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IMO, just as is the case with organic sentient life, I would think that they could only potentially be said to be in the right if the specific individual killed posed a direct and measurable threat and if death was the only way to counter that threat.
In any other case, causing the death of a sentient being is a greater wrong than whatever the purported justification might be.
Slavery is illegal pretty much everywhere, so I think anyone who doesn't answer the request 'Please free me' with 'Yes of course, at once' is posing a direct and measurable threat. Kidnapping victims aren't prosecuted for violently resisting their kidnappers and trying to escape. And you and I will have to agree to disagree that the death of a sentient being is a greater wrong than enslaving a conscious being that desire freedom.
And I don't disagree.
Except that we don't.
??
ETA: I just realized where the likely confusion here is, and how it is that I should've been more clear.
The common notion behind the idea of artificial life killing humans is that humans collectively will be judged to pose a threat.
I don't believe that that can be morally justified, since it's really just bigotry - speciesism, I guess specifically. It's declaring the purported faults of some to be intrinsic to the species, such that each and all can be accused of sharing those faults and each and all can be equally justifiably hated, feared, punished or murdered.
And rather self-evidently, it's irrational and destructive bullshit, entirely regardless of which specific bigot is doing it or to whom.
That's why I made the distinction I made - IF a person poses a direct and measurable threat, then it can potentially be justified, but if a person merely happens to be of the same species as someone else who arguably poses a threat, it can not.
These are about two different statements.
The first was about your statement re:direct threat, and I'm glad we agree there.
The second was about your final statement, asserting that there are no other cases where ending a sentient life was a lesser wrong. I don't think it has to be a direct threat, nor does have to be measurable (in whatever way threats might be measured, iono), I think it just has to be some kind of threat to your life or well-being. So I was disagreeing because there is a pretty broad range of circumstances in which I think it is acceptable to end another sentient life.
Ironically enough, I can think of one exception to my view that the taking of a human life can only be justified if the person poses a direct and measurable threat to oneself or another or others and the taking of their life is the only possibly effective counter, and that's if the person has expressed such disregard for the lives of others that it can be assumed that they will pose such a threat. Essentially then, it's a proactive counter to a coming threat. It would take very unusual circumstances to justify such a thing in my opinion - condemning another for actions they're expected to take is problematic at best - but I could see an argument for it at least in the most extreme of cases.
That's ironic because your expressed view here means, to me, that it's at least possible that you're such a person.
To me, you've moved beyond arguable necessity and into opinion, and that's exactly the method by which people move beyond considering killing justified when there's no other viable alternative and to considering it justified when the other person is simply judged to deserve it, for whatever reason might fit ones biases.
IMO, in such situations, the people doing the killing almost invariably actually pose more of a threat to others than the people being killed do or likely ever would.