Equality of Killing

It is morally worse to kill some people than it is to kill others. For instance, most people would agree that it is morally worse to kill someone who is in the prime of their life and desperately wants to live, then it is to kill someone who has a terminal illness, is in excruciating pain, and desperately wants to die.

Is it worse to kill someone who is older and has less time left in their life than it is to kill someone who is younger and has more time left in their life, all other things being equal? Some philosophers think that the degree of wrongness of killing depends on the dignity of human beings. If any two human beings are equally dignified, then it is no more worse to kill a healthy 20 year old with a long life left than it is to kill a 95 year old with only a few good years left.

One problem with this line is that it treats killing as a categorical act. Indeed, killing admits of less gradation than other actions: either a person’s life ceases, or it does not. But it really is continuous with other series of acts of varying moral significance: killing is just one way of shortening someone’s life.

Here is an argument that killing someone who is older is less morally wrong than killing someone who is younger.

Let Young be a 25 year old who will live to the year 2090 (at 100 years of age).

Let Old be a 75 year old who will live to 2040 (at 100 years of age).

Is it equally wrong to kill Young and Old?

Killing Young right now amounts to shortening Young’s life by 75 years.   Slipping Young a very slow-acting poison that will kill him in 50 years would amount to shortening Young’s life by 25 years. I submit that it is morally worse to kill Young right now than to give Young the slow-acting poison: if you have to do one or the other, you should do the latter.

We normally don’t think of shortening life and killing as being morally equivalent. By smoking around others, you might statistically shorten their lives by a small amount of time. By leaving asbestos in a house, you might be shortening the life of the future tenants. But what you do is not as wrong as killing them immediately.

It is hard to deny that giving Young the slow-acting poison is no better or worse than killing Old right now. The slow-acting poison takes many years to have its effect, but its effect shortens the life of Young just as much as killing Old right now would shorten his life. But if both of these claims are granted, it turns out that killing Young can’t be equally wrong as killing Old.

Killing Young > Giving Young the slow-acting poison

Giving Young the slow-acting poison = Killing old

Therefore,

Killing Young > Killing Old