Becoming The Overman

ONE OF THE most interesting debates in public law for the past century has been the right to use deadly force for self-defense. Each state seems to have its own views on the subject, ranging from the more authoritarian stands to those that seem to appropriate higher leeway to interpretations, with some states retaining laws based around the use of deadly force to protect ones own property. In November of 2007, however, Texas resident Joe Horn created a unique amalgamation of these issues when he used his 12-gauge shotgun to stop two burglars from robbing his neighbor’s home.

The incident began mid-day on the fourteenth of November in 2007. Joe Horn, a 61-year-old resident of Pasadena, Texas, witnessed two burglars breaking into his next-door neighbor’s home. They used a crowbar to gain access to the house, but Horn, being at the house alone, could see no other weapons visible. Horn then dialed 911, staying on the phone with the emergency operator for the complete duration of the incident. Horn was asked to describe the scene as best as possible and to remain on the phone and indoors until the police arrived. After being asked, Horn described the burglars as “black,” and was even able to describe what clothes one of the suspects was wearing. A dialogue began between Horn and the operator in which Horn said he “wasn’t going to let them get away” and that he was going to leave the house to get a better look, but not without his shotgun. The operator repeatedly told him not to leave the house, stating that “ain’t no property worth shooting somebody over.” When asked if he knew the neighbors being robbed Horn claimed he did not, but that he did know the neighbors on the other side of his house and that, were they being robbed, he would have already done something about it. Horn then expressed disbelief that such a thing could be happening in his neighborhood, repeating that he has the right to defend himself, threatening to leave the house with his gun to get a better view. The situation escalated when Horn witnessed the burglars leaving the house through a window, with what he described as “a bag of loot.” He claimed that they were crossing over his property and that he was “going to kill them.” The operator calmly tells him not to leave the house or he will get hurt, to which Horn replies, “You want to bet?” The sound of his shotgun cocking can be heard, to which he says to the operator, “You hear that shotgun clicking? I’m going after them.” Horn then exits the home, yells to the burglars, “Move and you’re dead!” and immediately fires three shotgun rounds. When Horn speaks to the operator again, he tells him to send police quickly because he’s just shot the men, claiming, “They came in the front yard with me! I had no choice!”

Afterwards it is revealed that a police detective in civilian clothes responding to the 911 call witnessed the escalation and shooting. His report on the incident indicated that the men who were killed “received gunfire from the rear.” Police Captain A.H. Corbett stated the two men ignored Horn’s order to freeze and one of the suspects ran towards Horn before he angled away from him toward the street when he was shot in the back from fifteen feet away. Pasadena police confirmed that the two men were shot after they ventured into his front yard. The detective did not arrest Horn.

The two men were later identified as 38-year-old Hernando Riascos Torres and 30-year-old Diego Ortiz, convicted criminals and Columbian illegal-immigrants connected to an organized burglary ring in Houston. Joe Horn had been retired from AT&T for nine years and was living with his daughter and her husband at the time of the incident. Horn was an avid hunter for years, but had lost interest in the sport years before the shooting.

The ethical peculiarities of this incident bring about many different and unique philosophical issues, but before these elements are taken into account, we must first evaluate this ethical study with the “trifecta of ethics,” those being: who are the moral agents involved, what harms were or could have been done to them, and were those moral agents acting on free will or not?

In this instance we have several moral agents. The first and most important is Joe Horn himself. The second and third are the burglars, Hernando Torres and Diego Ortiz. The fourth is the unnamed emergency operator. These are the moral agents with direct involvement in the incident. The owner of the home being robbed is a moral agent as well, but was not involved in the peak of the incident, that being the murder of the robbers. Other more ambiguous moral agents could be Horn’s daughter and step-son, whose home he was in at the time of the burglary, and Horn’s neighborhood in general.

Now it is asked of us, what harms were done to the moral agents involved, and could there have been lesser harms done were other actions taken? We will tackle this question by first studying the harms and quality of those harms done in the incident as it happened.

The most obvious harm done seems to be the biggest harm possible; that is, the murder of two men. They are now pushing up daises, as it were, permanent fertilizer for a patch of grass in some Pasadena cemetery. Their familial status’ were unknown in most reports detailing the circumstances, so we do not know if they have any family that could have been harmed emotionally or financially by their deaths. They were members of what was called an “organized” burglary ring, with presumes that they were part of some larger criminal team that may or may not have lost two of its members – this could be good or bad, considering that if these two men were two of the best, then the ring is weaker; this could also, however, be considered the destruction of two weak links in an organization that is all the more better off with their absence. We wonder, then, if Joe Horn helped the organized crime by permanently shutting the mouths of two men whom, if caught, could have spilled the proverbial beans and led to larger arrests in the future. Now, however, Torres and Ortiz will never have to worry about being interrogated for information, because their right to remain silent seems to have been granted quite permanently.

The next subject for moral harm in this situation also seems to be the most important, that being the shooter himself, Joe Horn. His ability to question and comprehend the possible harms done to him through his actions is what led him to carry out those actions. We are to assume he is a reasonable man with what is considered at least an average ability to make a rational decision; he would have a hard time arguing against this in court, namely for his reiterations, and running knowledge thereof, of current laws that would legally allow him to do what he did. With this assumption under our belt, we have a 61-year-old man who is watching two men half his age committing a serious and possibly violent crime at the house beside his – the information regarding the sizes of their properties, and therefore the physical distance between Horn and the two men while the robbery was underway, was not available at the time of this research, so the distance between houses could have been two hundred feet or it could have been twenty feet. The idea that Horn’s actions were done out of fear is then not a difficult one to grasp. There is also the harm being done to his neighbor’s property as motivation, but Horn debunks that theory when he states that he doesn’t know the homeowner, but that if it were someone he did know, he would have “already done something about it.” The fear that his neighborhood , as an idea rather than a place, was being hurt seemed to be what triggered Horn’s response. He repeated how what they were doing was just wrong, and that he wasn’t going to let it happen in his neighborhood. His eagerness to confront the men with his shotgun, not knowing if they themselves were armed, coupled with his comments to the operator, seems to debunk the idea of pure fear driving his actions. They were doing something wrong and he had the legal right to kill them for it, of which his intentions were nothing less. The idea that his family could be hurt at a later date is a representation of fear, but his dialogue tends to show unequivocally that his intentions were to kill them, not to stop activity in his neighborhood – besides that fact that organized crime has never been known for its ability to let bygones be bygones, and the murder of two members could actually have put his family in ever greater danger of personal attacks.

On the subject of free will, there seems to be no circumstances in which any of the moral agents involved acted against their own consent. The robbers chose to rob the house and Joe Horn chose to kill them. It could be argued that the robbers were forced to rob the house by a superior, but since that claim cannot be proven it is exempt from the debate.

Our next step is to take into account the different philosophical studies that can be applied to the situation at hand. Kant’s categorical imperative, Aristotle’s virtue ethics, and Rawls’ equality principle all play a part in the philosophical evaluations of the moral agents involved and stall be interpreted one by one.

We’ll begin by looking at Emanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. The theory states that one should act only on that maxim that you can will to be universal law, and derived from this thesis are the four perfect duties, those things that, when universalized, result in an illogical world. There are two that relate to this situation. The first is the maxim “don’t steal.” The second is the maxim “don’t kill.” I argue against the validity of the maxim “don’t steal” because there are certain cultures who do not appropriate property to each other, and therefore have no conception of theft. There is, however, no culture in which a maxim follows that everyone should kill everyone else – that culture would exist for about a day and a half. Therefore, as much as the burglars should not have been stealing, it goes against Kant’s perfect duties far more harshly to kill them for it. We also have a problem once we try universalizing the maxim that everyone should kill burglars. The entire basis of our court system, build on the foundation of innocent until proven guilty, would be shattered. The world would be filled with crossfire as vigilantes took the law into their own unorganized hands, sentencing capital punishment to whomever they see fit.

Next we take a look at Aristotle’s virtue ethics and how they apply to this case. Aristotle was one of the last in a long line of student and pupil philosophers, including Socrates and Pluto, two of the most celebrated philosophers in human history. Aristotle’s virtue ethics bind themselves on the idea of a “golden mean,” a center line for all virtuous attributes found in man. It states that all virtues have an excess form and a deficiency form – in other words, you can have too much of a good thing, and you can have too little as well. In the case of Joe Horn, we see that he attempted to show courage, which is a good virtue, by going out and shooting the two men. This response to watching a neighbor’s home getting robbed is a golden mean reaction about as much as killing a fly with a bazooka is. Were the men armed, Horn could have been killed. Were Horn to miss them, or hit and not kill them, the retaliation on his home could have been multiples of what it was before. Even shooting and killing them, Horn has officially made himself the public target of organized violence in his neighborhood, a grudge on his family that will possibly not die with him. By placing so many more people in danger than was necessary, Horn showed his actions to be foolhardy rather than courageous; his excessive, anger-based reactions may have caused more harm than good. It should be noted that virtue ethics also claim that one cannot be too just; this does not mean that there is no such thing as too much justice, particularly when that justice denies certain law-given rights, even to criminals.

The last conjecture is John Rawls’ equality principle. In his theory it is stated that a person must make decisions from what he called the “original position.” This original position was described as being cloaked in a veil of ignorance through which personal attributed were stripped for a decision. More closely to our argument is the equality principle itself, which states that there should be the same rights for everybody. In this case, the right to trial and jury, among others including but not limited to the right not to be murdered for theft when one is posing no physical danger whatsoever. There is a reason police officers aren’t allowed to shoot burglars when they catch them. As nice as the philosophy might sound, and as good as it might immediately seem to be to kill what are considered bad people, the long-term consequences of allowing acts like this to go unpunished is a far worse end.

In the end, when we look at Joe Horn, we do not see a man who was forced into a situation in which he had to take two lives, we see a man who was given the legal chance to take two lives. It wasn’t to protect himself, it was because he could. Perhaps he gave up hunting animals because the idea bored him. Who knows? But I am reminded of a martial artist who spent his entire life waiting for a situation to prove to himself what he could do. What this comes down to is simple; the right for a person to be sentenced to a court procedure and to receive a just and equal punishment for their crimes is something that cannot be traded in for personal feelings of security.

Posted by C. Nicholas Walker on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 10:15 PM | Permalink