The Problem with Preparing to Kill in Self‐Defense

Abstract

In a society marked by liberal gun ownership laws, and an increasingly militarized police force, how should we think about cases where a homeowner shoots a person who has mistakenly knocked on the wrong door, or where a police officer shoots someone who is unarmed? The general tendency – by shooters, courts, and many observers – is to use the framework of self‐defense. However, as I will argue, relying on the framework of self‐defense is inappropriate in these cases, because theories of self‐defensive killing are built up around a very specific type of case, namely, a random, sudden, one‐off encounter between roughly equally matched strangers. When a person who acts in self‐defense has undertaken certain preparations to kill in self‐defense – such as buying a gun, or undergoing certain kinds of training – they transform what would have been defensive violence into offensive violence. But because the self‐defense framework distinguishes only between defensive and aggressive violence, it cannot easily register the unique moral features of offensive violence. Relying on the self‐defense framework, then, produces judgments that are overly permissive of killings by gun owners and police, masking them as self‐defensive when in fact they are much more morally fraught.