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There can be slain

No sacrifice to God more acceptable

Than an unjust and wicked King

— Seneca, “Hercules Furens”

The brutal civil war in Syria — and in particular the numerous crimes against humanity committed by President Bashar al-Assad — have many people in the United States and elsewhere asking a familiar question: Are we morally obliged to intervene when a political leader is slaughtering civilians within his own territory? If we answer in the affirmative, discussion tends quickly to turn to the practical dimensions of humanitarian military intervention, which always carries the prospect of causing more harm than good.

Another alternative, one that we rarely discuss seriously anymore, has been examined often in the philosophical tradition: killing the tyrant. Why shouldn’t this be preferable to war?

In “The Statesman” and elsewhere, Plato makes clear that tyranny — a state of extreme political disorder in which a ruler has absolute power and uses it to only selfish ends, with disregard for law, wisdom, or the welfare of the populace — is the opposite of the virtuous kingship of the ideal state. Following this lead, Aristotle in “Politics” deems the killing of a tyrant to be a noble act, emphasizing the right of citizens to seek a public life leading to the good. Cicero is more emphatic. Tyrants show the exact opposite of the spirit of fraternity that should govern human interactions, and so, as he puts it in “De officiis,” “that pestilent and abominable race should be exterminated from human society.”

Like Cicero’s, the statement of Seneca’s Hercules that I have quoted as an epigraph arises from Stoic principles. It is a declaration that has enjoyed wide influence. The 16th-century German reformer Phillipp Melanchthon enthusiastically endorsed it, hoping that “some strong man” would kill King Henry VIII to avenge the death of Thomas Cromwell. John Milton quotes the same passage from Seneca in his vigorous defense of the execution of King Charles I, “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.” Melanchthon and Milton thus join a Protestant tradition of approving tyrannicide that includes John Knox and George Buchanan. That tradition finds 20th-century expression in the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the ethicist and Lutheran minister who conspired against Hitler. For Bonhoeffer, killing such enemies of humanity is a necessary component of pacifism: tyrants must be eliminated for peace to flourish.

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It is entirely possible, of course, that this chorus of worthies has things wrong. And an old idea is not necessarily a good one — slavery is an old idea; so is polygamy. In thinking about the ethics of the question, we might consider Immanuel Kant’s reasoning in opposing the execution of rulers. For Kant, the death penalty could be legitimately applied to a subject but not to a sovereign. The principle of jus talionis, or “law of retaliation,” calling for a punishment to match a crime, is in Kant’s terms fundamental to legal order, and can be used to justify the capital punishment of murderers. This is more than the simple retributive justice of an “eye for an eye.” It is founded instead on the idea that we forfeit any right we are not willing to extend to others: the murderer has disregarded another’s right to life, and so if acting with “honor,” as Kant describes it, would readily resign his own life. For Kant the sovereign is different. It is the role of the sovereign to secure legal order, rather than to be measured by it; in killing the sovereign, we potentially upset the stability of legal order as such.

This could lead us to two conclusions, one arguing for tyrannicide and the other putting a brake on it. The nature of legal order has changed since Kant’s time. As the past half-century’s trials of heads of state attest, we now do have mechanisms and precedents for applying rule of law to the conduct of rulers, which in and of itself suggests both conceptual and practical sources of justice above sovereignty. The legal order of our own time tends to be one of overlapping and multiple jurisdictional claims, rather than a single set of rules secured by the arbitrating presence of the sovereign. In our world much more than in Kant’s, one can take action against the sovereign without committing an assault on law itself.

But that conclusion may be too easy, which leads to our second one: there is no denying that national governments and the institutions they command remain in our world powerful stays against lawlessness. To satisfy Kant’s objection to eliminating the sovereign we must show that such action would actually advance the cause of justice rather than frustrate it further. Eliminating a tyrant is not virtuous if one is knowingly creating even greater conditions of disorder and destruction. Legitimate tyrannicide must flow from a good-faith effort to institute justice. To return to the example of Syria, when we hear news of extreme violence committed (or, in recent reports, claims of the use of chemical weapons) not just by government forces but by opposition forces, too, we must be led to wonder if the latter aim to replace Assad’s tyranny with one of their own making.

The effort to institute justice is one of several restrictions that we might impose on tyrannicide. At worst it is an alibi for the execution of political enemies. The most familiar examples of this tendency arose during the cold war, when a tyrant meriting assassination was one with Soviet sympathies and autocrats pliable to Western directives were deemed benign. To avoid this pitfall, we might first define a tyrant in terms familiar throughout history: a leader who rules by force, who has an incontrovertible record of directly ordering large-scale murder, and who is actively using a position of authority to engage in the slaughter of innocents. We might further define that person as a “rogue” in his refusal to participate in the community of nations, so that diplomatic and nonviolent restraint of his actions seems unachievable.

Cases in which tyrannicide seems an especially appropriate remedy will be those where the tyrant is a chief source of destructive commands in the polity, rather than presiding incompetently over a reckless and loosely organized military or security apparatus. In such an eventuality, the removal of the tyrant holds the strong possibility of ending the horrors taking place under his rule. But that removal, as we have said, must arise from the aspiration to implement a new and more peaceable civil order.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

None of these requirements, we should note, distinguish between the removal of a tyrant by domestic or foreign resistance. In ethical terms, such a distinction does not hold up to scrutiny: both foreign and domestic actors must strive for justice rather than conquest. We are rightly skeptical that foreign powers can ever have purely altruistic motives when intervening in the affairs of another state, but that skepticism should not lead us to assume that domestic forces have their fellow citizens’ best interests at heart. Conquest can come from within and without, and the obligation of cultivating justice applies equally to all.

Domestic and international law do not look kindly upon the assassination of a ruler, and it is not likely to be an option openly entertained by any diplomatic institutions. But that is at least partly because law and policy are created by political leaders, who rarely warm to ideas that might place them in the line of fire. As an ethical question the calculus is different. And if we do not see it as different, then we have allowed political authority to narrow the horizons of our ethical consideration. We often think of military intervention as an unfortunate if sometimes necessary course of action compromising truly humanitarian values. That sense of compromise is more pronounced still in light of the tradition urging us to take aim at the tyrant rather than his victims.



Feisal G. Mohamed is a professor at the University of Illinois. His most recent book is “Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism.” Follow him on Twitter at FGMohamed.