Self-Defense
Phil 166: Unit 3
We have now complete two out of the five main three-week sections of Phil 166. In Unit 1, we introduced ethics and philosophy, explored why ethical questions might be hard in some of the ways expected of philosophical questions, and explored Singer's arguments as a helpful illustrative example of doing moral philosophy with arguments. Then in Unit 2, we took up a number of interrelated questions about abortion, one of the most controversial moral topics in the contemporary United States. This topic led us to start to learn about some very general theoretical issues in the study of normative ethics.
Now, in Unit 3 of the course, we turn to another kind of moral issue: the morality of self-defense. Self-defense has already come up, because we saw that self-defense could underlie some justifications for abortion. But there are many other important questions that can be asked about the morality of self-defense, and in this section we will also see how issues about the morality of self-defense connect up to questions about when and how it is morally permissible to engage in war, and also about issues of racial justice in the contemporary United States.
Helen Frowe
Our first reading for this section of the course is a brief introduction to issues in and views about the morality of self-defense, written by Helen Frowe, a British moral philosopher who teaches at Stockholm University.
Frowe is the director of the Stockholm Center for War and Peace, and author of The Ethics of War and Peace, a textbook about ethical issues concerning war from which we will read three chapters in this unit of the course. In this unit of the course we will first be thinking about general issues about the ethics of self-defense, and then applying them to the ethics of war.
Introduction to Self-Defense
So when you read Frowe's introduction to theories of self-defense, which is the reading for today, and she keeps mentioning war and "just war theorists", just bear in mind that in her book, the reason that she is introducing the topic of self-defense is in order to be able to draw on it in her discussion of the ethics of war. We will eventually talk about war as well, but first we are going to talk about self-defense in general. As you read, pay special attention to make sure that you understand what Frowe means when she talks about necessity, and what she means when she talks about proportionality. Understanding these two important concepts in the theory of self-defense requires being able to construct examples in which an act of self-defense satisfies the necessity requirement but not the proportionality requirement, and cases in which an act of self-defense satisfies the proportionality requirement but not the necessity requirement. If you can't yet construct such examples, then you don't yet understand these two important concepts. So take extra time over the sections where Frowe introduces these principles and try to make sure that you can see what these examples would be like.
Frowe also spends substantial time in her introduction introducing and explaining several competing theories of what justifies self-defense. You don't need to understand all of these theories simply on the basis of this reading, but what I want you to get out of this is that there is a lot of agreement among moral philosophers about many of the main cases in which it is permissible to act in self defense, but a lot of disagreement about why, and some disagreement about marginal cases involving self-defense. This is analogous to the fact that there is a lot of agreement among moral philosophers that in normal cases it is wrong to kill adult human beings, but a lot of disagreement about exactly why, and some disagreement about marginal cases. Theories of self-defense do disagree about marginal or borderline cases, but these cases are just the edge of a lot of agreement that harming in self-defense is often okay.
Handout 7.2
Here.