Abstract
The problem of the time of a killing concerns exactly when and where to locate our actions. It is a problem for many of our actions beyond killing, and there are versions of the problem that can be raised no matter where your theory locates actions in particular. To answer the problem, I claim that we should be guided to the referent of ‘the killing’ by examining the definition of ‘to kill.’ Once we have the correct definition, we can see that there are several candidate events that might be the referent of ‘the killing,’ but that the definition does not determine which of them is the referent. So, I argue that it is indeterminate or vague which event is ‘the killing.’ This solution is general across many action verbs, appeals to a minimally controversial type of vagueness, avoids the unintuitive results of views that determinately locate killings, and is compatible with different views about the location of actions. In the concluding section, I show how appealing to vagueness is distinct from and superior to appealing to ambiguity.
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Notes
One often encounters in the literature the example of Booth’s shooting Lincoln, where Lincoln died several days later from the gunshot wound. However, an even more startling recent case is that of Hinckley’s assassination attempt of President Raegan. During that attempt in 1981, he shot and wounded James Brady, who continued living but eventually died of the gunshot wound a full thirty-three years later in 2014. The death was ruled a homicide. I use ‘A’ and ‘B’ here to avoid trivializing these cases.
For a classic discussion of this question of the time of a killing, see Thomson (1971).
Hence why this problem is sometimes called ‘the problem of the acting dead.’
See Hall (2000) for a discussion of whether and under what conception causation is transitive.
However, this is not part of the reason that Wierzbicka gives for using ‘because’ instead of ‘to cause.’ She claims using ‘because’ allows us to see the underlying structure better (498).
Even this may not be right though. Perhaps I encounter a fatally wounded animal and kill it so as to save it from the misery it would have in the time between then and when it dies from the wound. In this case, what I do is the primary cause of the death of the animal, not the state that it is in from the wound. However, although it does not die from the wound, it still sounds appropriate to say that it was fatally wounded when I encountered it. The solution to this appears to be that the mark of being fatally wounded is that the wound inexorably will cause the death (unless something else intervenes to cause the death first).
White uses the apparent difference between fatally wounding and killing to suggest that fatally wounding is much more plausibly located with the shooting than is the killing, and that the killing does not occur until the death. However, although the result of the fatally wounding (the patient’s being wounded) will occur before the death, we have exactly the same puzzle about whether the fatally wounding is located when the shot is fired or when the patient is struck. The solution that I offer below for killing will extend to fatally wounding, and I will explain the sense in which it is true that B was not killed until after the death. Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to consider how we should think about the difference between killing and fatally wounding.
The best way to characterize basic actions, or whether there is a meaningful distinction between basic and non-basic actions, is controversial in the philosophy of action. The point here is just that I do not expect all action verbs to be defined in this way, and there will likely be principled reasons why certain action verbs will not be defined in this way.
Given this, it should not be surprising that not all action verbs can be given this kind of definition, because not all action verbs are causal verbs. See Thomson (1987) for a thorough characterization of causal verbs and discussion of which action verbs will and will not be causal verbs (and why).
This is not to say that every event of which the agent is a subject is an action. There is an important distinction between things that the agent does (perhaps she sleepwalks) versus actions that the agent performs.
For example, Price (1982) argues that the killing is not only colocated with but identical to the death of the victim.
Interestingly, however, our intuitions might change depending on the action verb under discussion. It sounds unintuitive to say that A kills B entirely when B dies (and not even partially before), but it sounds a lot more intuitive to say that A insults B entirely when B reads the letter from A and is insulted.
In later work, however, Davidson actually rejects this view and instead seems to suggest that ‘killing’ is ambiguous in a way to be discussed below (1985/2001: 300). It is hard to know when a killing occurs absent any specification. However, if we specify that we want to know when the action of killing occurred, then he again identifies it with the action performed by the agent that causes the death of the victim.
For example, Lombard (1978) argues for the Davidsonian view and attempts to directly address the unintuitiveness of claiming that killings can occur before deaths.
These are typically called mere ‘Cambridge changes.’ Bennett does not refer to them in this way, although I think this is what he has in mind. For an alternative view that explicitly uses Cambridge changes, see Ruben (1999). Ruben claims that actions like killings are the actions they are in virtue of these properties, but that these actions are in fact located where the Cambridge change occurs. So the killing is located with the death, not the shooting. However, while it is true that my mother becomes a grandmother when I have child, what’s important to stress is that my mother still exists when she exists, not when I have a child. Similarly, although an action becomes a killing only when someone dies, that action (the killing) still occurs when it occurred (which, for Bennett, will be before the death). See Lombard (2003) for other significant criticisms of Ruben’s view, including pressure on the idea that a Cambridge change in an individual entails the existence of an event with that individual as the subject.
Lombard (1989) argues that several views on the time of a killing including Bennett’s are guilty of fallaciously inferring from the fact that the killing will not occur unless the death occurs to the fact that the killing will not occur until the death occurs. He claims that this mistake trades on a subtle ambiguity in the meaning of ‘unless.’
Mossel (2001: 262) presents this objection.
Pietroski is a Volitionist, however, and this may afford him a way around this problem. Volitionists claim that all actions are located within the body (or mind), and Pietroski argues that all actions are identical to instances of trying (which are within the body). Given this, he may accept that strictly speaking it’s true that all we can ‘do’ is try, and so technically killing is not an action that we can perform. There are other problems special to Volitionism of this kind that we do not have space to address here, but it is nevertheless true that this goes against our normal understanding of these action verbs as referring to actions.
Not just my preferred definition, but in fact several of the definitions mentioned do not clearly pick out a single event as the event that is the killing.
You may think that accepting any vagueness, even linguistic, commits you to some form of ontological vagueness. Insofar as we and the propositions we express are items in the natural world, I am inclined to agree with this. Still, it is a very different thing to accept that some referent is underdetermined than it is to accept that certain molecules indeterminately bear the parthood relation to certain macroscopic objects.
There is a way for my claims to technically be compatible even with those who think that there is no indeterminacy in the world or language, such as epistemicists. An epistemicist can deny that it is indeterminate which event is the killing, and instead claim that it is determinate but unknowable.
So I think we can capture the advantage that Bennett’s view is supposed to have.
See Dunbar (2001) for a clear discussion of the distinction between vagueness and ambiguity.
Weintraub herself thinks that although we are conflating the action that causes the death with the causing of the death, there in fact is no event that is the causing of the death. I take no stance here on the metaphysical status or ontological category of causings; however, I do not think the causing of a death is as easy to locate as Weintraub maintains.
Pols gives this worry for Weintraub’s solution. He says, “…it would mean assuming that our intuitions are structurally, as opposed to incidentally misguided” (728).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank John Hawthorne, Gabriel Uzquiano, Kadri Vihvelin, Gary Watson, and James van Cleve for many helpful discussions and comments on this topic.
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Silver, K. The vague time of a killing. Philos Stud 175, 1383–1400 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0915-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0915-4