityfor your
situation, you would be wrong in killing him. In explaining why Victim
is justified in killing Aggressor, then, this sort of responsibility will not
do the job. And note, by the way, that this is a clear counterexample to
the causer-pays principle, as applied to life and death.
Are Victim's actions justified by Aggressor's maliciousresponsibility-
the fact that Victim's situation is the direct consequence of Aggressor's
plan to do evil? This seems to make all the difference between killing
Aggressor and killing some third party, but we might ask why such re-
sponsibility should make all the difference. Is it because Aggressor deserves
to be killed while the third party does not, or because Aggressor has
forfeited a right not to be used, while the third party maintains that
right? It cannot be this simple. Suppose that the party the Corleone
family wishes you to kill is himself guilty, several years ago, of an un-
successful attempt on another's life (remember that all Aggressor is guilty
of is an unsuccessful attempt). Would you be justified in eliminating that
third party? I should think not, and certainly the law would not accord
much weight to this fact. If you are the Victim, the justification for your
killing Aggressor to save yourself must rest on the fact that Aggressor's
actions are directed toward you-you have some special entitlement to
kill Aggressor which you lack when saving your life means killing some
third party. It is as if Aggressor's actions have created some negative
bond between you and him. But what sort of bond could that be? A
complicated one, at the very least, since it seems to exist even when
Aggressor's actions are not motivated out of any malice toward you as a
person. Aggressor could, for example, be totally mistaken about who
you are, his threatening actions could be based on the belief that you
are Bruno Tattaglia. In this sense, the special bond that exists between
you and him need not arise from a real desire to harm you, but from his
actions alone. But if actions alone give you the authority to kill in this
sort of case, why don't they give you the authority to kill in such cases
of inadvertent responsibility mentioned above?
I shall return to the problem of this "negative bond" shortly, for I
believe it provides one source of insight into the pacifist's differences
with everyone else. If the argument I have just sketched is a sound one,
it serves to save the pacifist from the position in which he formerly found
himself, of having to provide the burden of proof in the argument. The
pacifist has not defeated his opponent, though, but merely shifted the
focus of attention onto the personal relationship that exists between
Aggressor and Defender. This shift of focus is significant, for it seems
to me to set at the center of disagreement between the pacifist and the
nonpacifist a problem which cannot be captured with the more 'juridical"
notions that most naturally arise in this context, those of right, obligation,
responsibility, and the like. In a moment I shall have more to say about
this as well, but first let me comment on the importance of the purely
skeptical claims I have considered so far.

Suppose that the pacifist's skeptical challenge cannot be met, that
any justification for killing (in self-defense and elsewhere) can be un-
dermined. A decade ago, I took this to mean that pacifism must be right,
but obviously this does not follow. Since the pacifist has not presented
any positive grounds for his injunction against killing, his skeptical ar-
guments at most establish that we do not know if killing is justified or
not. Now a critic of the pacifist's skeptical stance might respond by likening
his view to philosophical doubts about the justification of induction.
Probably everyone has felt at times that disputes over induction are rather
empty and pointless, since whateverphilosophers say, no one is going to
forsake inductive reasoning or seriously doubt its value. In the same
pragmatic spirit, a critic could question the point of the pacifist's persistent
nagging at our reasons for killing. If the pacifist's skepticism in fact leaves
our practices and convictions untouched (as it seems it would), then isn't
it just an empty philosophical exercise, which carries no weight in real
life? Now whether one views this sort of pragmatism as hard-nosed or
hardheaded will depend, I suspect, on one's sense of the practical. It is
enough to point out in defense of the pacifist's skeptical assertions that
the defense or denial ofjustification may serve ends other than providing
directional devices for what we should do, or even what we should believe.
When Kierkegaard rejected historical justifications of religious faith, his
goal was not to shake religious conviction but to question its meaning;
his intent was not to change the practice of religion so much as to change
the understanding of that practice, to give new significance to actions
that under the old had become mechanical. In this latter respect the
pacifist's skepticism is also directed against actions become mechanical.
By gnawing at our confidence in our convictions, his doubts are designed
to rid us of the ease with which we regard the taking of human life (an
ease evidenced, among other things, by the flat tone philosophical discussion
assumes on such matters-I might include my own discussion here).
III. THE MORALITY OF PACIFISM

As a purely skeptical position, then, pacifism can be spared the charge
of moral windsucking. But at a certain point a full account of the pacifist's
position must go beyond its purely skeptical claims to consider the more
positive motivations which lie behind it. In this part I shall try to characterize
the pacifist impulse (perhaps I should say: the impulse of some pacifists,
or my pacifist impulses). This characterization will ultimately return to
the point at which the preceding arguments left us, what I have char-
acterized (albeit loosely) as the "personal relationship" between Aggressor
and Victim, or more generally the killer and the killed. I shall begin by
drawing on an incident which George Orwell reports in an essay on the
Spanish Civil War.
Orwell tells how early one morning he ventured out with another
man to snipe at the fascists from the trenches outside their encampment.

Ryan Pacifism 521
After having little success for several hours, they were suddenly alerted
to the sound of Republican airplanes overhead. Orwell writes,
At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer,
jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in
full view. He was half-dressed and holding up his trousers with both
hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I
am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred
yards. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the
trousers. I had come here to shoot "Fascists";but a man who is
holding up his trousers isn't a "Fascist,"he is visibly a fellow creature,
similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting him."
Orwell was not a pacifist, but the problem he finds in this particular act
of killing is akin to the problem which the pacifist finds in all acts of
killing. That problem, the example suggests, takes the following form.
The problem with shooting the half-clothed man does not arise from
the rights involved, nor is it dispensed with by showing that, yes indeed,
you are justified (by your rights) in killing him. But this does not mean,
as some have suggested to me, that the problem is therefore not a moral
problem at all ("sheer sentimentality" was an objection raised by one
philosopher ex-marine). Surely if Orwell had gleefully blasted away here,
if he had not at least felt the tug of the other's "fellow-creaturehood,"
then this would have reflected badly, if not on his action, then on him,
as a human being. The problem, in the Orwell case, is that the man's
dishabille made inescapable the fact that he was a "fellow creature," and
in so doing it stripped away the labels and denied the distance so necessary
to murderous actions (it is not for nothing that armies give us stereotypes
in thinking about the enemy). The problem, I am tempted to say, involves
not so much the justification as the possibilityof killing in such circumstances
("How could you bring yourself to do it?" is a natural response to one
who felt no problem in such situations). And therein lies the clue to the
pacifist impulse.
The pacifist's problem is that he cannot create, or does not wish to
create, the necessary distance between himself and another to make the
act of killing possible. Moreover, the fact that others obviously can create
that distance is taken by the pacifist to reflect badly on them; they move
about in the world insensitive to the half-clothed status which all humans,
qua fellow creatures, share. This latter point is important to showing
that the pacifist's position is indeed a moral position, and not just a
personal idiosyncrasy. What should now be evident is the sense in which
that moral position is motivated by a picture of the personal relationship
and outlook one should maintain toward others, regardless of the actions
they might take toward you. It is fitting in this regard that the debate
11. George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,"in A Collectionof Essays
by George Orwell (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1954), p. 199.

over self-defense should come down to the personal relationship, the
"negative bond" between Aggressor and Defender. For even if this negative
bond renders killing in self-defense permissible, the pacifist will insist
that the deeper bonds of fellow creaturehood should render it impossible.'2
That such an outlook will be branded by others as sheer sentimentality
comes to the pacifist as no surprise.
I am aware that this characterization of the pacifist's outlook may
strike many as obscure, but the difficulties in characterizing that outlook
themselves reflect, I think, how truly fundamental the disagreement
between the pacifist and the nonpacifist really is. That disagreement far
transcends the familiar problems of justice and equity; it is no surprise
that the familiar terms should fail us. As to the accuracy of this char-
acterization, I would offer as indirect support the following example of
the aesthetic of fascism, which I take to be at polar ends from that of
pacifism, and so illustrative in contrast of the pacifist outlook: "War is
beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated ma-
chinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers,
and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of met-
alization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches the
flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns."'3 What the
fascist rejoices in the pacifist rejects, in toto-the "metalization of the
human body," the insensitivity to fellow creaturehood which the pacifist
sees as the presupposition of killing.'4
This account of the pacifist's position suggests some obvious avenues
of criticism of the more traditional sort. One could naturally ask whether
killing necessarily presupposes objectification and distance, as the pacifist
feels it does. It seems to me though that the differences between the
pacifist and the nonpacifist are substantial enough that neither side is
likely to produce a simple "refutation" along such lines which the other
conceivably could, or logically need, accept. If any criticism of pacifism
is to be forthcoming which can make any real claim to the pacifist's
attention, it will be one which questions the consistency of his conclusions
12. Stuart Hampshire discusses the notion of "moral impossibility" most perceptively
in his essay, "Morality and Pessimism," in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 1-23. He employs the notion, which
differs in his hands somewhat from mine, to point out inadequacies in the utilitarian
approach to rights. I would employ it to criticize the language of rights as well, as inadequate
for capturing certain features of our moral experience.
13. The quote is from Marinetti, a founder of Futurism, cited in Walter Benjamin's
essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), p. 241.
14. This "insensitivity to fellow creaturehood" need not be a presupposition of mercy
killing. Consider, e.g., the killing of the character played by Jane Fonda at the end of "They
Shoot Horses, Don't They?" But the pacifist can grant this without rendering his position
any less controversial.

Ryan Pacifism 523
with what I have described as his motivating impulse. Let me suggest
how such a criticism might go.
If the pacifist's intent is to acknowledge through his attitudes and
actions the other person's status as a fellow creature, the problem is that
violence, and even killing, are at times a means of acknowledging this
as well, a way of bridging the distance between oneself and another
person, a way of acknowledging one's own status as a person. This is one
of the underlying themes of Hegel's account of conflict in the master-
slave dialectic, and the important truth it contains should not be lost in
its seeming glorification of conflict. That the refusal to allow others to
treat one as an object is an important step to defining one's own integrity
is a point well understood by revolutionary theorists such as Fannon. It
is a point apparently lost to pacifists like Gandhi, who suggested that the
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto would have made the superior moral statement
by committing collective suicide, since their resistance proved futile anyway.
What strikes us as positively bizarre in the pacifist's suggestion, for example,
that we not defend our loved ones when attacked is not the fact that
someone's rights might be abused by our refusal to so act. Our real
concern is what the refusal to intervene would express about our rela-
tionships and ourselves, for one of the ways we acknowledge the importance
of a relationship is through our willingness to take such actions, and that
is why the problem in such cases is how we can bring ourselves not to
intervene (how is passivity possible).
The willingness to commit violence is linked to our love and estimation
for others, just as the capacity forjealousy is an integral part of affection.
The pacifist may respond that this is just a sociological or psychological
fact about how our community links violence and care, a questionable
connection that expresses thousands of years of macho culture. But this
connection is no more questionable than that which views acts of violence
against an aggressor as expressing hatred, or indifference, or objectification.
If the pacifist's problem is that he cannot consistently live out his initial
impulse-the posture he wishes to assume toward others requires that
he commit violence and that he not commit violence-does this reflect
badly on his position? Well, if you find his goals attractive it may well
reflect badly on the position-orfix-we are all in. Unraveling the pacifist's
logic may lead us to see that our world of violence and killing is one in
which regarding some as people requires we regard others as things and
that this is not a fact that can be excused or absolved through the techniques
of moral philosophy. If the pacifist's error arises from the desire to
smooth this all over by hewing to one side of the dilemma, he is no worse
than his opponent, whose "refutation" of pacifism serves to dismiss those
very intractable problems of violence of which pacifism is the anxious
expression. As long as this tragic element in violence persists pacifism
will remain with us as a response; we should not applaud its demise, for
it may well mark that the dilemmas of violence have simply been forgotten.

Impatience will now ask: so do we kill or don't we? It should be clear
that I do not have the sort of answer to this question that a philosopher,
at least, might expect (or that I once expected). One can attend to the
problems involved in either choice, but the greatest problem is that the
choice does not flow naturally from a desire to acknowledge in others
and in ourselves their importance and weaknesses and worth. Or to put
it another way: if I were sent another form SSS 150. by my draft board,
I would once again tear it up. But I couldn't tell you why.


Self-Defense, Pacifism, and The Possibility of Killing Cheyney C. Ryan

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Self-Defense, Pacifism,

and the Possibility of Killing*

1. G. E. M. Anscombe, "Warand Murder," in Moral Problems,ed. James Rachels (New

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I. SELF-DEFENSE AND THE RIGHT TO KILL

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7. Joel Feinberg, I have recently discovered, formulates a point about responsibility

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The Causer Pays

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III. THE MORALITY OF PACIFISM

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