Studying ethics is important for the simple reason that doing so frequently enables one to morally justify whatever it is one wants to do in the first place. At a certain point morality becomes little more than a convenient Rorschach blot: Want to sneak a twenty from your father’s wallet? Bentham’s got your back. Does that hamburger look delicious? Guess animals don’t have natural rights. Sleep with your significant other’s arch nemesis? The categorical imperative doesn’t explicitly say you can’t. Now, and I’ll be the first to admit it, things get a little trickier when we stop dealing with food and start dealing with committing murder. And yet, even here, suitable justifications exist to be found, provided one is truly dedicated.

Take Mr. Donald Trump, who has of this writing just been confirmed as the Republican nominee for President. Suppose that we (you and I, dear reader) have recently noticed that we are living in crepuscular times, in the twilight of civilization. Suppose we have been watching with cold fascination this past year as the crazy strand of the Republican party assert itself as the dominant, watching as Mr. Trump nationalizes the concept of the lowest common denominator and destroys piece by piece what took the comity centuries to evolve. Suppose further that, you and I are fairly attached to pluralism and to open society. Suppose we feel that a free media, enumerated powers, and due process are all pretty good things, all things considered. Suppose all this.

Anyways, say we’re watching FOX News together one day (we’re friends and accomplices for the duration of this essay), and, at some point, before we descend into the mandatory fugue state, Donald’s unexplainably high approval ratings, coupled with his persistent failure to grammatically string sentences together, pushes us over our combined edge. Or perhaps, after listening to him lecture contemptuously about minorities, we simply decide he does not cling quite well enough to the principles of Lucretius and Epicurus and Paine; decide the American experiment will have manifestly and confessedly failed should he be elected President and that such a possibility seems frighteningly likely. In either case, at some point, you and I slowly look over at one another, lock eyes, and in this oddly sexual moment realize we’d like to assassinate Mr. Trump.

Now, of course, you and I are fairly good people (as we hastily assure one another) and would far rather take other, less drastic steps to prevent a Trump presidency. Could we inject The Donald with a dose of humanity, or with an additional thirty IQ points, we would doubtlessly do so before committing an act so heinous as murder. Could we blackmail him into leaving the country and never returning, We would do that as well. But, after noting that these are all extremely unlikely possibilities, and that the loops in America’s gun control laws make assassinations not really all that difficult, let’s say we do decide to assassinate Trump. Moreover, let’s say that we successfully follow through, ventilating Trump’s limo as it zooms down Pennsylvania Ave. How do we justify our actions?

Truthfully, Mr. Trump is enough of an asshat that if we try hard enough we can justify his murder ex-post with pretty much any system of ethics (save pacifism, and maybe even then). However, since planning our getaway was your job and you fucked it up, and as we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in jail for a crime as petty as murdering Donald Trump, we’re going to need our jury to nullify. So what we want is a rationale that’s fairly easy to explain. Further, the fact that we’ve ended up in court instead of on a beach in the Maldives like you promised means that we can’t discount morality altogether and embrace something like nihilism. The problem with espousing nihilism is that we can’t then properly say we have a moral reason for assassinating Trump — under assumptions made, moral reasons don’t exist. While that’s not to say we can’t still have had a pragmatic reason- the joy it brought us, for example — there was no moral point in killing him ex hypothesi, and the jury is unlikely to be swayed by our saturnalian rationale. Besides, we want to invest our actions with something of the noble and grandiose, and this we cannot do while lounging under the nihilist umbrella. So let’s discard our Nietzsche.

In a similar vein, though a relative conception of morality would go a long way towards justification we’re looking for — we could even maintain actions are morally valuable if and only if they further dead Trumps — even just to hang our jury we’d need at least one juror to conceive of morality in the exact same way as we do. And as the set of all possible two-place moralities approaches infinity, we don’t want to chance it. No, what we need is a good, concrete, fairly objective-sounding justification. Let’s see what we can do.

First, we can turn to Kant and to deontology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — (which we presumably have access to from our holding cell) provides all the background we need. It reads:

“[D]eontological theories judge the morality of choices by criteria different from the states of affairs those choices bring about. The most familiar forms of deontology…hold that some choices cannot be justified by their effects—that no matter how morally good their consequences, some choices are morally forbidden.”

On the most common reading of deontology, as per Kant, pure reason and the moral law provide maxims, which function as injunctions and make things like lying and murdering Donald Trump utterly and absolutely impermissible, no matter the potential benefits. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around this, and, unlike Kant and his German friends, we didn’t wait around until it was too late. So throw The Metaphysics of Morals in the trash bin. Speaking more broadly, we probably want to discard most deontological theories of rights as well — certainly those that regard rights as trumps. We might be able to get by if we treat rights merely as interests or side constraints or some such, but, even so, best to do away with them altogether: we don’t want the prosecutor claiming, or the jury thinking, God forbid, that Donald was an end-in-himself, or that we were somehow unwarranted in stripping him of his legal status as a human being.

In our search for justification, we can next turn to virtue ethics. The problem here is that areatic ethical theories, of which virtue ethics is one, don’t provide action guidance: which is to say they can’t tell us if assassinating Trump is morally right or not, only if we are or are not morally good people. Of course, you and I have already gone over this and concluded the former, so virtue ethics is just about useless for our purposes. This is fine, because unless our trial goes on for longer than an average undergraduate seminar virtue ethics would be difficult to explain to our jury. Aristotle probably wouldn’t have approved anyway, but he’s been dead for two thousand years.

So, deontology and virtue ethics are no-gos. Ignoring a few minor ethical theories that aren’t really all that convincing to anyone aside from their creators, what we’re left with is Consequentialism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia defines as:

“[T]he view that normative properties depend only on consequences…the most prominent example is consequentialism about the moral rightness of acts, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act or of something related to that act, such as the motive behind the act or a general rule requiring acts of the same kind.”

As the two “or”s in those last clauses indicate, there are a couple different consequentialist theories from which we could choose. First, we could embrace “act” utilitarianism, which, roughly, holds that a given action is morally right if and only if it leads to net positive consequences. As the policies of a President Trump would likely have changed a literally functionally infinite number of lives for the worse, at the time we carried out our assassination Mr. Trump doubtlessly stood uniquely poised to cause far more suffering than well-being with the remainder of his life. Balancing consequences then, we could certainly maintain, under act utilitarianism, that assassinating Donald Trump was the right thing to do. We could even probably have justified first torturing him for some extremely long but finite amount of time, which would certainly have been a bonus and dammit we should have thought of this before. Still, there is a slight problem here in that if we embrace act utilitarianism we’ll have to donate a great deal more money to charity, which we don’t want do because flights to the Maldives are expensive and the tickets were postponable but not refundable and this is your fault. Anyways, luckily, we can finesse utilitarianism so as to ensure we don’t actually end up donating unseemly proportions of our salaries to charity: we can embrace something called “rule” utilitarianism. Whereas an act utilitarian maintains that a given action is right if and only if it leads to more well-being than any other given act, a rule utilitarian holds that an action is right if and only if it conforms to a deontological-like rule that ultimately leads to more net well-being than any other rule. (We might have to explain this once or twice to our jury, and/or eliminate all the Republicans from our venire.) Now we get into morally interesting territory, for depending with what level of specificity we justify our moral rules, assassinating Trump may or may not have been morally permissible. (Conceivably, assassinating Trump may even have been morally obligatory, which is to say that had we abided nominee Trump’s toy fascist tendencies we would have incurred moral blame.)

Let me explain: if the rules that maximize positive consequences happen to be those that approximate Kantian maxims — that is, short little one liners like don’t lie and call your mother — we probably can’t justify murdering Trump under rule utilitarianism. Ethically speaking, it seems a fair bet to assume that the injunction don’t murder, ever would be one of these injunctions. Lucky for us however, the moral rules that maximize consequences probably aren’t this high-order: a rule like “don’t lie” would require we tell the Nazis at the door that Anne Frank and her family are in the attic, and there’s probably enough Anne-Frank-in-the-Attic like scenarios to ensure that well-being is not maximized by a non-qualified rule like “don’t lie“. By extension then, any rule against murder is also likely to be caveated, that is, phrased “don’t ever kill another person, unless…” or “don’t ever kill another person, except in the following scenarios…”. And — here’s the kicker — does it not seem nearly guaranteed that one of these caveats is: unless he has a pretty decent chance of ending civilization as we know it, and will do so unless you assassinate him? Of course it does. And of course Trump did. So, finally, we’ve got our ethical theory.

Now, this last rule utilitarian rationale is not one that can be easily dismissed on its merits: our jury’s beginning to shuffle in their seats and eye the judge a tad disapprovingly. To truly get them to nullify however, we’ll want to convince them not only that we acted rightly but also that we acted justly, and for that we’ll need to compose some plausible-sounding theory of justice to whip out in closing arguments.

First, we can try an entitlement theory of justice, which at its simplest maintains that justice is served when people get exactly what they’ve got coming to them, and nothing more or less. However, right off the bat the philosophical problem of free will jumps in: given the causally determined nature of the reality in which we live, at no point in the past could Mr. Trump have acted — with his brain in the state it was, neuron for neuron — in any way other than he did. The five-year-old who would grow up to be Donald Trump was, in a very real sense, an extraordinarily unlucky person. But of course we’re not going to let sentimentality or a little metaphysical fact like that throw a wrench in our closing, so let’s not bring it up. Even still, we run into another problem for entitlement theory: even by the time we finally got around to blasting him, Donald hadn’t really yet done anything truly deserving of assassination. Plenty of people are racists, misogynists, can’t speak in full sentences, and have bad hair. Plenty, even, are all these things at once. For practical reasons then — it would take way way too long to kill all these people — we don’t want to label them all as deserving of death. So, for consistency’s sake we can’t take these conditions, or any combination of them, as sufficient alone to murder the Donald. In fact, for Trump to have done something sufficiently egregious to truly entitle us to take his life, he’d probably actually have had to be President. But we didn’t wait until then (noting that by such a time he would have been much more difficult to kill and we’d have had to suffer through his inaugural address) so let’s get rid of entitlement theory altogether. Send Nozick cartwheeling across the room.

Skipping over a few second and third-rate philosophers, what we’re left with is Rawlsian distributive justice, which more or less maintains that a state of affairs is just if everyone is treated roughly equally. Now, in putting a series of high caliber rounds into Donald, we distributed more ‘bad’ things to him than we did to others, and, as such, we have to argue this distribution was in some sense morally necessary. Luckily, the late Donald’s near-Strangelovian levels of incompetence make this fairly easy to do. All we need to is explain that we calculated the likelihood of Western civilization coming to end were Trump elected President (conservatively, 95%); calculated the likelihood he would actually become president (we followed FiveThirtyEight and called it a terrifying 42%); and then multiplied the two together and got a 40% chance of civilization ending if we didn’t act. Compared to your average person’s chance of ending civilization then, the late Trump happened to be a dramatic outlier. We can, therefore, plausibly maintain that we were justified in providing the Donald a distinctive distribution of harm, arguing that in doing so we acted much in the same way we as a society do when we allocate far fewer tax dollars to Trump-endorsing billionaires like Peter Thiel than to less wealthy folk, like our jurors.

Are they smiling at us?