The Common Defense Paradigm: A Moral Approach to the Culpable Threat Problem

Philosophers ascribing to an individualist account of the morality of war claim that the individual is the fundamental unit of moral analysis and that all states rights are reducible to individual rights. I agree that individuals are the fundamental unit of moral analysis (i.e. I am an individualist), and in this argument I will assume that this claim is correct. Additionally, I agree with the current individualist claims that individuals are morally required to investigate the overall justice of a particular war and that, in some circumstances, individuals can be morally required to abstain from their country’s wars or even fight against their own country. However, I strongly disagree with the triggering conditions that current individualists set for participation in war. They claim that, in a position of epistemic uncertainty about the justness of a war’s cause, individuals should favor abstention rather than participation in their country’s wars. At least two individualists claim that individuals should apply more restrictive triggering conditions to carrying out domestic police work than they should apply to acts of war. This is fallacious. My core claim in this argument is that the triggering conditions for participating in war are less restrictive than current individualists imply and that participating in war is often easier to justify than participating in domestic police actions. In order to support this central claim, I will make two broad supporting arguments. First, I will argue that self-defense and other-defense can only be understood in relation to each other. Most individualists claim that justifications for war reduce to the individual right of personal self-defense or can be explained through an analogy with personal self-defense. The titles of individualist books and articles fixate on self-defense, individualist moral analysis relies on intuitions derived from thought examples involving hypothetical cases of self-defense, and individualist arguments emphasize self-defense at the expense of other-defense. When individualists do treat other-defense, they sometimes deny that it has an important relationship with the right to self-defense, and they often claim that the positive duty to other-defense carries less moral weight than the negative duty to refrain from killing non-culpable agents. Extant individualist literature insists that other-defense is, at most, a relatively weak positive duty that only obtains when an agent can carry out other-defense without exposing herself to great risk. If the agent can only carry out other-defense at great personal risk, then she is permitted to act, but she is not morally required to. Such acts of other-defense are considered supererogatory, unless the agent makes a voluntary commitment to carry out other-defense. Because current individualist arguments de-emphasize the positive duty to protect (i.e. other-defense), they miss the relationship between self-defense and other-defense and wrongly claim that directly inflicting harms (i.e. doing) can be meaningfully distinguished from allowing harms to be inflicted (i.e. allowing). This results in a less robust analysis of the relational claims between non-culpable persons. In evidence-relative morality, self-defense and other-defense cannot be analyzed separately, nor are they reducible to the same principle. They can only be understood in relationship to each other. Specifically, as evidence of other-defense increases, the right to self-defense is increasingly restricted. As evidence of other-defense decreases, the right to self-defense is increasingly permissive. Second, I will argue that institutions are morally important because they provide evidence that is germane to evidence-relative principles. There is no such thing as a stand-alone “institutional justification” that applies to individuals deliberating participation in police work or war. This contrasts with individualists claim that policing acts in reasonably just societies are morally different from acts of self-defense and acts of war in at least one important way: these policing acts have an institutional justification that does not obtain in personal self-defense and war. According to this view, police officers in just states are justified when they act in accord with professional rules, even if those rules lead them astray in individual cases. According to commonly accepted standards for institutional justifications, institutional justifications only obtain when there is a fair institution in place that achieves a positive moral purpose. Part of what makes an institution ‘fair’ is that it is reasonably just and restricts the costs of the institution to those agents who benefit from the moral purpose of the institution. That is why, according to individualists, institutional justifications can obtain for police in just societies but not for combatants is war. This analysis of “institutional justifications” is inconsistent and artificially binary. It is inconsistent because some of the most influential individualists claim that a lack of just institutions makes acts of self- and other-defense simultaneously harder and easier to justify. It must be one or the other; it cannot be both harder and easier. It is artificially binary, because it treats the justice of institutions as an ‘all-or-nothing’ stand-alone justification. For individualists, fully- or mostly-just institutions provide a justification; all other institutions provide no justification. However, the justice of institutions is always a matter of degree and it is fallacious to utilize an all-or-nothing approach.