Desert and Avoidability in Self-Defence

Authors

François Tanguay-Renaud, Osgoode Hall Law School of York UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011

Source Publication

Ethics

Keywords

War--Moral and ethical aspects; Combat--Moral and ethical aspects; Military ethics; Merit (Ethics); Self-defense

Abstract

Jeff McMahan rejects the relevance of desert to the morality of self-defense. In Killing in War he restates his rejection and adds to his reasons. We argue that the reasons are not decisive and that the rejection calls for further attention, which we provide. Although we end up agreeing with McMahan that the limits of morally acceptable self-defense are not determined by anyone’s deserts, we try to show that deserts may have some subsidiary roles in the morality of self-defense. We suggest that recognizing this might help McMahan to answer some unanswered questions to which his own position gives rise.

Repository Citation

Tanguay-Renaud, François, and John Gardner. "Desert and Avoidability in Self-Defence." Ethics, vol. 122, no.1 (2011): 111-134.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.