Defensive Liability
This chapter aims to identify four common mistakes about defensive liability. Two excellent books on the ethics of defense and war, Helen Frowe’s Defensive Killing and Jeff McMahan’s Killing in War, are used to provide examples of each of the four mistakes. The first mistake is the failure to recognize that defensive liability requires an unjust threat in the sense of a threat to a right or a threat that infringes upon a right. The second is the failure to recognize that defensive liability requires posing (or taking part in a group’s posing) an unjust threat, as opposed to merely contributing to an unjust threat. The third is the failure to recognize that defensive liability requires not merely posing an unjust threat but also being more responsible than the potential victim for the threat one poses. The fourth is the mistake of thinking that defensive liability requires an objective threat.