Just Kill The Bad Guy
Heroism on the Cheap
Recently, I watched a movie in which the heroes faced a malevolent, supernaturally powerful being who appeared to be able to kill anyone without touching them (via some magical power). He controlled a vast organization capable of killing millions, and he showed no sign of ever changing heart. Having survived attacks which would have killed a human being, he was finally cornered and in a weakened state. And the good guys refused to kill him, under the theory that he was now unarmed and it wouldn’t be right to kill him.
It appeared to me that he was never unarmed, because he was in control of some sort of power which didn’t require him to hold a weapon to kill someone, in which case there was no reason for them not to kill him. But even if he had been unarmed, the right thing to do would have been to kill the all-powerful genocidal maniac, rather than letting him live to wage another war another day.
Quite a number of movies and books involve heroes who refuse to kill in cold blood. Sometimes, this is quite admirable. But there are other scenarios, and this is one of them, where this principle rings hollow.
Screenwriters use good guys’ refusal to kill unarmed bad guys as an illustration of the classic “principle vs. circumstance” debate.1 But this isn’t actually a good illustration of that. The choice isn’t between consequentialism and principle, but between two competing principles. I reject consequentialism and believe morality consists in adhering to principles which transcend circumstance, no matter the cost, but that doesn’t make me sympathetic to the poorly-articulated and poorly-understood principle behind the decision of the aforementioned heroes not to kill the all-powerful, genocidal maniac.
In part, that is because I don’t believe that executing a bad guy in order to save innocent lives in the future is a violation of natural law.2 In fact, if letting a bad guy go free just because he lacks a weapon results in him slaughtering more innocent people, it strikes me that letting him live was the wrong thing to do. What moral principle allows for the sacrificing of innocent lives in order to save the life of an evil man?3 What moral principle requires the good guys to knowingly letting the bad guys kill more innocents merely because the good guys need to fight with the gloves on?
Adhering to principle despite the consequences is admirable, but Hollywood often offers only a simplistic version of this.4 The heroes of these films seem to be totally ignorant of just war theory, or the international laws of war. For instance, under the latter, if a hospital is used as a military base, it becomes a legitimate target and the deaths of everyone in the hospital are on the hands of those using it as a base. Using a hospital as a base is a war crime, but bombing a hospital which is used as a base is not.
Whether or not you personally like this example, the minds which have labored over the years to hash out the international laws of war have certainly given more thought to what constitutes adherence to moral principle in wartime than have current screenwriters in Hollywood.
Let us look at some examples.