The Right to Life

Abstract

In the theory of rights we repeatedly encounter the problem of reconcil ing someone's having a right, with his properly suffering damage to the in terest protected by the right. In the case of to life, we have to assess numerous cases in which individuals are killed or allowed to die, and yet we wish nonetheless to affirm their to life. These cases include killing an ag gressor in self-defense, accidental homicide, terminating life-sustaining therapy, and capital punishment. Two fashionable ways of reconciling commonplace killing with the to will no longer do. One approach is to claim that the to is merely a prima facie right; it is subject to being overridden by competing con siderations.1 Even when stripped of confusing associations with principles of proof, the notion of a prima facie cannot withstand criticism. If someone's to prevails over the wishes of those who wish to kill him or her, we hardly would say that the is merely prima facie. And if the victim's of defense permits the killing of an aggressor, we are hard pres sed to say that the aggressor's to is somehow overridden and thus lost in the collision with a higher value. It seems that the remains the same, whether overridden or not.2 Another fashionable argument builds on a theory of forfeiture.3 Aggres sors and criminals supposedly forfeit their to life; that they have no to explains why murderers are properly subject to the death penalty and why some aggressors are subject to being killed in response to their aggres sion. This argument has already encountered considerable scepticism,4 and yet it is so tempting a solution that it reasserts itself.5 One item on our agenda is to rid ourselves of this theory with a more thorough refutation. My program in this paper is to provide an account of how it is that those with a to may nonetheless be properly subject to an untimely death. Among the advantages of this account, it avoids the shortcomings of theories that stress either the prima facie nature of rights or the forfeiture of rights through conduct. In thinking about fundamental human rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, private property and privacy, we often encounter the protagonist who wants to know: What is the definition of the right? What precisely is the holder entitled to claim of other people? Yet no straightforward answer emerges from the quest for definition. The reason is that an adequate analysis of the right to life requires attention to three distinct questions: