Responsibility and Liability

There is a broad consensus that something like responsibility or choice impacts on a person’s liability to defensive harm. But beyond that, there is little consensus. This chapter considers several influential views about the significance of responsibility. Some, such as the luck egalitarian view, are found to be badly incomplete. Others, such as the protective value of choice, fail to explain the significance of a person’s relationship with a threat for liability. However, the chapter broadly defends the significance of choice in some cases of culpable and non-culpable threat-causing conduct.

Personal and Interpersonal Sources of Doing and Allowing

This chapter is concerned with the distinction between doing harm and allowing harm. It considers two different kinds of rationale for that distinction. The first is concerned with the constraints on the use of a person’s personal resources. The other has to do with the significance of involving others in our plans. These two different rationales explain why certain acts either count as allowings or are permitted in just the same way as allowings. They also explain why doing and allowing is significant both in cases where the agent’s interests are at stake and cases where they are not.

Accountability for Wrongdoing in War

This chapter is about the institutional mechanisms for holding people accountable for wrongdoing in war. The main form of accountability that many people have in mind when they consider responsibility for serious wrongdoing in war is akin to the criminal model. But, it is argued, there is a much more limited role for criminal punishment, even though a great deal of wrongdoing in war is serious enough to warrant the criminal response. Other responses, which aim at capturing the range and scope of wrongdoing in war as a whole, provide at least as important a mechanism for ensuring that wrongdoing is responded to in an appropriate way.

Against Following Orders

This chapter argues against the popular thought that superiors in the armed forces can issue authoritative commands to those below them in the chain of command. This culture of subservience is widely supported. The chapter suggests that whilst combatants sometimes have a duty to do what they are commanded to do, this is not because those giving them commands have authority. In doing so, it argues against popular instrumental accounts of practical authority, such as Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority. These arguments can be extended to a further set of cases where instrumental defences of authority have been influential: the solution of coordination problems.

Fighting for One’s Own

This chapter addresses the significance of political and personal relationships in the ethics of war—the extent to which such relationships and political communities give people reason to fight, the kind of reasons they are, and what implications they have in the ethics of war. It is mainly sceptical that such relationships can make an otherwise unjust war permissible, but it defends the view that they can make otherwise permissible conduct required. It also addresses the question whether contractual duties ground permissions and duties in war. Finally, the chapter argues that it is sometimes permissible to fight in unjust wars.

Humanizing War

This chapter introduces issues in the ethics of war by considering the Vietnam War. It describes the main aim of the book as to totalize the humanitarian impulse in the moral assessment of war. By that it means to understand the morality of war by understanding the significance of each human life in war, and to regulate our actions in accordance with this significance. It widens the focus to the relationship between state responsibility for war. and individual responsibility for wrongdoing. It then outlines the main themes of the book.

Sharing the Costs of War

This chapter is concerned with the obligations that citizens have to share the costs of war amongst themselves. It argues that principles of fairness militate against a strong principle of non-combatant immunity, both in the case of just and unjust wars. It does so by considering fairness arguments that arise due to the division of labour. It also considers whether consent-based arguments make combatants liable to be killed, and for the most part rejects that view. Finally, it considers whether liability of combatants might be supported by the significance of occupational choice, and rejects that view for the most part, in both just and unjust societies.

Why It Is Wrong to Kill Non-Responsible Threats

This chapter argues that it is wrong to kill a non-responsible lethal threat, even where this is necessary to save the life of the person threatened. It clarifies the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative arguments for the permissibility of killing non-responsible threats. It clarifies the main agent-neutral argument against permissibility, and considers several objections to that argument. It then offers a new and decisive argument against permissibility on agent-neutral grounds. It then shows that agent-relative arguments in favour of permissibility fail.

Why Law and Morality Should Converge

Many people reject equality of combatants, and non-combatant immunity, as moral matters. They think that it is normally wrong to kill just combatants, and sometimes permissible to kill some non-combatants. Many with this view also think that their moral views should not be reflected in the law. The main arguments that have been given for this view are based on the incentives that combatants would have were law to reflect morality. This chapter argues against these views, suggesting that there are other ways to alter the incentives given to states and combatants that do not rely on altering substantive law.

Causation and Liability

This chapter is concerned with whether it makes a difference to a person’s liability to avert a threat whether she caused that threat or causally contributed to it. It argues against the view that causation is necessary for liability. It tentatively argues for the significance of causation to liability. It then considers a wide range of versions of the view that the magnitude of a person’s causal contribution affects the magnitude of her liability. It does so by exploring different ideas that people might have in mind when they claim that some causal contribution to a threat is greater or lesser. It defends mostly sceptical conclusions. In some cases, the magnitude of a person’s causal contribution to a threat may make a difference to her liability to defensive harm. But where this is true, it is normally because causation is relevant to something else, such as moral responsibility, that affects liability.