Culpable Bystanders, Innocent Threats and the Ethics of Self-Defense

Abstract

The moral right to act in self-defense seems to be unproblematic: you are allowed to kill an aggressor if doing so is necessary for saving your own life. Indeed, it seems that from the moral Standpoint, acting in self-defense is doing the right thing. Thanks, however, to works by George Fletcher and Judith Thomson, it is now well known how unstable the moral basis of the right to self-defense is. We are in the dark with regard to one of the most basic problems raised by this right, namely: the problem of the innocent aggressor. The disturbing question is simple enough: Is a potential victim allowed to kill, in self-defense, a morally innocent aggressor?