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
Publication date:
26.12.2016.
Visits: 1.091 *