Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

Introduction -- Cosmopolitanism -- Collective self-defense -- Subsistence wars -- Humanitarian intervention -- Commodified wars -- Asymmetrical wars -- Conclusion.

In this article, I develop a general explanatory model of the liability and lesser evil justifications of harm. Despite their respective provenance in consequentialist and deontological ethics, both justifications are, at root, rich forms of the proportionality relationship between a shared set of underlying normative variables. The nature of the proportionality relationship, and the conditions under which it operates, differ between the two forms of justification. The article explores these differences in detail and the implications they have for the justification (...) of self-defense and war. (shrink)

The constraint against harming people in order to save yourself and others seems stronger than the constraint against harming people as a consequence of saving yourself and others. The reduced constraint against acting in one type of case is often justified with reference to the intentions of the agent or to the fact that she does not use the people she harms as a means. In this article I offer a victim-centered account. I argue that the circumstances in which the (...) people to be harmed find themselves are significant in distinguishing morally between two instances of harming. (shrink)

Do individuals have a positive right of self-defence? And if so, what are the limits of this right? Under what conditions does this use of force extend to the defence of others? These are some of the issues explored by Dr Uniacke in this comprehensive 1994 philosophical discussion of the principles relevant to self-defence as a moral and legal justification of homicide. She establishes a unitary right of self-defence and the defence of others, one which grounds the permissibility of the (...) use of necessary and proportionate defensive force against culpable and non-culpable, active and passive, unjust threats. Particular topics discussed include: the nature of moral and legal justification and excuse; natural law justifications of homicide in self-defence; the Principle of Double Effect and the claim that homicide in self-defence is justified as unintended killing; and the question of self-preferential killing. This is a lucid and sophisticated account of the complex notion of justification, revolving around a critical discussion of trends in the law of self-defence. (shrink)

Two articles have appeared in Law and Philosophy that provide detailed criticisms of aspects of my account of the justification of individual self-defense. One of these articles misconstrues central aspects of my account. The other raises a less central, but nonetheless an important issue that invites clarification. The criticisms raised in these two articles to which I respond here have important bearing on the nature of the justification of self-defense.

I presented an earlier version of this paper to the Law and Philosophy Discussion Group in Los Angeles, whose members I would like to thank for their comments. In addition, I would also like to thank the following people for reading and providing written or verbal commentary on earlier drafts: Robert Mams, Rogers Albritton, G. A. Cohen, David Copp, Matthew Hanser, Craig Ihara, Brian Lee, Marc Lange, Derk Pereboom, Carol Voeller, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I owe (...) special thanks to Timothy Hall and Seana Shiffnn for their insightful and helpful comments. (shrink)

This paper has a threefold purpose: to question the adequacy of two familiar proposals for explaining the permissibility of harming others in self-defense, to suggest an alternative explanation, and to answer some objections to this latter explanation. By and large, discussions of the proposals whose adequacy I will question focus on what they imply about the permissibility of self-defense in controversial cases. I will argue here that the proposals themselves contain large and significant theoretical gaps. Accordingly, examining their implications for (...) controversial cases is premature, since they don’t adequately explain permissible self-defense in even the clearest cases—that is, those in which people defend themselves against “culpable attackers”. (shrink)

The traditional theory of the just war comprises two sets of principles, one governing the resort to war ( jus ad bellum) and the other governing the conduct of war ( jus in bello). The two sets of principles are regarded, in Michael Walzer’s words, as “logically independent. It is perfectly possible for a just war to be fought unjustly and for an unjust war to be fought in strict accordance with the rules.”1 Let us say that those who fight (...) in a just war are “just combatants,” while those who fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause are “unjust combatants.” (A just cause is an aim that can contribute to the justification for war and that may permissibly be pursued by means of war.)2 The most important implication of the idea that jus in bello is independent of jus ad bellum is that.. (shrink)

This paper argues that certain central tenets of the traditional theory of the just war cannot be correct. It then advances an alternative account grounded in the same considerations of justice that govern self-defense at the individual level. The implications of this account are unorthodox. It implies that, with few exceptions, combatants who fight for an unjust cause act impermissibly when they attack enemy combatants, and that combatants who fight in a just war may, in certain circumstances, legitimately target noncombatants (...) who bear a significant degree of moral responsibility for a wrong, when the prevention or rectification of that wrong constitutes a just cause for war. (shrink)

There may be circumstances in which it is morally justifiable intentionally to kill a person who is morally innocent, threatens no one, rationally wishes not to die, and does not consent to be killed. Although the killing would wrong the victim, it might be justified by the necessity of averting some disaster that would otherwise occur. In other instances of permissible killing, however, the justification appeals to more than consequences. It may appeal to the claim that the person to be (...) killed has acted in such a way that to kill him would neither wrong him nor violate his rights, even if he has not consented to be killed or to be subjected to the risk of being killed. In these cases, I will say that the person is liable to be killed. Although I borrow the notion of liability from legal theory, and although much of what I say will be informed by the literature on liability in both tort law and criminal law, my concern in this article is with moral rather than legal liability. (shrink)

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

War, Richard Norman reminds us, is treated as the great exception to the strong moral prohibition against the killing of other humans. Despite the widespread belief that war is, in many cases, permissible, its morally exceptional character suggests that there is a strong presumption against its permissibility. Norman argues that this presumption cannot be successfully rebutted and, in particular, that just-war theory, which attempts to provide such a rebuttal, fails in this endeavor. But Norman’s work is more than a critique (...) of just-war theory. He also takes up the more general task of demonstrating the basis of the moral presumption against war, that is, the basis and the nature of the prohibition against killing. This is a necessary preliminary, for only when we understand the prohibition can we adequately address the question whether the presumption against war that it establishes can be sustained. Norman provides interesting and subtle arguments concerning both the prohibition against killing and the just-war rebuttal to the presumption against war, but in the end it is not clear that his position can be coherently distinguished from the just-war position he criticizes. (shrink)

Killing in War presents the Moral Equality of Combatants with serious, and in my view insurmountable problems. Absent some novel defense, this thesis is now very difficult to sustain. But this success is counterbalanced by the strikingly revisionist implications of McMahan’s account of the underlying morality of killing in war, which forces us into one of two unattractive positions, contingent pacifism, or near-total war. In this article, I have argued that his efforts to mitigate these controversial implications fail. The reader (...) is left stranded: to reach plausible conclusions, Walzer deployed an implausible conception of our rights to life; McMahan’s more rigorous account of those rights generates untenable conclusions. Absent new developments, it seems that the prospects for grounding the ethics of war in individual rights are poor: any theory of our rights to life that is sufficiently indiscriminate to work in the chaos of war is not discriminating enough to be a plausible theory of our rights to life. Perhaps by rejecting the ideal of the rights-respecting war altogether we might develop an alternative theory of justified warfare, which marries theoretical soundness with conclusions that we can more confidently support. (shrink)

I try to show that agent responsibility is an inadequate basis for the attribution of liability, by discrediting the Risk Argument and showing how the Responsibility Argument in fact collapses into the Risk Argument. I have concentrated on undermining these as philosophical theories of self-defense, although I at times note that our theory of self-defense should not be predicated on assumptions that are inapplicable to the context of war. The potential combatant, I conclude, should not look to the agency view (...) to ease his conscience about the killing he will do in war. If he is to fight without violating rights, then he will need a different theory of self-defense; if there are no more defensible theories, then he must either accept pacifism—which I think is a live possibility—or seek to identify stronger countervailing reasons, which can override the great force of his victims’ rights to life. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that using lethal or otherwise serious force in self-defense is justified only when three conditions are satisfied: first, there are some grounds for the defender to give priority to his own interests over those of the attacker (whether because the attacker has lost the protection of his right to life, for example, or because of the defender’s prerogative to prefer himself to others); second, the harm used is proportionate to the threat thereby averted; third, the harm (...) is necessary to avert that threat. The first and second conditions have been exhaustively discussed, but the third has been oddly neglected. Meanwhile a prominent school of thought has arisen, in the ethics of war, which seeks to ground the justification of killing in war in principles of individual self-defense. They too have failed to offer any substantive analysis of necessity, while at the same time appealing to it when it suits them to do so. In this paper, I attempt a detailed analysis of the necessity constraint on defensive force, and explore the implications of that analysis for the attempt to transpose principles of individual self-defense into the context of warfare. (shrink)

The necessity constraint is at the heart of the ethics of both self-defense and war, and yet we know little about it. This article seeks to remedy that defect. It proceeds in two stages: first, an analysis of the concept of necessity in self-defense; second, an application of this analysis to war, looking at both its implications for just war theory and its application in the laws of war.

Most people believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand. Although it would often be meritorious, we are not, in fact, morally required to do all that we can to promote overall good. What's more, most people also believe that certain types of acts are simply forbidden, morally off limits, even when necessary for promoting the overall good. In this provocative analysis Kagan maintains that despite the intuitive appeal of these views, they cannot be adequately defended. (...) In criticizing arguments for limited moral requirements as well as those for unconditionally prohibited acts, Kagan offers a sustained attack on two of the most basic features of ordinary common sense morality. (shrink)

My thesis is that morality arises when a group of people reach an implicit agreement or come to a tacit understanding about their relations with one another. Part of what I mean by this is that moral judgments - or, rather, an important class of them - make sense only in relation to and with reference to one or another such agreement or understanding. This is vague, and I shall try to make it more precise in what follows. But it (...) should be clear that I intend to argue for a version of what has been called moral relativism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the widespread view that obstructors are a special sort of bystander is mistaken. Obstructors make Victim worse off by their presence, and thus are more properly described as innocent threats. Only those characters who do not make Victim worse off by their presence can be classified as bystanders.

The reductivist view of war holds that the moral rules of killing in war can be reduced to the moral rules that govern killing between individuals. Noam Zohar objects to reductivism on the grounds that the account of individual self-defence that best supports the rules of war will inadvertently sanction terrorist killings of non-combatants. I argue that even an extended account of self-defence—that is, an account that permits killing at least some innocent people to save one's own life—can support a (...) prohibition on terrorism, provided that it distinguishes between direct and indirect threats. What such an account cannot support is the blanket immunity of non-combatants to defensive killing. If a non-combatant is morally responsible for indirectly threatening in an unjust war, she can be liable to defensive killing. However, this gives us reason to revise our account of permissible killing in war, rather than to reject the reductivist account. (shrink)

abstract Michael Otsuka claims that it is impermissible to kill innocent threats because doing so is morally equivalent to killing bystanders. I show that Otsuka's argument conflates killing as a means with treating a person herself as a means. The killing of a person can be a means only if that person is instrumental in the threat to Victim's life. A permission to kill a person as a means will not permit killing bystanders. I also defend a permission to kill (...) innocent threats against Otsuka's Trolley Cases. Otsuka depicts a person tied to an oncoming trolley as a bystander. I argue that such characters are threats whom Victim can permissibly kill. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The abortion debate rages on. Yet the two most popular positions seem to be clearly mistaken. Conservatives maintain that a human life begins at conception and that therefore abortion must be wrong because it is murder. But not all killings of humans are murders. Most notably, self defense may justify even the killing of an innocent person.Liberals, on the other hand, are just as mistaken in their argument that since a fetus does not become a person until birth, a woman (...) may do whatever she pleases in and to her own body. First, you cannot do as you please with your own body if it affects other people adversely. Second, if a fetus is not a person, that does not imply that you can do to it anything you wish. Animals, for example, are not persons, yet to kill or torture them for no reason at all is wrong. (shrink)