Recalibrating Defensive Killing: Liability, Mere Permissibility, and the Problem of Multiple Threats

Abstract

The concept of liability is currently at the centre of contemporary debates on interpersonal defensive killing and war. This often leads to radically asymmetrical moral positions between aggressors and victims, and between just and unjust combatants. This article argues that the dichotomy liable/non-liable is too rigid to adequately capture the moral landscape in many relevant defensive killing situations. By contrast, it proposes a more granulated framework that takes seriously both the conceptual features of rights as essentially individualistic entities and their strength in moral reasoning. Finally, the article also shows that far from creating problems for the morality of killing in war, the proposed framework allows us to better accommodate for the position of unjust combatants than standard revisionist accounts of just war theory.