Essentially, double-effect means that your good actions can have unintended yet foreseen evil consequences. If you make a hunting rifle, and someone uses that to shoot children at a school, are you responsible? Not an easy question to answer.
Very easy question to answer. The answer is "no". There was no ill intent, no expectation of misuse, no "mens rea" ("guilty mind"). The intended and expected market is very large and overwhelmingly upstanding. The good done far outweighs the freakish non-sequitur bad. You don't not do something just because, with a twisted line of reasoning, someone can conceive of 1 in orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude chance it might be abused.
Someone driving a car into a crowd does not make it Ford's fault. Society does not ban cars just because 50,000 people a year are killed by them.
I don't think it is so easy, especially if you are rigorous about your criteria and reasoning.
Double-effect has four criteria for making a judgment in any particular case. The intent of the maker is only one of the four. The most pertinent criteria in the case of the hunting rifle and school shooting scenario is the last, of proportionality. Does the good to be gained by having hunting rifles exceed the evil to be suffered by school shootings?
That's a tougher question to answer than whether there is an ill intent.
Not tough. The answer to that particular question is "yes". The number of lives saved using rifles far exceeds the number taken without just cause. And when it comes to defending my family, "proportionality" is irrelevant: statistics mean nothing when they happen to you. Careful how you apply your reasoning, lest every right you cherish be denied you in kind.
Guns are an interesting case. Thee are many tools (eg computers, knives, hammers) that can be used to kill someone, but most of the uses of them are not killing people (more tomatoes are cut with knives than people killed). I'm not so sure about guns. Are most of the instances of guns being fired being used to kill/hurt someone (or practice to kill/hurt someone)?
Perhaps it's the European in me that can't wrap my head around the American idea of guns. To me "Guns are dangerous" seems obvious.
I don't agree with it, but I think the American idea of guns is like what you said about knives: hunting guns are okay (like how kitchen knives are mostly used to cut tomatoes), but there's a line drawn somewhere for "assault weapons" (nobody cuts tomatoes with a switchblade).
Personally I think that although this idea makes sense for knives, guns cannot be justified because they have no purpose other than killing (hunting is still killing).
> guns cannot be justified because they have no purpose other than killing
Suppose someone is trying to kill you or your loved ones. Do you really not see how a gun could be beneficial? Do you really not see how killing someone could be the right thing to do?
Do you really not see how widespread gun ownership can be harmful?
On the front page is a story about someone recovering a camera from a thief. One comment says that confronting the thief could be dangerous, since they might have a gun ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505464 ). Here in Ireland if some low level criminal stole my camera, they wouldn't have a gun when I meeting them in a café.
Yeah, I know my view is idealistic... Having a gun for self-defense may be reasonable, but killing is never "the right thing to do" except as an absolute last resort in such situations.
My hunch is that hunting guns are a minority (or small percentage) of all gun firings, whereas with knives, it's the other way. The illegal killings (with knives) are the (small) minority.
I suspect that future generations will be disgusted by the fact that we find it okay to shoot conscious beings for amusement. Am generalising of course.
Comments
Check out Stanford's Encylopedia of Philosophy entry on double-effect: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/.
Essentially, double-effect means that your good actions can have unintended yet foreseen evil consequences. If you make a hunting rifle, and someone uses that to shoot children at a school, are you responsible? Not an easy question to answer.
Very easy question to answer. The answer is "no". There was no ill intent, no expectation of misuse, no "mens rea" ("guilty mind"). The intended and expected market is very large and overwhelmingly upstanding. The good done far outweighs the freakish non-sequitur bad. You don't not do something just because, with a twisted line of reasoning, someone can conceive of 1 in orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude chance it might be abused.
Someone driving a car into a crowd does not make it Ford's fault. Society does not ban cars just because 50,000 people a year are killed by them.
I don't think it is so easy, especially if you are rigorous about your criteria and reasoning.
Double-effect has four criteria for making a judgment in any particular case. The intent of the maker is only one of the four. The most pertinent criteria in the case of the hunting rifle and school shooting scenario is the last, of proportionality. Does the good to be gained by having hunting rifles exceed the evil to be suffered by school shootings?
That's a tougher question to answer than whether there is an ill intent.
Not tough. The answer to that particular question is "yes". The number of lives saved using rifles far exceeds the number taken without just cause. And when it comes to defending my family, "proportionality" is irrelevant: statistics mean nothing when they happen to you. Careful how you apply your reasoning, lest every right you cherish be denied you in kind.
Guns are an interesting case. Thee are many tools (eg computers, knives, hammers) that can be used to kill someone, but most of the uses of them are not killing people (more tomatoes are cut with knives than people killed). I'm not so sure about guns. Are most of the instances of guns being fired being used to kill/hurt someone (or practice to kill/hurt someone)?
Perhaps it's the European in me that can't wrap my head around the American idea of guns. To me "Guns are dangerous" seems obvious.
It's an interesting cultural difference.
I don't agree with it, but I think the American idea of guns is like what you said about knives: hunting guns are okay (like how kitchen knives are mostly used to cut tomatoes), but there's a line drawn somewhere for "assault weapons" (nobody cuts tomatoes with a switchblade).
Personally I think that although this idea makes sense for knives, guns cannot be justified because they have no purpose other than killing (hunting is still killing).
> guns cannot be justified because they have no purpose other than killing
Suppose someone is trying to kill you or your loved ones. Do you really not see how a gun could be beneficial? Do you really not see how killing someone could be the right thing to do?
Do you really not see how widespread gun ownership can be harmful?
On the front page is a story about someone recovering a camera from a thief. One comment says that confronting the thief could be dangerous, since they might have a gun ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5505464 ). Here in Ireland if some low level criminal stole my camera, they wouldn't have a gun when I meeting them in a café.
Yeah, I know my view is idealistic... Having a gun for self-defense may be reasonable, but killing is never "the right thing to do" except as an absolute last resort in such situations.
My hunch is that hunting guns are a minority (or small percentage) of all gun firings, whereas with knives, it's the other way. The illegal killings (with knives) are the (small) minority.
I suspect that future generations will be disgusted by the fact that we find it okay to shoot conscious beings for amusement. Am generalising of course.
Is shooting an animal really any worse than what happens inside a slaughter house? The videos I've seen seem to indicate that it isn't.
Enjoy your hamburger.