Liability, responsibility, and ineffective threats
Creators: name: Woodside, Stephen Noel
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2016

description: To say that a person is morally liable to some harm implies that he would not be wronged by suffering it. The paradigmatic cases of liability are those in which an attacker is harmed to prevent a threat of wrongful harm that he poses. In these standard cases, we say that the unjust attacker, by virtue of his wrongful behavior, i.e. his posing the wrongful threat, makes himself morally liable to defensive harming by his potential victim. He becomes liable to the harm since, by virtue of his wrongful behavior, he forfeits his right against being harmed in this way. And this rights-forfeiture explains why the attacker is not wronged by the harm. The standard cases are consistent with the following three principles on liability: (1) instrumentality principle—one can be liable only to harm that secures some external good (e.g. the prevention of wrongful harm); (2) responsibility principle—one can be liable to harm to prevent only those threats for which one is sufficiently morally responsible; (3) causality principle—one is sufficiently morally responsible for a threat only if one causally contributes to it. Despite the plausibility of these principles, support for them has been eroding due to recent arguments in the literature claiming that ineffective threats like apparent threats, culpable attempters, and complicit threats can be liable to harm. This dissertation is comprised of three separate articles, each aimed at refuting arguments for liability of the various types of ineffective threats just mentioned. In Article 1, “Liability, Instrumentality, and Apparent Threats,” I argue that, although it might seem that apparent threats are liable to harm, the theoretical cost of this position gives us good reason to reconsider this intuition, for if apparent threats are liable, we must reject the instrumentality principle. I then argue that the more plausible position is that apparent threats are not liable to be harmed, and that this position is consistent with their not having the right to defend themselves against the wrongful harm posed by their apparent victims. In Article 2, “Liability, Responsibility, and Culpable Attempters,” I argue that, although it might be true that culpable attempters would not be wronged by harm to avert a threat for which they are not responsible, this claim is best explained by desert-based reasons for harming. I argue then, that culpable attempter cases give us no good reason to reject the responsibility principle of liability. In Article 3, “Ineffective Threats, Complicity, and Liability by Omission,” I argue that, although it is plausible that some complicit threats could be liable to serious harm, there is a better explanation for their liability than their complicity. I argue for an explanation based on responsibility by omission, which, I claim, is better able to handle what I call the proportionality problem for complicitous liability. I develop an account of liability by omission to demonstrate this, and I argue that my explanation is also preferable since it can extend to cases involving intuitively liable non-complicit individuals.