Abstract
In this chapter I introduce the main thesis of this book: that Osama bin Laden was morally liable to be killed as a justifiable act of defensive harm. I briefly mention some of the competing accounts that could be offered in defense of the killing and lay out the organization of the remainder of the book. I clarify that I am not making a legal argument for the killing, but am, rather, focusing purely on the moral question of whether killing Osama bin Laden was ethically permissible. I also briefly explain and defend the methodology of contemporary analytic moral philosophy that I use throughout the monograph.
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Notes
Depending on one’s view of the philosophy of law, however, it could be derived from my moral arguments here that the killing should have been legal. But that is a much larger debate which falls outside the scope of this book. For an interesting take on how the laws of war should follow as closely as is pragmatically possible the morality of war, see David Rodin, “Superior Law,” presented at the Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict Center’s Annual Workshop on War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Also see Jeff McMahan “Targeted Killing: Murder, Combat, or Law Enforcement,” in Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Ohlin, and Andrew Altman, eds, Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) for an extended discussion of both the morality and related legal considerations of killings such as that of Osama bin Laden. The argument I offer in this book for the moral permissibility of this particular killing is in broad agreement and accord with some of the moral arguments offered by McMahan in that piece.
See, for example, Suzanne Uniacke, Permissible Killing: The Self-Defence Justification of Homicide (Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford University Press, 2011);
Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Harvard University Press, 1990);
David Rodin, War and Self-Defence (Oxford University Press, 2005). Though, of course, there remains tremendous disagreement on what the proper conditions for liability attribution are precisely. But there is broad agreement among many scholars today in moral analytic philosophy on the general conception of liability to permissible harm as I deploy it here.
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© 2014 Bradley Jay Strawser
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Strawser, B.J. (2014). Introduction. In: Killing bin Laden: A Moral Analysis. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434937_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434937_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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