Assassination

The justification of political violence is a difficult but hardly avoidable question for political philosophy. Recent assassinations and attempted assassinations have raised this issue in the U.S. political context. Here are a few thoughts on assassination as a particular form of political violence.  It seems to me to have four logically possible (not to say necessarily valid) justifications: 

1. Elimination. Assassination may be conceived for the purpose of eliminating an individual who poses a distinct, particular, and grave threat to innocent people. For example, if you could kill Adolf Hitler and you knew that doing so would prevent millions of people from being killed, it would seem justified. It is hard to imagine a scenario in which elimination is the sole justification. If Hitler had already killed millions, an assassin might prevent him killing millions more, but surely retribution for those already killed would be part of the justification along with prevention of future killing. If he had not yet ordered any killings, but you somehow know he will, would killing be justified? I think this grey area is what the film Minority Report was about. But normally, one would be imaging a scenario in which elimination is not the sole justification, but rather one operating in tandem with retribution.
2. Retribution is basically just revenge. Perhaps it can be said that those who oppose the death penalty would, in order to be consistent, have to reject this as a sufficient justification for assassination. But I've found that many people who do oppose the death penalty are willing to justify assassinations on grounds of retribution. What seems to explain this "inconsistency" is how the relative power of killer and killed are imagined. With assassination, we imagine the killer as weak and the targeted person as very powerful. But in such a situation of a very powerful person doing harm to others with impunity, the motive of retribution would generally be operating in tandem with elimination of the threat, since assumedly the tyrant would continue his depredations if not stopped in some way, and in some scenarios, assassination may be the only way of stopping them. Could retribution be a sole and sufficient justification? Let's imagine a scenario where the tyrant's damage is somehow over and done with. In such a situation, where a powerful person has caused pain and death to others who are too weak to defend themselves, where they've done it with an attitude of contempt for the weaker victims, and where the would-be assassin has been personally and grievously affected--there assassination may seem justifiable just for retribution. Think, perhaps, of a formerly enslaved person killing a former particularly abusive master, when other ways of seeking justice are not available.
3. Revolution is another potential justification. In other words, sparking a larger, violent struggle for a cause that is of utmost worthiness. Often assassins entertain hopes (usually narcissistic fantasies) that their actions will galvanize a revolution against some evil power structure. I would think this is rarely the sole justification in the mind of an assassin (assuming they are concerned with justifications at all). For it to be even an ancillary justification, one would need to credibly believe it would actually work to significantly advance the cause or struggle, and the worthiness of the revolutionary cause would, of course, be paramount. Maybe there are examples in history where an assassination actually led to a successful larger movement for a worthy cause, but I cannot think of one off the top of my head. One might think of Brutus's killing of his sons to restore the Roman Republic. But that was more about elimination, and anyway I don't think he was a very good dad. WWI was triggered by an assassination, they say. But, on balance, did enough good come of that war to justify a murder? It seems like the situation rather left us with a lot more murders wanting for justification. 
4. Deterrence. If an abusive powerful person is killed, other powerful people may be deterred from being similarly abusive. Similarly to revolution, it seems to me that, here, one would need to be fairly certain of the intended effect. And similarly to elimination, I think in realistic scenarios deterrence would not be the sole justification, but likely ancillary to retribution. In criminal justice, I do not condone "making an example" of someone by excessive punishment just to deter others. So, for me, deterrence on its own can't justify killing someone.

For the most part, these justifications map onto the justifications of punishment through modern criminal justice systems. Criminal Justice 101 teaches that criminals are imprisoned for four official reasons: 

• removal of a threat to the public, 
• retribution for the victim and the public,
• deterrence of others from doing similar crimes,
• rehabilitation of the criminal.

Perhaps any one of these would be sufficient justification in certain cases, but the point is that they apply together. And if there are cases of justified assassination, the justification would surely be likewise multi-dimensional. 

Of course, in the case of the death penalty (or assassination), rehabilitation is out the window. The justification that potentially applies to assassinations, but not to criminal justice is starting a revolution. The reason is pretty obvious: the act of assassination, while targeting an individual, is often directed toward that person as a representative or crucial agent within a large power structure, which would be the target of the intended revolution. The death penalty is an inverse scenario, in the sense that the structure (the state) is doing violence to the individual (criminal).

Even if we set morality aside, I think there are practical reasons to generally reject assassination as a way of starting a revolution. 

• First, it usually doesn't work. Assassinations can and do destabilize societies and states to some extent, as any violence does. That destabilization often works against democracy/republicanism, at least in the near term, because republics requires social trust and stable institutions of power sharing. Thus revolutions, being inherently destabilizing events, very often end in dictatorships. Assassinations, for similar reasons, often feed authoritarianism. 
• In cases where revolution itself is justified, non-violent social movements are often more successful than violent ones as a revolutionary tactic. This is what Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen claim to decisively show in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Somewhere between violence and non-violence lie non-lethal tactics of provocation and reprisal. See for example, the Boston Tea Party or the actions that initiated the Bougainville Revolution. These tactics seem to have a record of success that surpasses assassination, even if the latter were otherwise justified.
• If assassination were an effective way to initiate a violent revolutionary struggle, there would still remain the separate question of justifying the revolution itself, whether with a utilitarian calculus or otherwise. Violent revolutions cause a lot of suffering and death in their own right. The best revolutions are short revolutions, meaning those with a just cause and near certainty of success.

It seems to me that any justification of assassination, at least in realistic scenarios, would have to include retribution, which for me could only justify killing when the person is willfully and knowingly doing the most wrong kinds of things, and when the assassin is personally affected. I imagine that, in the right (by which I mean the most wrong) circumstances, many people are capable of being driven into a murderous rage that could be, if not justified, at least understood and perhaps forgiven. If someone knowingly killed someone close to me, someone I loved; if they did so for their own profit, power, or convenience; if they did so remorselessly, contemptuously… perhaps I could become one of those people. And I would probably feel justified. But why would I have to be personally affected? Is that selfish of me? Am I not unjustifiably privileging those close to me and my own pain and anguish? Shouldn't I consider, moreover, that in my time and place, I and my loved-ones have the privilege of being largely protected from the structural harm and systemic violence that befalls other people in other places? My defense is only this: if I were to exact the assassin's retribution on behalf of abstract others, I would be killing in cold blood. And this, in the end, is why I oppose the death penalty. Not because the worst criminals deserve life. But because, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, "the state is the coldest of cold monsters." And it always kills in cold blood.