Hello again欢迎来到Happy Hour英文小酒馆。关注公众号璐璐的英文小酒馆，加入我们的酒馆社群，邂逅更精彩更广阔的世界。

Hi, everyone. And welcome back to 【Let's Philosophize】.欢迎回来《知乎哲也》.

Hi, TJ.

Hey, Lulu. Good to see you again.

Good to see you. TJ, I know that every time you ask me a question to start our discussion, can I ask you a question this time?

Yeah, of course, go ahead.

Have you been following up on one of the top trending news on Chinese social media about what happened in Tangshan?

Yeah, I’ve seen the video, and I’ve read a few different opinions online, a lot of people have been talking about it.

One topic that has come up is the topic of self-defense, should we do it, how should we do it, and how much should we do it?

So I thought we can talk about self-defense from a philosophical point of view.

Yeah, of course. It's good to look at these real life situations in philosophy because I know sometimes it's very abstract. And self-defense is a situation that we have to face on our own.

The police, they can't be everywhere all the time, and I don't think we would want the police to be everywhere all the time either, that would make us uncomfortable.

So it means there's always that chance that we meet these situations where we have to defend ourselves. And of course, there's the practical side of that, the martial arts and all different kinds of strategies that we can use to defend ourselves.

But there's also the question of what should we do? You know, how should we treat people?

Exactly.

So when we talk about self-defense, it's always good to look at this from a moral point of view, in terms of what should we do if we want to be good people.

And the first thing we can look at is the deservingness of the person. So should this person be harmed? We might say yes, sometimes we might say no.

So if we use a simple example of hitting somebody, so I’m a reasonably healthy man, if a child hits me, most people would say that child does not deserve to be hit by me, right, that I can't just hit the child.

Okay. Deservingness就是正当性. Should they be harmed? So you just give the example of a child, maybe also people who have mental illness?

Right, mental illness or maybe even if they're very drunk, we changed the rules for people if they're drunk too.

I’m not sure I agree with the drunk thing because that was actually one of the big issue here.

Some people were mentioning in this incident that happened in China saying all these people were drunk, you know how drunk people are.

But being drunk, if you are mentally all right, like if you're not mentally ill, then being drunk really shouldn't be your get out of jail free card. It shouldn't be your excuse.

Exactly. I think there's different levels of drunkenness as well, just like mental health, if you feel a little bit down one day, that doesn't mean that you can do anything you want.

And the same thing with drunkenness, I remember my sister punched me in the face when she was very, very drunk, but she also couldn't stand up at that point, she couldn't stand up straight, she didn't know where she was.

So I think that these… in this case, I don't think we can say that these men were so drunk that they didn't know what they were doing, right?

Yeah.

I don't think they have that kind of excuse. They don't look mentally unhealthy to me. It seems like that they are normal adults, right, that we would expect them to behave better than what they did.

I think a lot of this deservingness is based on their… whether they can be responsible for their behaviors, if they can, they should; if as a child or as a mental patient, you actually cannot be responsible, then it's something else.

Right.

So often when we talk about self-defense, then we have to give a justification, right, why can we harm people? And one of those is a lesser-evil justification. That's really just what it sounds like.

Lesser-evil.

Something bad will happen if we do something, but we can stop that from happening, if we do something bad but not as bad.

中文叫“两害取其轻”.

Right. We often see this lesser-evil justification when the police use a taser gum to stop somebody, right? It's not nice to be tased but it's much better than this person stabbing someone or shooting someone doing something very bad, right?

Ture.

So it's okay to harm people if you are trying to stop something worse from happening.

So that's one way you can decide when… if you want to defend yourself whether that's what you want to do.

The other idea is that you lose some of your rights. We normally say most people have a right not to be attacked, but if you do certain things, then maybe you lose that right. Maybe people are allowed to hit you if you hit them first. That's another sense that we use that.

I see. So you forfeit your right of not being hurt if you initiate the attack.

Right. But it's not like a light switch, right, it's not on or off that you suddenly, if something happens, you lose all of your right.

This is where we move on to another thing that we talk about when we talk about self-defense, which is proportionality.

Proportionality叫“比例原则”或者“相称性”. Is this about how much should this person be hurt?

Right. We have this idea that you can defend yourself, but some things are too much.

I remember when I was in high school, there was a fight. One of the boys hit another boy, and the other boy hit him back and knocked him to the ground, everybody seemed okay with that, that was okay.

But then the boy started kicking the boy who fell to the ground when he was on the ground. And then everybody went to stop the other person from doing it.

It seems like he went too far, right, that we have this idea, you can defend yourself, but you can't do something that is really far beyond what you need to do to protect your own safety.

I see, so that's proportionality. Whatever self-defense is, it should fit the original harm done.

So for example, if someone slaps me, I shouldn't kill him or her because that wouldn't fit the proportionality.

Right, right, again with philosophy, there's always somebody that will disagree, but I think almost everyone would agree with you that, Lulu, that it's very unusual that what someone would say that it was proportionate to kill somebody if they slapped you.

Proportionality comes in the physical, but we also have proportionality in terms of the words that we use as well.

In some countries, in some places, you can use words if you're threatened. So someone says maybe they're going to kill you, or if you feel like you are in danger, so it doesn't actually have to be that you're attacked, that you feel like you're in danger, then you can defend yourself.

But usually that danger has to be very clear, right? Like someone saying they're going to kill you or something like this.

Yeah, because otherwise there would definitely be people who will exploit that.

For example, I can attack you. And then I would just say I attacked TJ because he threatened to hurt me. But then again, with words, it's going to be very difficult to prove sometimes.

Right. We don't want to talk too much about American politics, but The Rittenhouse case in America is a good example where you have a young man with a gun and there were several incidents, and several people that got shot.

But one of the things that happened was somebody tried to grab his gun and take it away from him.

And he said, well, I felt like that was a danger to my life. I didn't know if this person takes my gun away from me. I don't know what they're going to do when they get the gun. So I had the right to defend myself, I had the right to shoot this person.

Whether or not you think he should have the gun in the first place is a different question. But it is interesting, this fear is also a good reason why we can defend ourselves.

Yeah, it's almost like a preemptive self-defense, and now this is very tricky territory. Because maybe the threat they’re feeling is real, but unless they are actually attacked, I think it will be a bit difficult to argue the ground or justification for self-defense, because you are not technically attacked. You are verbally threatened.

Then I mean, you can protect yourself, but self-defense in the form of actually harming the other person, I’m not sure about this, I think probably case by case.

Right. And the Americans are famously very liberal with this, when someone comes onto your property or if they have a firearm, then it's very easy in America to say that you fear for your life, and you're right, you can kill someone or seriously harm them.

In the UK, we had a similar case where some boys were breaking into somebody's house, a farmer's house. He had a shotgun because he's a farmer, he shot the boys, but he was sent to jail. And they said that's not a good enough reason, just because they're breaking into your house.

Yeah. I think it's very, very different in different legal system, and then legal systems are changing as well. This is the whole point of where's the limit of self-defense? Should there be any situation that can justify self-defense without any limits?

For example, you feel threatened or you are actually attacked, then you can actually kill the attacker. That is a very complex legal matter.

You know after we talked about deservingness, the proportionality, the other thing is also about obligation, I often think do we have to defend ourselves?

Because that sort of the argument where sometimes in some cases you are hurt and then you might be going to the police and I’m not saying any specific police, but they might say why don't you defend yourself? For example, you could have defended yourself.

Now I’m just thinking that sort of argument, do we have to engage in self-defense?

Well. That is a really interesting argument because on one hand, we want to say that we should protect everybody, right, that human life is special in some way, that would include your own life. You have some kind of obligation to protect yourself.

But on the other side of that spectrum, you have pacifists, you have people that say you should…

Exactly.

Never harm people. And any harm is always bad. It's a little bit difficult. Most people have an animal instinct, right, that tells them to protect themselves.

So we don't usually worry too much about people not defending themselves. And like they say in Buddhism to drop your knife and become a buddha, right? And…

放下屠刀, 立地成佛.

Right, to let go of this feeling. A lot of people want to defend themselves, but some people do suffer a lot and don't defend themselves.

So maybe… even if you don't defend yourself directly through violence, that you have a duty to find some way to protect yourself from being harmed, whether that's through the police or friends or family.

Yeah. But then we're getting into a very complex territory of obligation, because why should we have to defend ourselves. Why shouldn't the system or other people automatically defend us?

But then again, that's way too complex.

We're talking about this today, not to say what is right or what is wrong in self-defense, but it's more to give a philosophical angle of discussing this.

And then, so today we've actually talked about deservingness, proportionality and also obligation of self-defense.

Leave a comment in the comment section, let us know what is your view on self-defense. And we're going to wrap up here. Thank you, TJ for coming to the show.

Thank you very much for having me.

I will see you next time.

Bye.