Original scientific paper

On Killing as Causing Death

CHENG-CHIH TSAI orcid.org/0000-0001-8074-9414 ; Mackay Medical College – Center for Holistic Education, 46, Sec. 3, Jhong-Jheng Rd, San-Jhih District, New Taipei City 252, Taiwan

Abstract

Common sense has that killing someone amounts to causing the death of someone. This makes killing a physical, biological, or, at best, metaphysical issue, and, as a consequence, the ethics of killing can be dealt with independently of the non-ethical issue of who the killer is. However, in this paper, we show that this is not the case. A physical/biological definition of death plus a metaphysical definition of causation does not exhaust the meaning of killing. Rather, the notion of killing per se generally presumes a notion of default, which often involves ethical considerations.

Keywords

Causation; death; killing; social norm

Hrčak ID:

178871

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/178871

Publication date:

26.12.2016.

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