The right to defend yourself in your home

[P_Funk]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

If you neutralize him straight off, you keep the initiative. If you don't, you give him a chance to seize the initiative. It is your life. Want to take the chance?

Why even become involved is the point. Kill him if you must but why even enter into that situation if there is a non violent alternative? If you have the initiative as you say then you can choose the course. Why face a man and give him the chance to harm you? You don't face off with a fire in your home so why a burgler?

When you say that, you have agreed to two things:
1) The value of a human life is not infinite.
2) Some humans (like yourself) are more valuable than others (like criminals who infringe on your right to life).

If I choose to challenge this assumption, how would you defend it? When you kill in "self-defense", you actually assert that your life is of greater value than the Criminal.

If your life is of lesser or equal value, you can't make a valid decision to use deadly force against the Criminal. Presumably, the only reason to justify that your life is of greater value is that the criminal depressed the value of his life by being a criminal.

But if that value is depressable, justify the idea that the Criminal cannot have depressed his value to below that of a "material possession."

Suppose you see Criminal preparing to rape a Victim (that you don't know). For the sake of argument, assume that you know for sure that Rapist'd just leave Victim alone after the raping instead of killing Victim, and Rapist has no STDs to transmit. Also assume that you don't think you can safely get Rapist off Victim without deadly force. The police are about 1 hour away. Will you choose deadly force or not?

If you chose that you would use deadly force, you've degraded the value of the criminal well past the ordinary "Human Life" range. After all, I've already established that there is no threat to human life unless you intervene. The damage to Victim will primarily be Psychological. In other words, you've just depressed the Criminal's life value below that of presumably severe but unpredictable Psychological Damage. And that to someone you don't even know. Yet somehow "not intervening" does not seem to be the answer, no?

But if Psychological Damage is enough justification to kill a rapist, then I may be justified in killing a burglar just for taking my stuff. Obviously not if he takes my box of tissue paper - I won't even feel like going to the trouble of calling the police after him. But if he makes off with my family heirloom or my wedding ring, that might cause me great psychological damage. So, justify why I can't shoot him.

You make a kind of distinction that I cannot for the life of me contemplate. You assert that the value of human life is negotiable based solely on action. Such ideas are in direct competition with the philosophical foundation of our democratic societies. Whatever the character of a man you cannot declare that life is more valuable in one case than another.

I challange first of all your assertion that self defense is admitting that ones own life is more valuable than that which you took. This is ridiculous logic. What self defense asserts is that your life is threatened and that as the guardian of your own existance you took action to prevent its extinction. This says nothing for the life which you might have ended in the process only that it was an obstacle to your continued survival. Such logic is slanted towards the argument that criminals deserve a lesser kind of humanity than the rest of us and that is a kind of philosophy that makes me wish many people that do care would join the rest in being apathetic.

Secondly comparing a burgler to a rapist is not a fair argument simply because I asserted that self defense is only necessary when you are forced into a situation where you face grave bodily harm. So that means that you should sacrifice your feeble possession in favour of the prudent course. Rape however is a different matter. For one it is bodily harm, and that is the goal of the attack. Secondly it is already forced upon you or the person whom you might come accross. The nuances of circumstance that exist in burglary are absent in the case of rape. This example you brought forth is moot. If I were to come accross a rapist raping a woman I would first get him off her and then either chase him off or incapacitate him, in that order. But from the outset I wouldn't say to myself "I'm going to kill this guy no matter what just to be safe".