Why Are Victims Permitted to Harm Aggressors to Defend Themselves?

VENEZIA, LUCIANO

Coventry

Workshop; Just War Theory Workshop; 2023

University of Warwick

According to some advocates of the moral responsibility account of liability to defensive harm, particularly Kerah Gordon-Solmon, Jeff McMahan, and Michael Otsuka, the permissibility of imposing proportionate and necessary harm on aggressors is ultimately explained by the fact that doing so distributives unavoidable harm between victims and aggressors fairly. But some critics, especially Susanne Burri and Jonathan Quong, argue that this view is incorrect. Instead, they maintain that this permission is explained by the fact that victims have a right to enforce their rights by eliminating or reducing threats of unjust harm.Burri and Quong offer different reasons against the distributive justice view and in favor of the rights enforcement position. Here I also offer further considerations of my own, including a novel argument, which shows that there are strong reasons to think that victims do not have the right to distribute unavoidable harm in a fair manner, so that the distributive justice position paradoxically implies that victims (or third parties) are not permitted to harm aggressors. I also argue that the Lockean idea that all persons have authority over their own bodies and minds accounts for victims’ right to enforce their rights by eliminating or reducing threats of unjust harm and, so, favors the rights enforcement view.