Can we ever forfeit our moral standing?: Ethics in "Killers of a Certain Age"

Utilitarianism, desert, and Kantianism

Note: This post was written before the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I feel compelled in light of that event to preface this by saying clearly that I condemn political violence even against those I disagree with stridently. If, as I wonder here, there is anyone who might actually deserve assassination, the bar is extremely high, and it is not someone exercising their right to free speech. Although I oppose Kirk’s messages, to my knowledge he was not a villian in the sense discussed below.

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Last week, I wrote about how I’m not much for consequentialism:

But one of the reasons—the reason, really—that I can’t swallow consequentialism¹ as my main ethical approach is the possibility that it threatens to erase the worth of an individual and makes us all instruments of the greater good, possibly to the detriment of ourselves. You see my Kantian instincts here. Consequentialists have replies to this objection, of course, but so far I just haven’t been convinced.

A novel I’m reading (listening to)¹ is challenging my stance on this. Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn is the story of four 60-year-old assassins who retire after 40 years in the business, only to find that they’ve become targets of the organization they worked for. It’s a fantastic heist book, but what’s got me really thinking is the ethics behind its premises. (Of course.) Caution: there may be minor spoilers ahead.

Photo by Ravi Patel on Unsplash

The organization the women worked for, known only as the Museum, was formed after WWII to hunt down and kill escaped Nazis and restore looted art to its rightful owners. The women were recruited in 1978, and by then there weren’t many Nazis left. The Museum began targeting other dangerous folks, and every “mission” they order is backed by careful, thorough research about the target, so that the operatives can be sure they’re making the world a better place by taking these people out: drug lords, sex traffickers, arms dealers, etc. In short: the whole operation is based on utilitarian premises, though of course there’s also an element of revenge.

An extremely important rule for the Museum’s agents is that they’re not allowed to carry out assassination work on the side for their own gain. This matters a lot to the four main characters as well as the organization: it’s what allows them to believe they’re doing good by killing people.² It’s emphatically not for profit. It’s for both retributive justice and the forward-looking protection of would-be victims.

The book stirs up tons of gripping questions (at least if you’re me), including whether revenge, which is backward-looking, is ever okay. The main one it has me wrestling with right now is whether the utilitarian motives really can override the Kantian defense of human dignity. The power of literature makes it easy to buy right into the story’s premise and think of the protagonists as heroes. The targets have been carefully researched and are clearly villians, doing lots of harm out of less-than-noble motives. We get scenes of the women carrying out missions, told from their point of view, and find it easy to cheer when they execute a plan. Just as in any heist story, we’re made to admire the intricacy of their preparation, their anticipation of most contingencies and their backup plans. It’s a grand adventure, and the heroines are likeable, humorously humble about their age, and piercingly smart. The writing puts you on their side, believing in the soundness of their cause.

Let’s assume that a forward-looking utilitarian calculus does in fact favor taking out the targets. This fits with a reasonably strong and I suspect widespread intuition that sometimes we have to do things in the name of justice or the greater good.³ The problem is that this is in tension with another strong intuition most of us have: the (Kantian) dictum to honor the humanity in each person, never treating them merely as a means to an end.

But what if they deserve it?⁴

What if they’ve behaved in heartless ways, treating others as mere means, dehumanizing and using people for their own gain or in the name of some misbegotten cause that similarly dehumanizes its victims? Then they have it coming, right?

How in all my years as a moral philosopher have I not thought about desert?—especially given that the metaphor of justice as balance is an old one: an eye for an eye, yin and yang, karma, Lady Justice with her scales.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

Contemplating all of this, I realized that my objections to consequentialism are mostly based on the possibility that you can force someone who doesn’t deserve it into taking one for the team. The clear intuition pumps involve innocent people. Like (I think?) most of us, however, on a first pass I’m apparently pretty willing to throw a villian under the bus when we’re sure they’re actually a villian.⁵

Still. In carrying out atrocities big enough to become a target of the Museum, have the targets forfeited their rights to be treated as inviolable humans with dignity? Are their assassinations problematically treating them as mere means to the greater good? Or are the killings justified cases of holding bad apples accountable and protecting others against being used as mere means to whatever end the villians have in mind?

A tried-and-true Kantian would very likely say that no one loses their humanity by their actions. So would someone operating from a position centering care: everyone can be understood, respected, and loved as an individual.

Perhaps I’m neither a true Kantian (no surprise) nor a full-throated care ethicist (!), since I’m drawn to the idea that these assassinations are at the very least understandable but regrettable, and might even be the right thing to do.

The conflict here seems like a tension between viewing someone on a micro scale and viewing them on a macro scale: when viewed one-on-one, they’re a person just like any of us, who can think and feel. On this level, the moral thing to do is to try appealing to their own humanity and get them to stop their atrocities and make what amends they can. If we understand morality as a second-personal system of holding one another accountable, as Stephen Darwall does, then some form of accountability is actually an instance of respecting them as moral agents.

Two questions, though. One: Is accountability short of murder realistic in these cases? Surely if such appeals could work, these people would not have done what they did, right? Two: What if all such appeals have been exhausted? Is assassination justified, or at least excusable, then?

Furthermore, couldn’t we say that these villians have already opted out of the usual channels of moral accountability, thus suspending the normal rules? We can’t hold them accountable by the usual means because they aren’t acting within the system. Even if this is true, though, the rest of us still need to act within the system, or it breaks down entirely. If moral reasoning concerning targets’ desert is supporting the Museum’s operatives’ actions, then they’re bound by moral standards.

Although I’ve offered some reasons to think that assassination may be justified even on Kantian and care grounds, I’m not sure I’m fully convinced. This may be when we turn to the more abstract view that points toward traditional notions of justice as desert and utilitarian calculus—either that, or we say such assassinations are not actually justified, no matter how much satisfaction they give us and how necessary they may feel. The latter reminds me of what I remember learning from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, which I read in college (so forgive me if my memory is incorrect): moral responsibility is required of us in the face of real evil, but we can’t know ahead of time whether any given opposition to evil is justified.⁶ I remember Bonhoeffer concluding that assassinating Hitler was necessary, but possibly not justified.

There are a number of conclusions we could draw from all this. The main insight I’m taking away personally is that my opposition to consequentialist thinking isn’t absolute, even though I stand by my refusal to accept the use of non-evil people as mere instruments of the greater good. More broadly, the case of what to do with villians (if there actually are any) is truly hard. And no one moral framework seems able to capture our considered judgments, which is something I’ve been telling students for two decades. The question is when to use one kind of thinking rather than another—and I have no clear answer to that either.

1. Listening to the book makes it hard for me to flip back and find passages, so I’m relying on memory, which is almost certainly imperfect. Even if I’m not entirely true to the book, however, the issues here are still worth discussing.

2. As employees of the Museum, they’re paid well and are retiring with healthy pensions. This is a mode of profiting from their killing. No one questions whether there’s a difference between receiving a salary and pension and profiting from side jobs, and although this is also interesting, I’m not going to pursue it here.

3. A sharp student once pointed out in class that many villians in superhero stories are motivated by supposedly utilitarian thinking: this nasty thing needs to be done in order to save the world.

4. For present purposes, we’ll leave aside the questions raised by the notion of desert.

5. I am setting aside the very murky question of whether we can actually be sure.

6. This is confirmed by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Bonhoeffer: “We are, accordingly, faced with the following dilemma: when assaulted by evil, we must oppose it directly. We have no other option. The failure to act is simply to condone evil. But it is also clear that we have no justification for preferring one response to evil over another. We seemingly could do anything with equal justification. Nevertheless, for Bonhoeffer, the reality of a demand for action without any (a priori) justification is just the moral reality we must face, if we want to be responsible people.”