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Not as a Means: Killing as a Side Effect in Self‐defense
Author(s) -
GordonSolmon Kerah
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/papq.12288
Subject(s) - harm , liability , freak , pedestrian , conflation , law , criminology , law and economics , sociology , computer security , political science , epistemology , philosophy , computer science , engineering , transport engineering
A person drives her well‐maintained car cautiously and alertly to the movies. Freak circumstances send the car out of control. It veers in the direction of a pedestrian whom it will kill unless she, or a third party, blows it up with a grenade. Whether the driver is liable to be thusly killed polarizes debates about the ethics of self‐defense. But debaters frequently conflate the questions of whether and by what means the driver is liable to be killed. The paper separates these questions: it argues the driver's liability to lethal harm need not entail her liability to the grenade.