Possible Moral Justifications

Abstract

There are many ways one could try to justify the killing of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, in the public square we heard a wide variety of claims regarding the killing: that it was good because a “bad man” was now dead, or that it was a permissible act of enforcing capital punishment, or that it was simply killing a combatant in war, which is permissible under traditional just war theory. In this chapter I show some of the ways these and other justifications for killing Osama bin Laden fall short. The goal is not to give a complete rebuttal of such approaches, but, rather, to simply show that the rights-based liability account for permissible harm described in Chapter 1 is far more restrictive than these other competing accounts.KeywordsCapital PunishmentJudicial ProcessRepugnant ConclusionLegitimate TargetDefensive HarmThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.