The ethics of killing the dead

They covered this exact scenerio in the Movie "Magnolia"

A 17-year-old boy, Sydney Barringer, attempts suicide by jumping off the roof of his apartment building; this attempt became a "successful homicide" when he was accidentally shot by his mother as he fell past his own apartment window. His parents regularly argued and threatened each other with a shotgun that was normally kept unloaded. Unbeknown to them, Sydney had loaded the gun a few days earlier hoping they would make good on their threats to kill one another. As a result, he unwittingly became an accomplice in his own murder. The irony here is that a newly installed protective netting for window washers on the building's exterior below their apartment, would have saved his life if he had not been hit by the shotgun blast that he himself had loaded.

Now, was Mr. Bullseye wrong to shoot Mr. Gravity?

Wait, let's give them their real names (or their user names), Mr Gravity is of course OmSigDavid, and Mr. Bullseye is actually cjhsa, our two resident gun freaks.

And to make it more of a judicial dilemma, the actual ending of the story is that OmSig, shot in fall by cj, flails his arms in his final agony, which act like airfoils and move his body sufficiently sidewise so that he falls on cj. His body is moving so fast because of the 100 story fall that he mashes cj flat. Did he kill cj? He was already dead when he fell on him, so he certainly didn't have the volition. But they are both dead.

Moral, he who lives by the gun dies by the gun.

Let us suppose that Mr. Bullseye is the sworn enemy of Mr. Gravity. Indeed, their enmity is so bitter and ineradicable that one day Mr. Bullseye determines to go to the penthouse home of Mr. Gravity and shoot him dead. On his way to this grim assignment, Mr. Bullseye (who has excellent vision) notes that Mr. Gravity is standing on a window ledge 100 stories above the ground. Mr. Gravity then jumps. He is, without a doubt, going to be killed -- there is no earthly chance that he might survive such a fall. Given that Mr. Gravity is, for all intents and purposes, a dead man, the quick-thinking Mr. Bullseye, not one to be so easily thwarted by fate, decides to fulfill his life's ambition and shoot Mr. Gravity. He takes aim and fires, and Mr. Gravity is shot dead just as he passes the 40th floor. His lifeless body then plummets the remaining distance and splatters upon the sidewalk below.

Now, was Mr. Bullseye wrong to shoot Mr. Gravity?

joefromchicago wrote:

Now, was Mr. Bullseye wrong to shoot Mr. Gravity?

You're talking ethics as separate from the legal issue, right?

Well, Mr. Bullseye took away Mr. Gravity's choice in the matter. Mr. Gravity wanted to kill himself, for his own reasons, in his own way. Mr. Bullseye prevented that from happening. The end result might be the same but it wasn't up to Mr. Bullseye to make that decision for Mr. Gravity.

(And really, isn't it remotely possible that a huge truck full of inflated bouncy castles could have parked directly under Mr. Gravity's fall-path making Mr. Bullseye a murderer? Until he actually hit the ground, Mr. Gravity's fate was "up in the air" -- yeah, wincing as I type that...)

Please be gentle; I remember almost nothing from Philosophy 101.

This is all rather ridiculous, in my view. Obviously Mr. Bullseye is not God, and just because he cannot see a way in which Mr. Gravity could survive does not mean that it is impossible.

One could further argue that prematurely ending his life two seconds before his inevitable death is still premature.

I much prefer the moral dilemma in Lost regarding the dying marshall.

DrewDad wrote:

This is all rather ridiculous, in my view. Obviously Mr. Bullseye is not God, and just because he cannot see a way in which Mr. Gravity could survive does not mean that it is impossible.

Well, in a Humean sense I suppose it's also possible that Mr. Gravity might float suspended in mid-air or fall up rather than down. Anything, after all, is possible.

DrewDad wrote:

One could further argue that prematurely ending his life two seconds before his inevitable death is still premature.

Why should that make any ethical difference?

Under the terms of my hypothetical, it is beyond the realm of possibility that Mr. Gravity would survive his fall. There is, consequently, no doubt that, if Mr. Bullseye doesn't kill him, the sidewalk will.

DrewDad wrote:

One could further argue that prematurely ending his life two seconds before his inevitable death is still premature.

Why should that make any ethical difference?