A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, even if they did, they introduce (...) new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but even if they didn’t, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents’ negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication. (shrink)

According to the evidence-relative view of liability to defensive harm, a person is so liable if and only if she acts in a way that provides sufficient evidence to justify a (putative) victim’s belief that the person poses a threat of unjust harm, which may or may not be the case. Bas van der Vossen defends this position by analyzing, in relation to a version of Frank Jackson’s famous drug example, a case in which a putative murderer is killed by (...) a putative victim. Van der Vossen submits that the putative murderer is liable to be killed, which is a verdict that can be accommodated only by the evidence-relative view. We argue that Van der Vossen’s attempt to ground the evidence-relative view of liability to defensive harm fails. We also argue that this notion should be construed in fact-relative terms. This, however, does not mean that the notion of permissibility should necessarily also be understood in such a way in all possible cases. So, we explore whether the evidence-relative view of permissibility may be used in some contexts. (shrink)