Morally, I don’t think there’s any difference worth remarking between assassinating a tyrant and assassinating someone like Osama bin Laden. When done in the right contexts and in the right way, I would consider both to be legitimately defensive uses of violence.
However, those two in the right…
phrases introduce two provisos.
First, while killing either a tyrant like Caesar or a terrorist like bin Laden is legitimately defensive violence, killing 5 or 10 or 20 innocent bystanders who happen to be in the vicinity, isn’t. It’s easy to limit the effect of your attack on innocent bystanders if you stab Caesar with knives; much less so if you go about a so-called targeted assassination, as the American and Israeli militaries, for example, do, by firing off an air-to-surface missile at a house or an apartment complex where you think your target might be. So I oppose that kind of tactic along with the rest of modern government warfare, not because I think there’s usually anything morally wrong with the assassination, but rather because there is something wrong with murdering a bunch of children and other civilians in order to get to the target you’re attacking.
Second, when you say extra-judicial execution,
I’m not sure whether you’re referring to attacks on terrorists who are at large and currently posing an ongoing threat, or if you’re referring to executing a terrorist after-the-fact, once he or she has already been seized and restrained. I mention this because, while I have no problem with the former, I consider the latter, like I consider all forms of an after-the-fact death penalty–whether they are judicially mediated or not–to be murder. If a terrorists or tyrants are at large, and posing an ongoing threat to innocent people, then, in defense of self or others, people have a right to use violence against the person of the tyrant in order to end the threat, up to and including killing them. But, on the other hand, if the killing is just after-the-fact retaliation, when a tyrant or terrorist has already been made captive, stripped of the power to threaten anybody, etc., then it serves no defensive purpose and is just murder.
Thus, for example, while I don’t feel much sorrow for the loss of Charles I in England, Louis XVI in France, or Nicholas II in Russia, I don’t celebrate cases like these, where the former tyrant was murdered by revolutionaries after he had already been deposed and taken captive. It’s only a genuine tyrannicide if the victim is a genuine tyrant; murdering an ex-tyrant, who no longer poses an immediate threat to anybody, doesn’t count. In that kind of case, my attitude is No pity, no praise.
Althought I agree with you that the death of a tyrant is something to be celebrated, I am the morality of an assasination of a tyrant is clear. I am not saying that it is INMORAL in any circurstance to assasin a tyrant. But then, I think we could ask ourselves if the assasination of a tyrant is not the equivalent of a extra judicial execution of a criminal (say, a murderer or a terrorist, which what tyrants usually are). What is the difference between assasinating a tyrant and an extra judicial execution of say, a Bin Laden, in your opinion? This is not to say the difference does not exist, but rather is hard to clearly conceptualize it, even if it is intuitively perceivable.
]]>Before I read your posting, I just wanted to say congratulations on your Ministry of Culture appointment in the secessionist republic of one. I am confident that you will serve with honor!
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