Ends, Means and Knowledge
The Moral Implications of Mistakes
Subjectively Right, Objectively Wrong
Continuing with the same theme as my previous two posts, what are the moral implications of an act that is subjectively justified, within the actor's rights given what he reasonably believes the facts to be, but objectively wrong? Suppose, for example, I correctly believe someone is trying to kill me. You, a stranger, take some entirely innocent act which I reasonably interpret as the beginning of an assassination attempt. I attack you, injure you, and then discover my mistake. What ought to happen to me?
The answer that fits my intuition — I think I could justify it in terms of the economic analysis of law, but that is not the approach I'm interested in at the moment — is that I am guilty of a tort but not a crime. I have injured you and so owe you compensation but did not intend to violate your rights and so do not deserve punishment.
To make the question more interesting, replace me by the government. You are arrested for a murder you did not commit, convicted on convincing evidence and jailed awaiting execution. The only way in which you can save your life is by escaping, killing a guard in the process; you do so. A month later, after you would have been executed if you had not escaped, someone else confesses to the murder, providing absolutely convincing evidence of his guilt and your innocence.
What now is your status? Are you a murderer because you killed a guard? Are you innocent of that murder on grounds of self defense, with a claim against the government for false imprisonment?
The government and the guard were subjectively innocent since they reasonably believed you were a murderer and so deserved to be executed (I am not interested, at the moment, in whether capital punishment itself is morally justified, it just makes the example simpler). But they were objectively guilty, since in fact you were not a murderer; they were attempting to kill you when you did not deserved to be killed. You are both subjectively and objectively innocent of killing someone without justification, since they were trying to kill you and you had no other way of defending yourself, unless their subjective innocence makes their actions morally correct.
My intuition is that you are innocent, the government and its agents, as in the previous case, liable to you for damages but not deserving of punishment. If you do not agree, can you suggest a different approach to such situations, preferably one that applies to both private and state actors?
You were a victim of circumstances that would result in your death.
Instead you chose to replace yourself with another, innocent, person - the guard - who was simply doing his job and had no personal intention to kill you.
Imagine this situation differently: you slipped and fell on the rails and there is a train coming that will kill you. You grab a bystander and pull yourself off the rails, but push him in, and he gets killed.
Do you still think you're not guilty?
I take one of the thought experiments you once used seriously, the Russian Roulette as universal punishment. Both of your examples I'd be happy to see solved by some probabilistic chance of death applied. In the fomer case, you can allow the heirs of the deceased to negotiate some settlement that saves me the chance of death.