Some, but not all, of the mistakes a person makes when acting in apparently necessary self-defense are reasonable: we take them not to violate the rights of the apparent aggressor. I argue that this is explained by duties grounded in agents' entitlements to a fair distribution of the risk of suffering unjust harm. I suggest that the content of these duties is filled in by a social signaling norm, and offer some moral constraints on the form such a norm can (...) take. (shrink)

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 (...) grounds that, first, it has draconian implications for threateners like the driver, and second, it contravenes the plausible principle that wronging one's victim is necessary for forfeiting one's rights. But I argue, drawing on the account's luck-egalitarian underpinnings, that the account lacks the draconian implications widely attributed to it, and contrary to what many assume, wrongdoing is unnecessary for rights-forfeiture. Via these arguments, I seek both to deepen our understanding of the responsibility account, and to reissue it in a more plausible and attractive form. (shrink)

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.

The focus of this paper is an influential family of views in the ethics of self-defense and war: views that ground the agent’s liability to be attacked in self-defense in the agent’s moral responsibility for the threat posed (“Responsibility Views”). I critically examine the concept of responsibility employed by such views, by looking at potential connections with the contemporary literature on moral responsibility. I start by uncovering some of the key assumptions that Responsibility Views make about the relevant concept of (...) responsibility, and by scrutinizing those assumptions under the lens of more general theorizing about responsibility. I identify an important conflict that arises at that point. The problem is that the concept presupposed by Responsibility Views is in tension with the standard way of understanding the connection between the neutral and non-neutral forms of moral responsibility. I draw attention to a particular strategy that could be used to address this challenge, but I also identify some important obstacles that stand in the way. (shrink)

This paper examines whether an agent becomes liable to defensive harm by engaging in a morally permissible but foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. It first clarifies the notion of a foreseeably risk-imposing activity by proposing that an activity should count as foreseeably risk-imposing if an agent may morally permissibly perform it only if she abides by certain duties of care. Those who argue that engaging in such an activity can render an agent liable to defensive harm (...) ground this liability in the luck egalitarian thought that we may justly hold individuals responsible for the consequences of their voluntary choices. Against this, I argue that a luck egalitarian commitment to holding people responsible cannot, by itself, ground liability to defensive harm. It can help ground such liability only against the backdrop of a distributively just society, and only if further considerations speak morally in favour of attaching certain well-defined costs to individuals’ risk-imposing choices. I conclude by suggesting that if an account of liability applies robustly across distributively just and unjust contexts alike, then what grounds an agent’s liability is plausibly not her responsibility for threatening objectively unjustified harm, but her culpability for doing so. (shrink)