Jeff McMahan urges us to reject the view, dominant throughout history, that mere participation in an unjust war is not wrong.

Most people believe that it is sometimes morally permissible for a person to use force to defend herself or others against harm. In Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe offers a detailed exploration of when and why the use of such force is permissible. She begins by considering the use of force between individuals, investigating both the circumstances under which an attacker forfeits her right not to be harmed, and the distinct question of when it is all-things-considered permissible to use force against (...) an attacker. Frowe then extends this enquiry to war, defending the view that we should judge the ethics of killing in war by the moral rules that govern killing between individuals. She argues that this requires us to significantly revise our understanding of the moral status of non-combatants in war. Non-combatants who intentionally contribute to an unjust war forfeit their rights not to be harmed, such that they are morally liable to attack by combatants fighting a just war. (shrink)

A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust (...) harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person's liability to suffer harm. (shrink)

The paper discusses a neglected condition for justified self-defense, namely, 'The Success Condition [SC].' According to SC, otherwise immoral acts can be justified under the right to self-defense only if they actually achieve the intended defense from the perceived threat. If they don't, they are almost always excused, but not morally justified. I show that SC leads to a troubling puzzle because victims who estimate they cannot prevent the attack against them would be morally required to surrender. I try to (...) solve the puzzle by relying on what I call 'The Honor Solution.' Even if defensive acts fail to protect the victim's body, property, or life, they are successful in protecting her honor, thus they do ultimately meet the success condition. (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)

This chapter is concerned with the necessity constraint on defensive harming. It first considers whether a defensive option that would cause more harm than some other equally effective option is ruled out as causing unnecessary harm. The chapter argues that it is not. It defends the view, nonetheless, that there is a sense of “necessary” and a sense of “proportionate” such that defensive liability is itself limited to necessary and proportionate harm. The remainder of the chapter defends the view that (...) necessity, effectiveness, and proportionality are all “internal” to liability—that is, that one cannot be liable to suffer harm that is unnecessary ineffective or disproportionate. (shrink)

The paper discusses a neglected condition for justified self-defense, namely, 'The Success Condition [SC].' According to SC, otherwise immoral acts can be justified under the right to self-defense only if they actually achieve the intended defense from the perceived threat. If they don't, they are almost always excused, but not morally justified. I show that SC leads to a troubling puzzle because victims who estimate they cannot prevent the attack against them would be morally required to surrender. I try to (...) solve the puzzle by relying on what I call 'The Honor Solution.' Even if defensive acts fail to protect the victim's body, property, or life, they are successful in protecting her honor, thus they do ultimately meet the success condition. (shrink)

In his recent book Killing in War, McMahan develops a powerful argument for the view that soldiers on opposite sides of a conflict are not morally on a par once the war has started: whether they have the right to kill depends on the justness of their war. In line with just war theory in general, McMahan scrutinizes the ethics of killing the enemy. In this article, I accept McMahan's account, but bring it to bear on the entirely neglected, but (...) nevertheless interesting, issue of what the military call killings or, as I refer to such acts here, internecine war killings. I focus on the case of the soldier who is ordered by his officer, at gunpoint, to go into action or to kill innocent civilians, and who kills his officer in self-defence. I argue that, at the bar of McMahan's account of the right to kill in self-defence, the officer lacks a justification for attacking the soldier as a means of enforcing his order, and the soldier thus sometimes (but not always) has the right to kill his officer should the latter so act. (shrink)