Political Theory and Limiting the Right of Self-Defense

Abstract

Jonathan Quong’s The Morality of Defensive Force tackles difficult questions concerning the moral justification of self-defense. Some are big structural questions. How does the permissibility of defensive force relate to broader moral principles? Should we have a single, unified theory of defensive force or multiple theories? Others involve narrower issues, including developing a theory of the triggering conditions for self-defense and providing novel justifications for the necessity and proportionality limitations. When it comes to some big structural questions (e.g. the relationship between self-defense and broader moral theory), The Morality of Defensive Force represents a major step forward. But the book’s omission of political theory leaves me skeptical of some answers that Quong provides to the narrower issues. In The Morality of Defensive Force, Quong does not offer a single unified theory of self-defense; instead, he presents two theories that provide independent sufficient grounds to justify defensive violence within their respective spheres. The first theory applies to cases in which “an attacker is liable to defensive harm... , and thus, he is not wronged, and has no standing to complain, when some defensive harm is imposed on him” (18). The second theory, in contrast, involves self-defense cases in which neither party has done an action that makes the person liable to defensive violence. These are cases in which innocent victims face threats from otherwise justified attackers or nonresponsible threats (58). Let’s begin with the first theory. This theory involves core selfdefense cases, such as when a culpable Aggressor A unjustly threatens to kill a victim V. What makes A liable to defensive force by V? Much previous scholarship grounds V’s permission to use defensive force either on A’s culpability in creating the threat or on the fact that ∗Robert Leider is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University. Email: rleider@gmu.edu Criminal Justice Ethics, 2021 Vol. 40, No. 3, 274–283, https://doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2021.2005866