Abstract:

Contemporary accounts of defensive killing standardly concentrate on explaining when a particular individual is liable to being killed. By this they usually mean that she has lost or forfeited her right to life. They also agree that someone’s liability is explained on the basis of the harm that is threatened and the degree of responsibility for the threat. By contrast, theorists characteristically disagree about the type and extent of this responsibility. Some consider sufficient that the agent is causally responsible for the threat while others require that the agent is morally responsible for it. This paper challenges these majoritarian views. First it argues that these standard accounts cannot successfully account for situations of multiple threats. These situations seem to indicate that we would fare better with more demanding requirements for liability. Second, it argues that liability itself should play a far more restricted role than it does in most contemporary accounts of defensive killing. I suggest, by contrast, that a more convincing account of defensive killing should revolve around the conditions for permissible killing. Furthermore, I argue that permissibility is better account, at least in the majority of the more controversial cases, by recourse to the conflict of prima facie rights. I ultimately submit that taking the conceptual and normative features of rights seriously allows us to provide a more plausible, and nuanced account of defensive killing than currently available in the literature.