The three primary considerations are:
- How many people have they killed (“Have”)
- How many people will they kill (“Will”)
- To what extent are they an obstacle/threat to your ability to eliminate more targets (“Obstacle”)
Each of these clearly is a scalar in itself, that is easy to rank. The question is, when the relative orderings do not accord, which of these should take priority?
First we must eliminate the simple cases:
- If an individual is preventing you from eliminating many/important targets, they become the first target you should eliminate (not only are they now in league with/protecting those other targets and therefore are acceptable to kill from that perspective, they also now will kill you if you continue, and hence must be dealt with first) (Obstacle > Have/Will)
- A person who clearly can’t kill anyone else due to disability (especially mental), or gross loss of power, goes down towards the bottom of the list (Will ~0)
- Someone who only claims or threatens to kill a lot of people goes toward the bottom, since neither can you punish them for crimes they haven’t committed, nor are their words going to be a more reliable predictor than the actions of other targets (Have ~0, Obstacle/Will unclear)
Hence we must consider, arguing by cases, something along the lines of the following:
- Have clearly > Will uncertain > Obstacle likely (“Inert If Undisturbed?”)
- Will likely > Have > Obstacle likely or guaranteed at low level of force (high level of force covered by above simple case) (“Kill Until Stopped”)
- Will > Obstacle (likely) > Have non-zero (“Threatening More”)
- Have > Obstacle (likely) > Will non-zero (“All-Around Menace”)
Considering that the assumption is that the “Inert if Undisturbed?” does not obviously prevent you from dealing with a significant number of first-rank threats, they can be left for the time being.
If we considered that we knew the Will part of “Threatening More” and “All-Around Menace” precisely, we could order them; however, it’s not clear what the relative motivations are, and whether those relative orders really mean anything in practice. If someone’s killed 2000 people one by one, and is the head of a gang (“Threatening More”), are they a more productive target than an Augusto Pinochet (“All-Around Menace”) if he’s only killed a few thousand people, yet seems to have returned to some level of civil society? Why is he Augusto Pinochet and not Bashar al-Assad/Assad family? That doesn’t sound reliable.
The “Kill Until Stopped” simply is a matter of ranking the death toll incurred by not eliminating the individual(s) vs. the death toll incurred by leaving the other targets for later.
Therefore I think the correct ordering is:
- Anyone who clearly is preventing you from eliminating the most dangerous murderers/highest rate of murder sources
- The people who produce more murder on a regular basis, or have a lot of power and are more than willing to use it against their innocent opponents
- The individuals on a rampage against allies and innocents
- The notorious murderers or settled-down dictators who currently do not seem to be on a crime spree
- The retired dictators