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Switch to: References
Citations of:
The Limits of Self-Defense
In Christian Coons & Michael Weber (eds.), The Ethics of Self-Defense. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA (2016)
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In his recent JME article Daniel Restrepo argues that both legal and ethical rules should protect the so-called Naked Soldiers, combatants engaged in activity unrelated to military operations and unaware of the imminent danger threatening them. I criticize this position from several angles. I deny the existence of any link between vulnerability and innocence, and claim ignorance of deadly threats does not give rise to a morally distinguished type of vulnerability. I argue that actions not contributing to the war effort (...) |
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It is an orthodoxy of modern political thought that violence is morally incompatible with politics, with the important exception of the permissible violence carried out by the state. The “commonsense argument” for permissible political violence denies this by extending the principles of defensive ethics to the context of state-subject interaction. This article has two aims: First, I critically investigate the commonsense argument and its limits. I argue that the scope of permissions it licenses is significantly more limited than its proponents (...) |
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This paper considers whether victims can justify what appears to be unnecessary defensive harming by reference to an honour-based justification. I argue that such an account faces serious problems: the honour-based justification cannot permit, first, defensive harming, and second, substantial unnecessary harming. Finally, I suggest that, if the purpose of the honour based justification is expressive, an argument must be given to demonstrate why harming threateners, as opposed to opting for a non-harmful alternative, is the most effective means of affirming (...) |
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The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that killing a Conditional Threat usually involves an unnecessary act of self-defense, so killing this aggressor is usually morally impermissible. We defend this thesis by showing that this case is fundamentally similar to a case involving an Unconditional Threat in which the victim can flee to safety although this involves incurring a minor cost. Second, we analyze the thresholds of maximal harm that victims are required to bear before they are (...) |
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In public discourse, activists are often criticized for directing their acts of political resistance against this or that specific target. Underlying these criticisms appears to be a strongly held, though underarticulated, intuitive moral judgment that some targets are legitimate whereas others are not. Little philosophical attention has been paid to this issue. My primary aim is to address this neglect. I specify a central part of this intuitive judgment – centering on persons and activities – and argue that there is (...) |
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Defensive harm is subject to both a proportionality and necessity constraint. In what follows I precisify, explain, and unify these two constraints. I argue that they express the very same moral demand, only at different levels of generality—specifically, the demand that an attacker not be made to bear more cost to avert their attack than they would be required to take on themselves. |
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This article addresses a previously overlooked problem in the ethics of defensive killing. Everyone agrees that defensive killing can only be justified when it is necessary. But necessary for what? That seemingly simple question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. Imagine Attacker is trying to kill Victim, and the only way one could save Victim is by killing Attacker. It would seem that, in such a case, killing is necessary. But now suppose there is some other innocent person, (...) |
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European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 546-564, June 2022. |
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The thesis of this paper is that it is possible to explain why a culpable aggressor forfeits his right not to suffer the harm necessary to prevent his aggression if a killer forfeits his right to life. I argue that this strategy accounts also for the necessity restriction on self-defense. I respond to several objections, including the worry that it makes no sense to attempt a derivation of the relatively uncontroversial from the highly controversial. |
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The individualist nature of much contemporary just war theory means that we often discuss cases with single attackers. But even if war is best understood in this individualist way, in war combatants often have to make decisions about how to distribute harms among a plurality of aggressors: they must decide whom and how many to harm, and how much to harm them. In this paper, I look at simultaneous multiple aggressor cases in which more than one distribution of harm among (...) |
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On Jeff McMahan's influential ‘responsibility account’ of moral liability to defensive killing, one can forfeit one's right not be killed by engaging in an ordinary, morally permissible risk-imposing activity, such as driving a car. If, through no fault of hers, a driver's car veers out of control and toward a pedestrian, the account deems it no violation of the driver's right to save the pedestrian's life at the expense of the driver's life. Many critics reject the responsibility account on the (...) |
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