That would be stretching it_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

That would be stretching it

I wrote to McMahan afterward to follow up; he noted that chats are not exactly conducive to conveying qualifications. He also wrote,

First, the claim that it could in principle be permissible to kill a journalist if that were the only way to prevent him or her from releasing information that would result in the deaths of innocent people was a claim about what’s in principle possible but I think it has almost no practical relevance. Such cases are so unlikely to arise that they’re hardly worth taking seriously. Journalists are seldom in possession of information that, if published, will result in innocent people being killed. And even if a journalist were to have such information and be tempted to release it, there would almost certainly be other ways than killing of preventing the release.

McMahan offered a scenario that he thought would fit: a hypothetical village occupied by Nazis, whose inhabitants must decide whether to kill “a Quisling journalist” who is about to reveal that some of their neighbors are secretly Jewish. (A somewhat different circumstance, since a secret is being delivered to the governing power rather than suppressed by it.) “But there are almost never real cases of this sort,” McMahan added, which is why the “only reasonable rule,” in terms of law and policy, if not ethics, was that journalists were protected from attack. (Both he and Walzer distinguished between the ethical, legal, and political issues.)