Against Moral Taint
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Against Moral Taint Yitzhak Benbaji 1 & Daniel Statman 2 Accepted: 12 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
One motivation for adopting a justice-based view of the right to self-defense is that it seems to solve the puzzle of how a victim may kill her attacker even when doing so is not predicted to protect her from the threat imposed upon her. The paper shows (a) that this view leads to unacceptable results and (b) that its solution to cases of futile self-defense is unsatisfactory. This failure makes the interest-based theory of self-defense look more attractive, both in the context of futile self-defense and in general. To understand how a victim might use force in this context, one need only point to some interest of hers that is threatened, and the best candidate for such interest in cases of futile self-defense is her honor. Keywords Moral taint . Self-defense . Øverland . McMahan
And Cain said to the Lord: 'My punishment is too great to bear. Now that you have driven me this day from the soil and I must hide from your presence, I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me'. (Genesis 4, 13–14)
1 Introduction In situations of (legitimate) self-defense, a potential victim (‘Victim’) carries out an otherwise immoral act against her attacker (‘Aggressor’) in order to block an unjust attack against her.
* Daniel Statman [email protected] Yitzhak Benbaji [email protected]
1
Tel Aviv University Law School, Tel Aviv, Israel
2
Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Y. Benbaji, D. Statman
Thus, one necessary condition for the justification of a self-defensive act is its success in achieving this goal, namely, in preventing the relevant assault. What follows is – Prevention: Self-defensive harm is permissible only if it can prevent (or can reasonably be believed by Victim to prevent1) some unjust threat. Prevention seems hard to deny, but it gives rise to a disturbing puzzle which was discussed, separately, by each of us (Benbaji 2005; Statman 2008). The puzzle grows out of examples in which Victim seems clearly justified in X-ing Aggressor (when ‘X-ing’ refers to any otherwise immoral act against Aggressor) though X-ing does not achieve defense (and cannot reasonably be believed to achieve it). John Wayne is permitted to shoot at his hunters even if they outnumber him and he is doomed anyway. His shooting might eliminate the threat from some hunters, but harm would be wreaked upon him by others, hence, on the face of it, he seems to gain nothing by the shooting. Similarly, a woman is permitted to wound her assailant even if doing so will not save her from being raped by him.2 The two cases are slightly different: In the rape case, Victim can neither prevent the harm, nor prevent the threat from the particular aggressor. Her X-ing seems completely pointless, in clear opposition to prevention. By contrast, in a narrow sense, Wayne’s action would satisfy prevention – he would be blocking the threat posed to him by some specific agg
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