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Why It’s Wrong to Stand Your Ground
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Hereth, Blake |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | Stand Your Ground laws have prompted frequent and sustained legal and ethical reflection on self-defense. Two primary views have emerged in the literature: the Stand Your Ground View and the Retreat View. On the former view, there is no presumptive moral requirement to retreat even if one can do so safely. According to the latter view, there is such a requirement. I offer a novel argument against the Stand Your Ground View. In cases where retreat or the infliction of defensive harm would be equally efficacious in protecting the rights of an individual, one cannot intend either simply as a means, since there is no means-relevant reason for choosing one over the other. Thus, if one intends to inflict defensive harm, one intends the infliction of defensive harm as an end. Because it is always wrong to intend harm for its own sake, there is a presumptive requirement to retreat. STAND YOUR GROUND LAWS HAVE RETURNED to the forefront of political discourse over the past several years. Two Floridians, George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn, are said to have killed in self-defense while standing their ground.1 According to Florida Statute 776.013, subsection 3: A person who is not engaged in in any unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent 1 These laws, while still controversial, such as in Florida v Zimmerman and Florida v Dunn, are now on more solid legal ground in the United States. See Brown (1991). See also the preliminary report of the American Bar Association’s task force on stand your ground laws, available here: http://www.abajournal.com/files/GunReport.pdf. Why It’s Wrong to Stand Your Ground 41 death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.2 The statute refers to a right to be somewhere. This inclusion introduces an ambiguity in what the statute protects. The right to stand one’s ground appears derivative in the sense that it is a right to defend a more basic right. But from what right does it derive? One possibility is that the right to stand one’s ground derives from the right to life or the right not to be unjustly harmed: it applies in cases in which you’re unjustly attacked and the only way to protect your right not to be attacked unjustly is, as the statute puts it, to “meet force with force, including deadly force.”3 Another possibility is that the right derives from some right of movement: you have a right to travel where you please, certainly within public places or your home, and the only way to protect that right in some cases is to kill in defense of that right. Rights of movement might themselves derive from more basic bodily rights, such as the right to do with one’s body as one sees fit, and one might see fit to relocate one’s body.4 Other things being equal, it is wrong to prevent persons from relocating their bodies. There is some legal precedent for this view, as for example in the judgment reached in State v Bartlett: Because the right to go where one will without let or hindrance, despite threats made, necessarily implies the right to stay where one will without let or hindrance. These remarks are controlled by the thought of a lawful right to be in the particular locality in which [one] goes, or in which [one] stays. It is true, human life is sacred, but so is human liberty; one is as dear in the eye of the law as the other, and neither is to give way and surrender its legal status in order that the other may exclusively exist.5 These accounts share two common features. First, if you have some right and someone wrongly threatens to violate, then you have a derivative right to prevent that violation. Second, if inflicting reasonable harm is the only means of securing your right, then the right to protect your rights entails that you have a right to inflict reasonable harm. The general view espoused is that individuals are not even presumptively required to retreat in certain cases. Heidi Kurd, one defender of this view, summarizes contemporary thinking behind this view: 2 Numerous other states in the United States have passed similar or identical Stand Your Ground laws. For more on the laws as viewed internationally, see the brief but helpful review by Steinhoff (2013, 1019-1020). For an extensive review, see Leverick (2006, ch. 4); and Brown (1991), especially |
| Starting Page | 40 |
| Ending Page | 50 |
| Page Count | 11 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.5840/pcw20172414 |
| Volume Number | 24 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.blakehereth.com/uploads/1/2/7/5/127509046/why_its_wrong_to_stand_your_ground.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.5840/pcw20172414 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
