Abstract
I argue that any successful account of permissible self- defence must be action-guiding, or practical. It must be able to inform people’s deliberation about what they are permitted to do when faced with an apparent threat to their lives. I argue that this forces us to accept that a person can be permitted to use self-defence against Apparent Threats: characters whom a person reasonably, but mistakenly, believes threaten her life. I defend a hybrid account of self-defence that prioritises an agent’s subjective perspective. I argue that it is sufficient to render the use of defence permissible if an agent reasonably believes that (a) she is morally innocent, and (b) if she does not kill this person, then they will kill her. I argue that the correct account of self-defence must distinguish between whether an agent is permitted to inflict harm, and whether the target is liable to bear that harm.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to The Leverhulme Trust for financial support received during the writing of this paper. I am also grateful to Jeff McMahan and two anonymous referees for extremely helpful written comments, and to Chris Hookway, Gerald Lang, Jimmy Lenman, Andréas Lind and John Oberdiek for helpful discussions. Thanks also to audiences at research seminars at the University of Kent and the University of Sheffield, and to participants at a conference on Moral Theory at Lund University.
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Frowe, H. A Practical Account of Self-Defence. Law and Philos 29, 245–272 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-009-9062-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-009-9062-1