Material contribution, responsibility, and liability (forthcoming in Journal of Moral Philosophy) (original) (raw)

A Practical Account of Self-Defence (Law and Philosophy)

I argue that any successful account of permissible self- defence must be action-guiding, or practical. It must be able to inform people’s deliberation about what they are permitted to do when faced with an apparent threat to their lives. I argue that this forces us to accept that a person can be permitted to use self-defence against Apparent Threats: characters whom a person reasonably, but mistakenly, believes threaten her life. I defend a hybrid account of self-defence that prioritises an agent’s subjective perspective. I argue that it is sufficient to render the use of defence permissible if an agent reasonably believes that (a) she is morally innocent, and (b) if she does not kill this person, then they will kill her. I argue that the correct account of self-defence must distinguish between whether an agent is permitted to inflict harm, and whether the target is liable to bear that harm.

XII—What Follows from Defensive Non-Liability?

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

Theories of self-defence tend to invest heavily in 'liability justifications': if the Attacker is liable to have defensive violence deployed against him by the Defender, then he will not be wronged by such violence, and self-defence becomes, as a result, morally unproblematic. This paper contends that liability justifications are overrated. The deeper contribution to an explanation of why defensive permissions exist is made by the Defender's non-liability. Drawing on both canonical cases of self-defence, featuring Culpable Attackers, and more penumbral cases of self-defence, involving Non-Responsible Threats, a case is assembled for the 'Non-Liability First Account' of selfdefence. I Introduction. In canonical cases of individual self-defence, in which an Attacker culpably attacks an innocent Defender, something normatively eventful happens to both of them: the Attacker seems to lose normative powers, whereas the Defender appears to gain normative powers. When the conditions for permissible self-defence are in place, the Attacker is no longer protected by a right against harm which he used to have, and the Defender acquires a right, to inflict harm, which she did not used to have. The normative baton is somehow passed from one of these agents to the other. We can refer to this as the 'Central Normative Transition of Self-Defence', or the 'Central Normative Transition' for short (Lang 2014, p. 38). What explains the Central Normative Transition? What are the moving parts of that explanation, and how are they related to each other? These are the questions which concern me here. The argument unfolds as follows. §II sets up the basic picture in more detail. In §III, I outline the Falling Man case, in which the Defender is threatened by a falling person who is not exercising his agency at all. With the aid of a further familiar case, Rolling Stone, § §IV to VII explore various puzzles and slowly build up a case for what I call the Non-Liability First Account. §VIII returns to the canonical case of self-defence to see how, even here, the Non-Liability First Account has an important role to play.

Harming, Rescuing and the Necessity Constraint on Defensive Force

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2021

In The Morality of Defensive Force, Quong defends a powerful account of the grounds and conditions under which an agent may justifiably inflict serious harm on another person. In this paper, I examine Quong's account of the necessity constraint on permissible harming-the RESCUE account. I argue that RESCUE does not succeed. Section 2 describes RESCUE. Section 3 raises some worries about Quong's conceptual construal of the right to be rescued and its attendant duties. Section 4 argues that RESCUE does not deliver the verdicts that Quong wants. In those sections, I assume that the attacker is culpable for the threat he poses. Section 5 considers cases where the attacker, though responsible for the wrongful threat he poses and therefore liable to defensive force, has an epistemic justification for acting as he does and thus is not morally culpable. In his discussion of necessity, Quong does not explicitly deal with such cases. I suggest that RESCUE does not operate in the same way when attackers are mistaken as when they are morally culpable. Keywords Defensive force • Necessity • Ethics of killing An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a workshop on the penultimate draft of the book at the University of Warwick in February 2018. I am grateful to the participants for a stimulating discussion, and to Helen Frowe and Jonathan Quong for written comments on an earlier draft.

Honor, Self-Defense, and Moral Taint: A Reply to Øverland

Ethical Theory and Practice, 2021

In a recent paper in this journal, Gerhard Øverland develops a novel approach to the right to self-defense, which he refers to as “aggressor-centered.” According to this approach, culpable attackers have a “lesser-claim-for-protection," which explains why they may be killed even when doing so will most probably fail to protect their victims (cases of futile self-defense) and why they may be killed to avert threats to which they are not causally related. The purpose of my paper is to criticize Øverland's view mainly by pointing to its implausible implications. I argue that culpable attacks undermine the attacker's moral immunity only with regard to defensive actions that are meant to protect the potential victims of his specific attack. They don't undermine his immunity against all human beings, whenever a dilemma arises between the life of the attacker and that of others. Contra Øverland, culpable attackers are not tainted by their wrongful behavior.

Rights-based Justifications for Self-Defense

International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2022

I defend a modified rights-based unjust threat account for morally justified killing in self-defense. Rights-based moral justifications for killing in self-defense presume that human beings have a right to defend themselves from unjust threats. An unjust threat account of self-defense says that this right is derived from an agent's moral obligation to not pose a deadly threat to the defender. The failure to keep this moral obligation creates the moral asymmetry necessary to justify a defender killing the unjust threat in self-defense. I argue that the other rights-based approaches explored here are unfair to the defender because they require her to prove moral fault in the threat. But then I suggest that the unjust threat account should be modified so that where the threat is non-culpable or only partially culpable, the defender should seek to share the cost and risk with the threat in order for both parties to survive.