Morality of Self Defense

NOTE: this paper is a penultimate draft accepted for publication. The finalized version of it has been published in the Proceedings of the ACPA.

Aquinas held that lying is always a sin, an evil action (ST II-II, Q110, A3).  In later terminology it falls under what would be called an intrinsically evil action.  Under no circumstances can it be a good action.  Following Augustine, Aquinas held that even if others must die, one must still never tell a lie (ST II-II, Q110, A3, ad 4, DM Q15, A1, ad 5).  Yet when it comes to self-defense and capital punishment Aquinas’s reasoning seems at odds with itself.  One may kill a man in self-defense (ST II-II, Q64, A7).  Similarly, just as a diseased limb may be cutoff for the sake of the good of the whole, so too may an evildoer who is dangerous to the community be killed for the sake of the good of the whole community (ST II-II, Q64, A2).  Herein lies the tension:  why does Aquinas hold that it is licit to kill in self-defense or in capital punishment on account of the common good, but that one may never tell a lie on account of the common good?  I argue Aquinas does indeed have a consistent account.  Killing and lying are not analogous, despite the prima facie temptation to lump them together.

Some, but not all, of the mistakes a person makes when acting in apparently necessary self-defense are reasonable: we take them not to violate the rights of the apparent aggressor. I argue that this is explained by duties grounded in agents' entitlements to a fair distribution of the risk of suffering unjust harm.  I suggest that the content of these duties is filled in by a social signaling norm, and offer some moral constraints on the form such a norm can take.​

This authored book offers an institutionalist-based philosophical analysis of the use of lethal force by police officers and military combatants according to which the moral rights and duties of these institutional role holders differs from one another and also from that of ordinary citizens. As such, it is at various with standard revisionist accounts. It is of interest to those researchers and students in police ethics and military ethics in particular.

The primary method for defending biocentric individualism—a prominent theory of the moral value of organisms—is to appeal to the fact that certain things are good for or bad for living creatures, even if they are not sentient. This defense is typically and frequently met with the objection that we can determine what is good for some living creature without thereby having any moral reason or obligation to promote or avoid undermining it. In this paper I show how a theory of the morality of defensive violence undermines this objection.