COMMENSAL ISSUE 95

Dear Theo,

Thank you for your letter. You may publish anything I send you unless I make clear I forbid it.

Herewith four contributions. One is a reply to something many years ago. The rest arise marginally out of things said or implied in recent contributions more than once. So I have worded them as self-standing rather than a specific answer to someone else.

Use them one by one or all in a lump as convenient [the other three are in the pot for future editions of Commensal, Ed].

OF HOMICIDE AND MURDER

Homicide is the killing of one human being by another : murder is intentional homicide. It is, and usually has been, recognised that killing by accident may be a crime but is much less heinous than murder. Different legal systems at different times and in different countries have done a lot of fine-tuning on that. If A shoots at B intending to kill B but misses B and kills C, is A guilty of murder because he intended to kill someone, or only guilty of manslaughter because he did not intend to kill C ? A hits B on the head with a bottle intending only to knock him unconscious but B dies from the blow ? A gives B a violent push in the chest intending only to thrust him away, but B falls, hits his head on the edge of a kerb, and dies ?

Even assuming A intends to kill B and succeeds, most systems of law have recognised three justifications, ie. making the killings lawful. First, killing a member of the enemy army in time of war. More fine tuning. Was the victim a fighting man or only the cook who kept him in fighting trim ? Was the victim still fighting or had he surrendered ? Had war been duly declared (remember Pearl Harbour) ? Is the civilian captain of an unarmed ship with a cargo of shells or aviation fuel or army rations fair game ?

Secondly carrying out the lawful sentence of a court of law. The public hangman was never a murderer at law but only a mere mechanic doing a disagreeable job.

Thirdly, and most complicated, self-defence. For this, there must be an attack of sufficient violence by the victim. The defence may be of the person of the killer or of his property or of someone the killer has a duty to protect; his wife, children and other relatives; his servant or his employer; in the case of a teacher, his pupils; in the case of a policeman, any member of the public. I have a duty to protect the Queen and the Prince of Wales (and have sworn an oath to do so - to live and to die).

The first of these is a special case of the last. It is the duty of a good government (whether in the person of a queen, or emperor, or president, or dictator, or a cabinet, or supreme soviet) to allow all subjects to live in peace and quiet, and specifically to defend them against any invasion by a foreign power. The King cannot do this on his own : he needs an army (and navy and, nowadays, air force). In time of peace, good government requires an armed force to be ready if war should come about, and this force will consist of men (and women nowadays, more the pity) trained to kill other human beings. In time of war if invasion has occurred or is imminent it is the duty of all subjects who can fight to join in the defence of the realm and to kill the invaders if possible. I suppose the blitz was an actual invasion. The home guard was a response on the part of those not of military age to the threat of land invasion.

There used to be a fourth kind of justifiable homicide, namely the killing of an outlaw. If one who had committed a serious crime was not in custody he might be declared an outlaw, ie. the protection the law affords to all human beings within the realm was withdrawn. The Sheriff of Nottingham had a duty to kill Robin Hood, but anyone else might do so without fear of penalty.

If Salmon Rushdie is assassinated, this is an example of category two or four above. In a Christian, or Buddhist etc. country it would be murder but in a Moslem country it would be no crime.

I am not sure if it is in order to quote personal experience in a philosophical discussion. If it is not, you may eliminate this paragraph [gladly retained ! Ed]. For the argument is of great concern to me. You see, in the dark of night of 15^th January 1942, in an aeroplane, using one of the earlier makes of radar, I detected U577 some seven miles away. I directed my pilot to a position where he could, and did, sink her with a depth charge. The crew would be about 40 males, all certainly in the armed services of the Reich, and all perished. My complicity in their deaths is undoubted (it could not have occurred without my complicity). I intended to kill them. I doubt not that they would have killed me if they could, all of them. It is reasonably sure each of them had a wife, or girl friend, or parents, or young children, so something over a hundred persons will have mourned their loss. I am certainly not guilty of murder by German law or British law or international law. But am I guilty under some humanitarian notion of moral law ? Ought I to feel guilt, or shame ? Ought I to do penance or pay compensation ?

Assuming the proper translation of Exodus 20:13 is, "Thou shalt do no murder", as Cranmer (and practically no-one else) put it, or "Thou shalt not kill" (as the rest put it), it is an interesting exercise, in the light of the three justifications above, to find how many homicides in the Bible thereafter were murder : there were quite a few before, mainly by the direct hand of God.

Frank : An excellently clear exposition, it seems to me. It does, though, appear to get off to a bad start. Homicide, at least in its popular US usage, has the overtones of illegality about it, and you appear to suggest as much by saying that murder is intentional homicide. Then, you go on to talk about justifiable homicides, which appears to be back-peddling. I’m never quite sure how sentences of the form X is Y are supposed to work. The one you’ve chosen strikes me as a definition - ie. in all contexts in which we might use the term "murder", "intentional homicide" would do just as well, and vice versa. A similar statement, such as the contentious "abortion is murder" isn’t a definition but (allegedly) a statement of fact, with items corresponding to the first term forming a subset of those corresponding to the second. Maybe it’s only pedants like me that get muddled by such statements. The way I’d have expressed it, in tune with what you subsequently go on to say, would have been something like "murder is the intentional and unjustified killing of one human being by another", thought I dare say this is open to objections as well.

I was interested that your third mitigation referred to "those the killer has a duty to protect", with only policemen mentioned as having a duty to protect "any member of the public". Don’t we all have this duty ? At least we hear people moaning that so-and-so was mugged and no-one came to help, as though this state of affairs indicated a gross dereliction of duty on the part of passers-by.

You seem to have to scratch around a bit to make out WW2 as a defensive effort on the part of the British. Wasn’t it all about the liberation of allied territory (others we have a duty to protect) ? Hitler would have been happy to conclude a pact with the British - he just wanted to be left alone to carve up the East & get his lebensraum. He would, of course, have continued to inflict unspeakable sufferings on peoples we had no treaty with, as well as on those we did, but which we still had a "duty to protect" - or did we ?

Just why are the ethics of the Wild West and Sherwood Forrest no longer operative, if they aren’t ? Why no more outlaws or lynch-mobs ? Because the law now has a sufficiently long arm ?

Finally, can God logically commit murder ? After all, he provides the laws and the justifications for any homicides ? Clearly, on the other hand, there were many murders recorded in the Bible after Moses. The Bible doesn’t claim that all its characters were righteous. The incident of David and Uriah the Hittite, concerning David’s adultery with Bathsheba, is a classic case. David effectively murdered Uriah, even though he was killed in battle by his, and David’s, enemies. The divine retribution is interesting, too !

I suppose my biggest concern with your approach was uncertainty as to what sort of an argument it was supposed to be. Was it a definition of certain words, a description of common usage and practice or something deeper ?

Theo