Killing in Self-Defense : Jonathan Quong

Killing in Self-Defense*
Jonathan Quong
Can we ever permissibly kill others in self-defense, and if we can, what

is the moral principle that permits such lethal acts? Consider a Villainous
Aggressor who wants to kill me simply because he hates me, and I see
him coming at me with an axe. Can I permissibly kill him if this is the
only way to save my own life? What about the case of an Innocent Aggressor?
This is someone who has the intention to kill me, but they are not
morally responsible for forming this intention: perhaps a villain slipped
them a drug which temporarily caused them to have this intention.
Finally consider an Innocent Threat—someone who threatens my life even
though they have formed no intention to kill me and exercise no agency
at all. An example would be someone who has been pushed off a cliff
and will land on me and kill me unless I vaporize him with my trusty
ray gun first (if I do not shoot he will survive the fall). Like Judith Jarvis
Thomson, I think these are all cases where it is permissible to kill one
person in order to save my own life.1
Jeff McMahan, Michael Otsuka, and several others, however, have
offered a powerful argument against the permissibility of killing Inno-
* Earlier versions of this article were presented at Manchester Centre for Political
Theory and Philosophy events at the University of Manchester, the Nuffield Political The-
ory Workshop in Oxford, and the Warwick Research Seminar in Political Theory. I would
like to thank all the participants at those events for their questions. For comments on the
article and helpful discussions about it I am very grateful to Kim Brownlee, Richard Child,
Matthew Clayton, Cecile Fabre, Joe Horton, Seth Lazar, Dan McDermott, Jeff McMahan,
David Miller, John O’Neill, Michael Otsuka, Katie Portwin, Mark Reiff, Dave Sant, Ben
Saunders, Hillel Steiner, Zofia Stemplowska, Rebecca Stone, Victor Tadros, Steve de Wijze,
Andrew Williams, and an anonymous referee. Cecile Fabre, Jeff McMahan, and Michael
Otsuka each deserve special thanks for their generous help.
1. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Self-Defense,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 20 (1991):
283–310. My descriptions of Villainous Aggressor, Innocent Aggressor, Innocent Threat,
and Bystander are all drawn from Thomson. For an argument which has many parallels
with Thomson’s, see Suzanne Uniacke, Permissible Killing: The Self-Defence Justification of
Homicide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Fiona Leverick also endorses
the general approach to self-defense developed by Thomson and Uniacke. See Fiona
Leverick, Killing in Self-Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 3.
Ethics 119 (April 2009): 507–537

䉷 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2009/11903-
0001$10.00
507
508 Ethics April 2009
cent Aggressors and Innocent Threats in self-defense.2 They focus on

the widely accepted view that we may not kill Bystanders in order to save
our own life. Bystanders are those people who have no significant causal
involvement in whatever it is that threatens my life and have done noth-
ing that would normally make them liable to be killed.3 I cannot, for
example, permissibly push an innocent passer-by in front of a flying
javelin that is about to kill me in order to save my own life. But, McMahan
and Otsuka argue, there is nothing of moral relevance to distinguish
Bystanders from Innocent Threats and Innocent Aggressors. All are
equally innocent—the Innocent Aggressor and Innocent Threat have
done nothing that would normally make them liable to be killed in the
way that Villainous Aggressor clearly has (innocent persons are thus
always morally nonresponsible for a threat, and I will use these terms
interchangeably). Otsuka and McMahan thus argue that such Innocent
Aggressors and Threats must have an equivalent status to Bystanders. If
we accept the premise that it is impermissible to kill Bystanders, we must
therefore conclude that it is similarly impermissible to kill Innocent
Aggressors or Innocent Threats.4 I call this the Moral Responsibility
Argument.
In Section I of the article I show that despite its intuitive appeal,
the moral responsibility argument does not establish the impermissibility
of killing Innocent Aggressors or Threats. The most the argument can
do is remind us of the presumption against killing innocent persons.
This presumption, however, can sometimes be overridden given a suf-
ficiently compelling argument. Sections II and III are devoted to de-
veloping such an argument. I claim that Thomson’s distinction between
Bystanders on the one hand, and Aggressors and Threats on the other,
2. Jeff McMahan, “Self-Defense and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker,” Ethics
104 (1994): 252–90, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 398–411, “The Basis of Moral Liability to Defensive Killing,” Phil-
osophical Issues 15 (2005): 386–405, and Killing in War (Oxford: Clarendon, 2009), sec.
4.1.5; Michael Otsuka, “Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense,” Philosophy & Public Affairs
23 (1994): 74–94, reprinted in his Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2003), chap. 4. For similar views, also see Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, “Justifying
Self-Defence,” Law and Philosophy 24 (2005): 711–49, 733–39; David Rodin, War and Self-
Defense (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 79–89; and Noam Zohar, “Collective War and Individ-
ualistic Ethics: Against the Conscription of ‘Self-Defense’,” Political Theory 21 (1993):
606–22.
3. There is a subcategory of persons who are sometimes included as Bystanders who
have had a causal involvement in the lethal threat: Justified or Innocent Causes. I address
such cases in sec. B of the appendix.
4. Technically, McMahan believes we can permissibly kill some people he labels In-
nocent Threats, but that is because he draws the distinction somewhat differently than I
do here. McMahan does not believe we can permissibly kill Innocent Threats as I have
defined them. See, e.g., McMahan, “The Basis of Moral Liability,” 393–94.
Quong Killing in Self-Defense 509
is roughly the right one for thinking about permissible defensive killings
but that this distinction requires a different rationale than the one
offered by Thomson. My argument for distinguishing Bystanders from
Aggressors and Threats turns on a particular account of what it is to
use someone as a mere means to save your own life.
Before proceeding any further it is worth clarifying a few points
about the arguments that are to follow. First, I am only considering cases
of self-defense that involve lethal threats; nonlethal threats are not the
topic here, except insofar as they may help illuminate some aspect of
killing in defense against lethal threats. Second, this essay does not
address the interesting issue of when, if ever, we should be excused (due
to duress, panic, or lack of knowledge) for an impermissible instance
of killing. I am only interested in the question of when, if ever, we are
morally permitted to kill a single person in self-defense. The essay thus
does not concern itself with those cases of self-defense where one or
both parties have mistaken beliefs regarding matters of fact—I assume
all parties always have full and accurate knowledge of the situation.
Finally, the essay will be limited to the consideration of only those cases
of self-defense where the choice is between one life and another. Cases
of self-defense where multiple lives are at stake, or where killing (or not
killing) one person will have fatal consequences for many other lives,
are only considered insofar as they prove helpful in understanding some
aspect of the one versus one cases.
I. THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY ARGUMENT

Proponents of the moral responsibility argument deny that it is per-
missible to kill Innocent Threats and Aggressors in self-defense. Like
Bystanders, Innocent Threats and Aggressors have done nothing to
make themselves liable to be killed. Since it is impermissible to kill
Bystanders, it should likewise be impermissible to kill Innocent Threats
and Aggressors.
In this essay I set aside the various debates and questions surround-
ing the notion of moral responsibility, for example, the debate between
compatibilism and incompatibilism or the distinction between attribu-
tive and substantive responsibility.5 Even if we assume the definition of
moral responsibility to be unproblematic, my aim in this section is to
show that the most plausible version of the moral responsibility argu-
ment does not establish that it must be impermissible to kill Innocent
Threats and Aggressors in self-defense because it is impermissible to kill
5. For this latter distinction, see T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 6.
Bystanders in self-defense.6 The most the moral responsibility argument

does is remind us of the general presumption that it is wrong to kill
innocent people. The arguments in this section are thus purely negative:
they only establish that we cannot move unproblematically from the
premise that it is impermissible to kill Bystanders to the conclusion that
it must therefore be impermissible to kill Innocent Threats and Ag-
gressors. This section does not establish that it is in fact permissible to
kill Innocent Aggressors or Threats. In order to justify that conclusion,
some positive argument needs to be provided, and this task is left until
Sections II and III. With that clarification out of the way, let us consider
the strongest version of the moral responsibility argument:7
1. Each person has a right not to be killed by others unless they have
done something to waive or forfeit that right.
2. The only way to waive or forfeit your right not to be killed is
either to consent that someone may kill you or by being morally
responsible for causing a threat to someone else’s life who has
not waived their right not to be killed by you.8
3. Like Bystanders, Innocent Threats and Aggressors are not morally
responsible for what threatens your life, nor have they consented
to being killed by you.
4. Innocent Threats and Aggressors therefore retain their right not
to be killed by you.
5. It is impermissible to kill someone if they retain their right not
to be killed.
6. Therefore it is impermissible to kill Innocent Threats and Ag-
gressors in self-defense.
The immediate difficulty, however, is that premise 5 conflicts with

what most people believe. Consider, for instance:
Trolley : There is a runaway trolley whose brakes have failed headed
down a track where five people are trapped and will be killed unless
the trolley is diverted. Fortunately there is a side track onto which
6. For two other recent critiques of what I call the moral responsibility argument,
see Helen Frowe, “Equating Innocent Threats and Bystanders,” Journal of Applied Philosophy
25 (2008): 277–90; and Seth Lazar, “The Right to Kill? A Critique of Jeff McMahan’s
Theory of Liability to Defensive Killing” (unpublished manuscript, University of Oxford).
Frowe’s independently developed argument overlaps in some ways with the argument in
this article, and I note this below where appropriate.
7. There are several other formulations of the moral responsibility argument, but I
believe they are all clearly unsuccessful.
8. Or by being morally responsible for causing someone else to reasonably believe
they face a lethal threat.
the trolley can be diverted, but there is one person trapped on this
side track, and this person will be killed if we divert the trolley.9
Is it permissible to divert the trolley? Most people believe, and I

agree, that it is permissible. Even those who insist that it is impermissible
to turn the trolley will likely believe that there are some circumstances
under which it is permissible to kill an innocent person (e.g., propor-
tionate and unintended civilian casualties caused in the pursuit of a just
war). It therefore seems that the moral responsibility argument fails
because it implausibly assumes that people who retain their right not
to be killed can never be permissibly killed.
There is, however, an obvious reply available to the proponents of
the moral responsibility argument. They can reply that rights may be
permissibly infringed when there is a sufficiently important reason for
doing so. Saving five innocent people’s lives in Trolley seems to be a
sufficiently important reason, but saving a single life, even if it is your
own, is not sufficiently important to justify infringing a person’s right
not to be killed. Provided the number of lives at stake are equal, it is
impermissible to kill some in order to save others. So the appeal to
Trolley fails to undermine what we can call
The Narrow Thesis: It is always impermissible to kill one (or more)
innocent person(s) in order to save another single person (or equiv-
alent number of people).
If the narrow thesis is true, then the moral responsibility argument

appears perfectly valid. In fact, the narrow thesis makes most of the
steps in the argument above redundant—it establishes the conclusion
in a single step. But notice what this means—the narrow thesis estab-
lishes the truth of the view that it is impermissible to kill Innocent
Aggressors and Threats in self-defense, but it does so by stipulating the
very point which is disputed, namely, whether or not it is always im-
permissible to kill one innocent person to save another person. This is
what critics of the moral responsibility argument deny, and in the face
of such disagreement one cannot simply assert the truth of the narrow
thesis. If it is to do more than establish the conclusion by stipulation,
the narrow thesis must be supported by arguments which show that it
is plausible and that it is not vulnerable to objections that might be
pressed against it.
Of course the narrow thesis does have a great deal of plausibility,
primarily because it tracks the widely accepted intuition that killing is
9. For the classic presentation of Trolley and different variations of it, see Judith Jarvis
Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986),
chaps. 6, 7.
worse than letting die.10 But even if killing is worse than letting die, this
does not entail that the narrow thesis must be correct. There might be
other nonconsequentialist considerations that sometimes override or
nullify the fact that killing is worse than letting die, even when the
number of lives at stake is equivalent. Indeed, there seem to be examples
where this is exactly what happens. Consider the following pair of cases:
Man on the Track : There is a runaway trolley whose brakes have

failed headed down a track where your child is trapped and will
be killed by the trolley. Fortunately there is a side track onto which
the trolley can be diverted, but there is one man trapped on this
side track, and he will be killed if you divert the trolley.
Man on the Overpass: There is a runaway trolley whose brakes have
failed headed down a track where your child is trapped and will
be killed by the trolley. Fortunately you are standing on an overpass
under which the trolley must pass before it reaches your child. Next
to you stands a large man. This large man’s weight (but not your
own) would be sufficient to stop the trolley. If you pushed him off
the overpass, he would land on the tracks and stop the trolley before
it reaches your child, though he will be killed if you do so.
I assume that many people will believe that considerations of par-
tiality make it permissible to act in the first case, but that considerations
of partiality do not suffice to make it permissible to act in the second
case. If the first half of this judgment is right, then the narrow thesis is
false. But even those who do not share this view regarding the permis-
sibility of acting in Man on the Track may still believe there is some moral
difference between these two cases. This difference (even if one does
not believe it changes what is permissible) is presumably explained by
the fact that you would be using or intending the death of the large
man in a way you do not use or intend the death of the man in Man
on the Track. Provided it is more clearly impermissible to act in Man
on the Overpass than it is in Man on the Track, this should cast some
doubt on the claim that the narrow thesis is obviously or unproble-
matically true.
The narrow thesis implies that there can never be countervailing
considerations in one versus one cases which trump the prohibition on
killing an innocent person. It implies that nonconsequentialist consid-
erations—considerations of partiality, the distinction between intending
and foreseeing, or the idea of using someone as a mere means—can
10. The narrow thesis might also be thought to track another nonconsequentialist
distinction: the difference between intending and merely foreseeing. I am less certain that
this supports the plausibility of the narrow thesis, but I omit further discussion of this
point for the sake of brevity.
never justify killing one innocent person to save another. But if these
kinds of nonconsequentialist reasons can make a difference in distin-
guishing cases like Man on the Track versus Man on the Overpass, why
assume, without further argument, that such considerations cannot be
used to distinguish Bystanders from Innocent Aggressors and Threats
in cases of self-defense? Of course, after careful reflection we may decide
that there is no sound nonconsequentialist reason for treating Bystand-
ers differently from Innocent Aggressors and Threats, but it seems right
to say that we must consider the various arguments that might support
this asymmetric treatment before we can confidently endorse the narrow
thesis. What we cannot do is assert the truth of the narrow thesis as a
way of denying that any nonconsequentialist method for distinguishing
Bystanders from Innocent Aggressors and Threats is even possible. If
this is right, then the moral responsibility argument cannot establish
the conclusion that it is impermissible to kill Innocent Aggressors and
Threats in self-defense. The most the argument does is point us to the
thesis that would need to be true (the narrow thesis) in order for this
conclusion to be true. Whether or not the narrow thesis is true will turn
on whether any successful argument can be mounted justifying the dif-
ferential treatment of Bystanders as opposed to Innocent Aggressors and
Threats. In Sections II and III, I provide such an argument, and so if the
argument I present in those sections is sound, the narrow thesis is false.
One final point before moving on. Throughout, I assume that gen-
eral rights, such as the right not to be killed by others, do exist, but
can sometimes be permissibly infringed. I distinguish between a rights
infringement (permissible act) and a rights violation (impermissible
act).11 I will not provide a complete explanation of why I think this view
of rights is superior to a view of rights-as-absolutely-inviolable, but here
is one reason for thinking so. Regardless of which view of rights you
hold, you are likely to believe that in cases such as Trolley where we
may permissibly harm or kill an innocent person, something is owed to
the innocent person (or their beneficiaries) who has been harmed or
killed. On the infringing picture of rights it is quite easy to explain why
something is owed to this person: something was done to them or taken
from them that they had a right not to have done or taken, and so they
are entitled to compensation. If you believe that rights are absolute,
and thus believe there is no rights violation or infringement committed
in cases such as Trolley (i.e., you believe that the right not to be killed
is qualified in a way that does not give the one person a right not be
killed in cases like Trolley), then it is more puzzling to explain why
compensation is owed in cases such as Trolley. Since nothing was done
to that person that they had a right not to have done to them, why is
11. For a version of this distinction, see Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, 40–42.
there a further moral requirement to compensate them? It will not be

very convincing to reply that they have a right to compensation when
they are harmed or killed in such and such circumstances—what we are
asking is why they have this right. The most plausible answer is because
something that was theirs was taken from them. The view of general
rights which are sometimes permissibly infringed fits nicely with this
sensible answer, whereas the conception of rights as absolutely inviolable
seems to beg the further question as to why we compensate people when
we do things to them that are permissible.12 But, to be clear, I think the
arguments I present in the rest of the essay (with certain modifications)
could also be accepted by those people who hold the view that rights
cannot be permissibly infringed.
Of course the burden of justification must be borne by the side
arguing in favor of the permissibility of some rights infringement. The
default position is that the right protects the right holder, and any
infringement of the right thus requires a special sort of justification.
But if we believe that premise 5 is false—that rights are not absolute—
then it remains open to provide a positive account which explains why
killing Bystanders would constitute a rights violation, whereas killing
Innocent Threats and Aggressors would be merely a rights infringement.
This is what I try to do in the final section.
II. A PRINCIPLE OF DEFENSIVE KILLING
Having examined the moral responsibility argument, it will be helpful
briefly to consider Thomson’s alternative position which does not focus
on the moral responsibility of Threats and Aggressors.13 After consid-
ering various formulations of a principle for killing in self-defense,
Thomson settles on the following (my paraphrase):
T1: If X’s killing you will violate your right not to be killed, then X
loses their right not to be killed by you, and so you may per-
missibly kill X in self-defense.14
12. For a more comprehensive defense of the view that rights can be permissibly
infringed, see Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990), or Rights, Restitution, and Risk, chap. 5. The alternative position is presented in
Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), particularly chap. 3. Also see
Steiner, “Self-Ownership and Conscription,” in The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour
of G. A. Cohen, ed. Christine Sypnowich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 88–101.
13. Here I refer exclusively to Thomson’s most recent position presented in “Self-
Defense.” In an earlier paper Thomson makes one comment which is consistent with the
position I defend in this article. See Rights, Restitution, and Risk, 41.
14. Thomson, “Self-Defense,” 302. Uniacke presents a similar principle, arguing that
we possess a right to act in proportionate self-defense when we are subject to an unjust
harm or threat of harm, where unjust means roughly ‘would violate one or more of our
rights’. See Uniacke, Permissible Killing, chaps. 5, 6. For her agreement with Thomson
regarding the definition of unjust threats, see Permissible Killing, 175.
Why does Thomson rely on the idea of a rights violation in her principle
of defensive killing? Thomson asks us to consider an alternative principle
of permissible defensive killing that does not rely on the idea of a rights
violation:
T2: You can permissibly kill X if X will otherwise kill you.15
The problem with T2, as Thomson shows, is that it can be used by

a Villain to justify killing an Innocent Victim in self-defense who was
only attacking the Villain because the Villain was about to kill them. T1
avoids this perverse conclusion provided we accept Thomson’s further
claims that (a) the person who poses the initial lethal threat in any
situation is threatening to violate someone’s right not to be killed, and
so (b) the initial lethal threat loses their right not to be killed by their
potential victim. Villains thus forfeit their right not to be killed by their
Innocent Victims when they initiate an attack, but Innocent Victims do
not forfeit their right not to be killed when they act in self-defense since
the Villain has already forfeited their right not to be killed, and thus
the Victims’ act of self-defense involves no rights violation. Thomson
applies this argument in exactly the same way to all Aggressors and
Threats regardless of their moral responsibility. Thomson maintains that
all Aggressors and Threats are, by virtue of being the initial deadly threat,
going to violate someone’s rights. This means Aggressors and Threats
forfeit their right not to be killed, and so it is permissible to kill all
Aggressors and Threats in self-defense without thereby losing one’s own
immunity from being killed.
There is, however, a serious problem with Thomson’s T1. As Otsuka
and McMahan rightly point out, it doesn’t seem plausible to suppose,
as Thomson does, that Innocent Aggressors or Threats are guilty of
violating anyone’s rights.16 This is because we tend to believe that, in
order for one person to violate another’s rights, there must be respon-
sible agency. For example, although it would make sense to say that you
were killed by a boulder which fell from the top of a cliff as the result
of an earthquake, it would not make sense to say the boulder violated
your right not to be killed. The boulder has no agency, thus cannot be
subject to any moral duties, and so cannot violate (or even infringe)
your rights. The same is surely true of a large baby falling from a cliff.17
Since the large falling baby is an Innocent Threat, this seems to show,
15. Thomson, “Self-Defense,” 289.

16. Otsuka, “Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense,” 79–84; McMahan, “Self-Defense
and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker,” 276.
17. The example of a falling stone or boulder is used both in Otsuka, “Killing the
Innocent in Self-Defense,” 80; and in McMahan, “Self-Defense and the Problem of the
Innocent Attacker,” 276.
contra Thomson, that T1 does not justify the killing of Innocent Threats
or Innocent Aggressors in self-defense since neither has exercised re-
sponsible agency and thus neither can be shown to violate someone’s
right not to be killed.18 The difficulty we face is that in order to distin-
guish between Villains and Innocent Victims, it looks as if we need to
make use of the concept of a rights violation and the notion of moral
responsibility on which this concept relies. But if we make this move to
moral responsibility, we will then be unable to distinguish Bystanders
from Innocent Aggressors and Threats as Thomson would like to do.
The central problem with views of self-defense like Thomson’s, and
the moral responsibility argument, is that they wrongly focus our con-
ceptual attention on the possible targets of the defensive killing and ask
whether the possible target is going to violate someone’s rights or is
responsible for the lethal threat. Instead, I believe we should begin by
focusing on the agent acting in self-defense. On this view the permission
to act in self-defense is justified by appeal to the agent-relative value
that each person’s life has for them. By that I simply mean that your life
is of particular importance to you. One implication of this fact is that
most deontological theories do not require people to make great sac-
rifices on behalf of others unless they have voluntarily incurred an ob-
ligation to do so.19 You would be a hero if you risked your life by rushing
out into choppy and dangerous waters to rescue someone who was
drowning, but morality does not demand that you risk your life in this
way. Your life is your own, and so morality does not require that you
give it up or put it at significant risk for another person or even several
other people.20 By appealing to the agent-relative value each person’s
life has for them, I therefore mean nothing more than the following:
that each person is understood to have a powerful agent-relative per-
18. The same problem holds true for Uniacke’s account of the right to act in self-
defense against “unjust” threats, since this notion also relies on the idea that an unjust
threat is someone who is going to violate your rights. For a version of this critique applied
to Uniacke, see Tziporah Kasachkoff, “Killing in Self-Defense: An Unquestionable or Prob-
lematic Defense?” Law and Philosophy 17 (1998): 509–31, 518–19.
19. This claim is clearly consistent with the view that you may sometimes be required
to save others when you can do so at reasonable cost to yourself. For an argument that
this duty of rescue can also include the duty to kill attackers in defense of third parties,
see Cecile Fabre, “Mandatory Rescue Killings,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15 (2007):
363–84.
20. Some people believe that if the numbers are significant enough (a hundred, a
thousand, a million . . .) morality can in fact require you to sacrifice your life for others.
In this essay I remain agnostic about this claim. I simply hold that morality does not
require you to risk your life for another single person or even several other people.
mission to avoid sacrificing or significantly risking their own life for the
sake of others (absent any obligations voluntarily incurred).21
This appeal to agent-relative value is the source of a moral per-
mission and not merely the grounds for an excuse. We are excused
when we act in a way that we should not have, but mitigating circum-
stances entail that it would have been exceedingly difficult or even
impossible for any normal or reasonable person to act as morality re-
quires. Skeptics of the agent-relative view might believe this is what
happens when someone kills an Innocent Threat or Aggressor in self-
defense: they should not have killed under those circumstances, but
panic or self-interest made it very difficult to act in accordance with
morality’s requirements. I believe, however, that agent-relative consid-
erations can do more than provide the grounds for excuse in life and
death cases: they can alter the boundaries of what is permissible. Con-
sider cases of rescue. If a child is drowning and X can rescue the child
at the cost of muddying their trousers, most will agree X is required to
save the child. But suppose instead X can only save the child at the cost
of becoming a paraplegic. Here I think many would agree X is no longer
required by morality to save the child. Since the death of the child is
worse than the cost of becoming a paraplegic, the only explanation is
that agent-relative considerations have altered what morality permits.
While it is true that this is a case of rescue rather than killing, I think
it usefully highlights that agent-relative considerations can dramatically
alter what morality permits us to do, even when someone else’s life is
at stake.
I believe it is this agent-relative view about what morality can rea-
sonably require of us that is at the heart of the permission to act in self-
defense.22 Just as you cannot be expected to sacrifice or incur a signif-
icant risk to your life to rescue another person unless you have agreed
to do so, I do not believe (subject to certain constraints) that morality
can demand that you allow yourself to be killed if you have not consented
to this killing, or otherwise engaged in some voluntary act which has
the same effect. Morality cannot require you to sacrifice your life for
21. This agent-relative value is objectively, rather than subjectively, specified. That is,
I do not hold that a person may permissibly attach any weight they like to their own life
or projects. Rather, I claim that there is an objective sense in which each person may
permissibly attach much greater weight to their own life in comparison to the lives of
others. I do not claim that this agent-relative permission attaches to other things that a
person may value, for example, their religious beliefs.
22. In this respect I agree with what Nancy Davis and Susan Levine have said about
the basic grounds for self-defense. See Nancy Davis, “Abortion and Self-Defense,” Philosophy
& Public Affairs 13 (1984): 175–207, 192–93; and Susan Levine, “The Moral Permissibility
of Killing a Material Aggressor in Self-Defence,” Philosophical Studies 45 (1984): 69–78,
73–74.
another single person when you rightfully possess the means to save
yourself, and this is what provides the basic grounds for a permission
to kill in self-defense.23
There are, however, a number of difficulties with even a limited
agent-relative permission to kill in defense of one’s own life.24 First,
there seems to be a great deal of difference between the claim that
morality cannot require you to engage in some life-threatening activity
to rescue someone else and the claim that morality permits you to kill
someone else in defense of your own life. Another difficulty with the
agent-centered approach to self-defense is that it does not appear to
draw any distinction between Threats and Aggressors on the one hand
and Bystanders on the other. If the reason why you are permitted to
kill in self-defense is explicable in terms of the value your life has for
you, then surely it should be irrelevant whether it is a Threat, an Ag-
gressor, or a Bystander that you need to kill to save yourself? This, of
course, is deeply counterintuitive, and it is not a conclusion that I wish
to endorse. I will address these challenges in Section III, but first let
me introduce the agent-centered Principle of Defensive Killing (PDK) I
will defend against them:
PDK: You can permissibly kill X if X will otherwise kill you,25 provided
the following things are true:
(i) killing X is the only reasonable course of action that can
save your life, and
(ii) you have not waived or forfeited your permission to act in
self-defense.
Now consider the clauses attached to PDK. The first clause should
be relatively uncontroversial, even if the idea of reasonable necessity
cannot be rendered precise. You cannot permissibly kill X if you could
23. Again, for different expressions of this agent-relative view of the permission to
act in self-defense, see Davis, “Abortion and Self-Defense”; and Levine, “The Moral Per-
missibility of Killing a Material Aggressor in Self-Defence.”
24. Both objections to the agent-relative view in this paragraph are raised by Kasach-
koff and Leverick, and the latter objection is also raised by McMahan. See Kasachkoff,
“Killing in Self-Defense,” 524–26; Leverick, Killing in Self-Defence, 52; and McMahan, “Self-
Defense and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker,” 270–71.
25. I set aside two complications. First, I set aside complications that arise when we
consider cases where there is some uncertainty as to whether X will kill you if you do not
kill them. I will not try to settle the question regarding how likely a lethal attack must be
before acting in self-defense becomes permissible. Second, I set aside complications that
arise when we consider cases where an agent’s beliefs do not match the true state of the
world. That is, cases where the agent may believe, reasonably or not, that X is going to
kill them when X is not in fact going to kill them. I will only say that someone may act
without fault or blame, even if the agent’s action is impermissible given all the relevant
information.
also save yourself by pinching X on the nose. On the other hand, you
can permissibly kill X if the only other way to save yourself would render
you a quadriplegic. Between these extremes there will be difficult cases
where it is unclear whether you have a reasonable option other than
using lethal force, but again, I do not believe the existence of this gray
area renders the clause untrue or unnecessary.26
Second, I suppose that you have waived or forfeited your permission
to act in self-defense if you have voluntarily done any one of a number
of things that would also constitute waiving or forfeiting your right not
to be killed. These actions include but are not necessarily limited to
consenting that X may kill you, attempting to kill or gravely injure X
(or some other innocent person) without his consent when X poses no
threat to you, intentionally causing X (or some other innocent person)
to believe that you are attempting such an act, or otherwise being cul-
pably responsible for initiating a threat to X’s life. You do not waive or
forfeit your permission to act in self-defense when you act in self-defense
against someone who is the initial Threat or Aggressor, or if you act in
defense of someone else who is being attacked by a Villainous Aggressor.
Your permission to kill in self-defense is thus closely tied to your
right not to be killed, in the sense that so long as you retain the latter
right you normally also retain the former permission. However, and this
is one of the ways PDK differs from Thomson’s T1, what justifies or
grounds your permission to act in self-defense is not the fact that X will
otherwise violate your right not to be killed. The permission to kill in
self-defense is grounded rather in the agent-relative value your life has
for you. While this is what grounds the permission to act in self-defense,
the permission is also (as with all moral permissions) conditional on
your not having waived or forfeited the permission. It makes sense to
suppose that, in general, whenever you waive or forfeit your right not
to be killed, you have also forfeited your permission to act in self-defense.
There could, however, be cases where you waive your right not to be
killed while retaining your permission to act in self-defense (e.g., this
26. This reasonable necessity clause applies differently to morally guilty as opposed
to morally Innocent Aggressors and Threats. That is, the Victim will be required to bear
a greater burden when facing Innocent Aggressors and Threats. For example, we might
expect the Victim to endure five minutes of extreme pain if this was necessary to avoid
killing an Innocent Aggressor, but this might not be morally required in the case of a
Villainous Aggressor. This asymmetry fits nicely with the view that we infringe an Innocent
Aggressor’s right if we kill them, but we infringe no such right when we kill a Villainous
Aggressor. It seems plausible to suppose that we have a moral duty to bear certain costs
to avoid harming or killing someone when this would also wrong them, but that either
we do not have a duty to bear those costs when the harming or killing would not wrong
the target, or at least the costs we must bear in the latter case are substantially less. This
asymmetry is suggested in McMahan, “Self-Defense and the Problem of the Innocent
Attacker,” 265–66.
is a common view regarding combatants in war). For simplicity, I will

assume that whenever you waive or forfeit your right not to be killed,
you have also lost your permission to act in self-defense.
I believe that PDK does, roughly, everything that a principle of
permissible defensive killing should do.27 To begin, PDK successfully
distinguishes between Villains and Innocent Victims. A Villainous Ag-
gressor coming at me with an axe cannot use PDK as the justification
for killing me in self-defense when I try to shoot him first. He has
forfeited his permission to act in self-defense, but I have done nothing
similar, and so if it is necessary, I may kill him in self-defense. PDK also
picks out Threats and Aggressors, but not Bystanders, as permissible
targets of defensive killing. Of course it does so merely by stipulation—
by focusing on those people who would otherwise kill you, and so this
stipulation will require a justification. The task of providing this justi-
fication will be taken up in Section III.
Finally, notice that PDK makes it permissible for Innocent Threats
and Innocent Aggressors to ‘fight back’, that is, to kill someone in self-
defense who is about to kill them in self-defense. This is a major dif-
ference between PDK and Thomson’s principle T1.28 PDK allows anyone
to act in self-defense provided they have not done anything to waive or
forfeit their right not to be killed. This means that if you are about to
zap a falling Innocent Threat with your trusty ray gun, the Innocent
Threat may also permissibly use his gun, should he have one handy, to
shoot you to prevent you from shooting him. Since neither of you has
done anything to waive or forfeit your right not to be killed by the other,
you each have a permission to kill the other in self-defense.29
There are two worries about this conclusion. First, is it coherent?
It is. There need be nothing problematic about two people each having
a permission to act in ways that are incompossible. In a race, for example,
both athletes are permitted to try to win, but only one of them can.
Advocates of the view that rights must be compossible and inviolable
may object that races are different since each party has a liberty-right
to try and win the race, and this means that no party has a claim-right
against any other not to try to win the race.30 But cases involving In-
27. I say ‘roughly’ since, though I believe PDK correctly deals with all standard cases
of self-defense, I also believe that there are further cases, not covered by PDK, where it
is permissible to kill someone to save yourself even when that person will not otherwise
kill you. I discuss some of these cases in Secs. III and IV.
28. It also differs from Uniacke’s position in this way.
29. Again, in this respect I follow Davis’s position as presented in “Abortion and Self-
Defense,” 193–94.
30. Here I draw on the Hohfeldian categorization of rights. For clear expositions of
these categories, see Thomson, The Realm of Rights, chap. 1; or Steiner, An Essay on Rights,
chap. 3.
nocent Aggressors or Threats seem to be different. If both the Threat

and the Victim are innocent then each retains their right not to be
killed, and this should mean that each has a claim-right not to be killed
by the other, so it cannot also be true that each party is at liberty to kill
the other. This would imply the paradoxical conclusion that each is
under a duty not to kill the other, but each is also at liberty to kill the
other. Surely this cannot be correct?
This worry raises complex questions about the nature of rights,
issues I cannot fully engage with here. I will restrict myself to the fol-
lowing remarks. It does not seem to me incoherent to think of claim-
rights as generating powerful, yet defeasible, prima facie duties to do
or forbear from doing certain actions. If this is true, then under certain
circumstances the permission we each possess to act in self-defense may
outweigh the claim-right others have against us killing them. On this
view, acting in self-defense will necessarily involve the infringement of
the claim-right Innocent Aggressors and Threats possess against being
killed. The permission to act in self-defense would thus be no ordinary
liberty-right. It would be much more than the mere absence of a duty:
it would be a special permission or exemption from observing other
people’s valid claim-rights under certain circumstances.31 By contrast,
those who believe that rights cannot conflict in this way are invited, in
cases involving Innocent Threats and Aggressors, to assume that each
party loses their claim-right against the other and retains only the liberty-
right to act in self-defense.32
31. Note the following feature regarding the structure of my argument. I claim that
Innocent Aggressors and Threats have the same moral status as Bystanders but that we
each possess a special agent-relative permission to kill Innocent Aggressors and Threats,
but not Bystanders. As I will argue in Sec. III, this agent-relative permission covers the
former, but not the latter, group because the mode of agency we exercise in the two cases
is different. I thus endorse Warren Quinn’s view that the stringency of one’s right not to
be killed depends on the mode of agency that is exercised in the killing. One has more
stringent rights not to be killed in certain ways (e.g., when one’s body or property is used
as a means) than in other ways (when one’s body or property is not used as a means).
See Warren Quinn, “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double
Effect,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 18 (1989): 334–51, 346–47.
32. There is then the further question of whether, in cases involving Innocent Threats
or Aggressors, third parties would be prohibited from interfering. Is it, for example,
plausible to suppose that the spouse of one of the parties would not be permitted to
intervene on behalf of their spouse? A satisfactory resolution of this question as it pertains
to agent-relative accounts of self-defense is beyond the scope of the present essay. All I
will say here is that in such cases I am tempted to endorse the proposition that some
third parties may permissibly intervene for partial reasons. In cases where one party has
forfeited their right not to be killed but the other party has not, then it is clearly true
that third parties may intervene on behalf of the person who retains their right, but not
on behalf of the person who has forfeited their right. For an illuminating discussion of
third party rights and duties in defense cases, see Davis, “Abortion and Self-Defense,” esp.
194–96.
The second worry is whether it is plausible to suppose that Innocent

Threats and Innocent Aggressors should be permitted to fight back once
they realize they are about to be killed in self-defense. I believe it is. If
you are under attack from an Innocent Threat, you are both innocent
in the relevant sense—neither of you has waived or forfeited your per-
mission to defend your life—and so neither of you should be precluded
from acting in self-defense. There is no good reason why you should
be permitted to do so, but that the equally Innocent Threat to you
should not be permitted.
Some may object that PDK is problematic because it fails to offer
a unitary account of self-defense, in the sense that it treats Villainous
Aggressors very differently from Innocent Aggressors and Threats (i.e.,
no rights violation or infringement occurs when the former are killed,
but an infringement does occur when the latter are killed). According
to Suzanne Uniacke it is “inappropriate and distracting to posit separate
justifications of homicide in self-defence based on a distinction between
culpable and blameless aggressors.”33 On this view, each permissible
instance of defensive killing must have, at bottom, the same justification.
PDK does, however, offer a unitary account of self-defense. The
reason why it is permissible to act in self-defense is the same in all cases:
each person’s life has special value to them, and this is what grounds
the permission to act in defense of our own life. PDK’s dualism only
applies to the question of who retains the permission to act in self-
defense. Here PDK does depart from accounts, such as those offered
by Uniacke and Thomson, which make no distinction between Villain-
ous as opposed to Innocent Aggressors and Threats. But this is one of
the virtues of PDK. Unlike the theories of Uniacke and Thomson, PDK
does not implausibly hold that Innocent Aggressors or Threats violate
anyone’s rights and thereby forfeit their permission to act in self-de-
fense. Instead PDK accepts that people who exercise no responsible
agency cannot plausibly be said to forfeit anything, and so if we threaten
to kill them in self-defense, it must be the case that they then have a
similar permission to act in defense of their own life. It is a major
advantage that PDK recognizes this difference between the different
types of permissible defensive killing, and it accords with our wider
intuition that when our permissible actions harm or kill innocent people
we may be required, where possible, to compensate those people or
their legal beneficiaries. In this respect I am in complete agreement
with an early comment Thomson made on this topic: “If you are an
‘innocent threat’ to my life . . . and I can save my life only by killing
33. Uniacke, Permissible Killing, 207.

you, and I therefore do kill you, I think I do owe compensation, for I

take your life to save mine. If so I infringe a right of yours but do not
violate it.”34
III. THE RATIONALE

Even if PDK fits with our intuitions, we also want to know why we should
endorse a principle of permissible defensive killing that allows us to kill
people even when those people are morally innocent. As mentioned
earlier, PDK faces two major challenges. First, we must explain why the
permission or liberty to act in self-defense should include the permission
to harm or kill an innocent person. Even if our life has special agent-
relative value, the permission to kill innocent people in self-defense
seems much stronger and more controversial than the permission to
let innocent people die if rescuing them would be too risky. Second,
we must also explain why we can permissibly kill Innocent Aggressors
and Threats, but not Bystanders. Since I have claimed that the permis-
sion to act in self-defense is fundamentally grounded in the agent-rel-
ative value each person’s life has for them, why does PDK distinguish
certain targets of killing as permissible and others as impermissible?
From the agent’s point of view this distinction seems irrelevant. The
difficulty for PDK is not to explain why we can permissibly kill Villainous
Aggressors in self-defense—I assume this is a relatively unproblematic
case where someone forfeits their right not to be killed.
In this final section I argue that when we act in self-defense, we
still face certain moral constraints. Your life may have great agent-relative
value to you, but this does not mean that morality permits you to do
anything necessary in order to stay alive. The exercise of this permission
must cohere with other normative beliefs we have, and I suggest that
one of these beliefs—the belief that it is wrong to use someone as a
mere means—can explain why we are permitted to kill some innocent
people in self-defense but not others. Let’s begin with a relatively trivial
case:
Sleepwalking : You are sleepwalking, and are about to unwittingly
trample on your good friend’s prize-winning ant colony. The only
way your friend can stop you is by pinching you hard on the arm
which will cause you to wake up and stop walking (you will suffer
temporary pain, but no lasting damage from the pinch).
Is your friend permitted to pinch you? I think that in this case it would
be permissible for your friend to infringe your right not to be pinched
in order to protect his ant colony. If this explanation is on the right
track, then the following principle seems plausible:
34. Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, 41.

Infringing in Defense : You can permissibly infringe someone else’s
rights when this is necessary to defend something that belongs to
you.
Of course this principle is too simple. First, it needs to be restricted by
some notion of proportionality. It would not be permissible, for ex-
ample, for your friend to kill you if this was for some reason necessary
to save his ant colony from destruction. So this means we need:
Infringing in Defense 2 : You can permissibly infringe someone else’s
you, provided the infringement is proportionate.
How exactly we should settle the matter of proportionality is a difficult
question, and one that I cannot properly address here. I will assume
that an infringement is proportionate provided that the value of what
the right infringed is protecting is no greater than the value of what is
being threatened. Some may feel this definition of proportionality allows
too much, others too little, but we should be able to agree on the idea
that a proportionality clause is necessary.35
But our principle is still incomplete. Suppose that the only way for
your friend to wake you up and thus prevent you from trampling his
ants is by pinching a third person, his neighbor, hard on the arm (this
will cause the neighbor to yelp loudly which will wake you in time). Is
this permissible? It is far less obvious that it is. But why should there be
a difference between these two versions of the story? I think the differ-
ence lies in the fact that your friend will be taking advantage of the
neighbor’s presence to do something he could not do without him,
whereas this is not true in the case where he pinches your arm. When
you threaten to trample your friend’s ants and your friend pinches you
to save the ants, your friend does not use you to do something he could
not do without you.36 You are threatening to destroy something your
friend would safely possess so long as you were not there. In the case
where he pinches the neighbor, however, things are different. Here he
35. There remains the further question of whether the reference to value in the
proportionality clause is to be understood in objective or subjective terms. My view is that
value will have to be understood in an objective sense. To interpret the proportionality
clause in subjective or agent-relative terms would mean that, if the agent cared enough
about what they were defending, there would be no infringement that was too great to
be permissible, and I take this to be an obviously unacceptable conclusion.
36. One might object that your friend does use your pain as a means of manipulating
you (i.e., to wake you) and thus he uses you in the same (but much less severe) manner
that a torturer uses his victim. Setting the severity of the pain caused aside, there is another
significant difference between your friend’s pinch and the torturer. In pinching you, your
friend does not use you to do something he could not do without you (save his ants),
whereas the torturer does need his victim to achieve his objective (extract information or
simply cause suffering). This difference is the one that my example is meant to illuminate.
can only save his ants because the neighbor is present—if the neighbor
were not there he would be unable to protect his ants.
One way of explaining this distinction is to say that your friend
would be using his neighbor if he pinched his arm in a way that he
would not be using you if he pinched your arm. X uses Y, in the special
sense I am interested in here, when Y’s presence is causally necessary
for the successful execution of X’s action. Put counterfactually, without
Y’s presence, X cannot perform the required action or achieve the
relevant goal. Y is, we could say, a tool which X needs to successfully
complete some action or attain some goal. I believe that, other things
being equal, it is morally worse to act contrary to someone’s rights when
this allows you to do something you could not do without that person
than it is to act contrary to someone’s rights as a means of keeping what
you would be able to keep without that person. This view, I believe,
captures part of the Kantian idea that there is something particularly
wrong about treating another person as a mere means to your own
ends.37 When your friend pinches the arm of his neighbor he uses his
neighbor in a manner that has normative salience, but in the case where
he only pinches you he does not. In the latter case he is not taking
advantage of your presence—he is preventing you from taking some-
thing that he would have were it not for your threat. This distinction
is not novel. In particular, Warren Quinn proposes something similar,
distinguishing between those cases where the harmed or killed person’s
presence presents an opportunity or advantage, as opposed to those
cases where the harmed or killed person’s presence is perceived as an
obstacle. Quinn suggests that when we harm or kill in the former cases
our agency is ‘opportunistic’, whereas in the latter cases our agency is
merely ‘eliminative’.38
This same point can be put another way. We tend to believe it is
wrong, other things being equal, to profit or gain from someone else’s
suffering, but I think this intuition is strongest when the person who
has been harmed can complain—“you were just using me!” This com-
plaint makes sense and has moral force when the person who acts could
not have successfully executed their action but for the presence of the
person harmed, but it is not clear this complaint is plausible when this
is not the case. An Innocent Aggressor or Threat cannot plausibly com-
plain, “you were just using me,” if they are harmed or killed by someone
acting in self-defense. In these cases there is no sense in which the
37. I do not deny, however, that there are serious objections that have been pressed
against the view that there is a coherent and morally salient conception of what it is to
use someone as a mere means. See, e.g., Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1995), 212–25.
38. Quinn, “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences,” 344.
acting agent takes advantage of, or exploits the presence of, the In-
nocent Aggressor or Threat for their own gain.39 I thus disagree with
Otsuka when he says that killing an Innocent Threat is “analogous to
those most deplorable cases in which you kill a Bystander in order to
eat her body to prevent yourself from starving or in order to replace
your failing vital organs with healthy ones.”40 You may ‘use’ people in
all these cases in some loose sense, but there is a morally salient dis-
analogy since in killing the Innocent Threat you do not exploit their
presence as a means of doing something you could not do without them,
but this is what you do in the Bystander cases.41 If I am right about this,
we need to modify our principle yet again:
you, provided (a) the infringement is proportionate and (b) the
presence of the person whose right is infringed is not necessary in
order for you to keep what belongs to you.42
But we still face a problem, which can be seen clearly in the following
example:
Alcove: You are in a tunnel and see a runaway trolley headed straight
for you and it will kill you if do not escape. You can only escape
the trolley by squeezing into a small alcove in the tunnel. Unfor-
tunately for you, there is already someone in the small alcove. You
could pull them out of the alcove and onto the tracks, where they
will die, so you may fit in the alcove and save yourself.43
The person already in the alcove is an Innocent Obstructor. Innocent

Obstructors are not morally responsible for what threatens your life,
but they block your path to safety and can only be moved at the cost
of their life. I believe it is clear that in cases such as Alcove it is imper-
missible to kill Innocent Obstructors. The difficulty, however, is that if
you were to kill the Innocent Obstructor in Alcove, you would not be
39. Shelly Kagan considers this method of explaining the normative difference be-
tween Aggressors and Threats as opposed to Bystanders and Shields, and while he declares
that it is “a promising possibility,” he ultimately rejects it for reasons I consider below. See
Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 140–44.
40. Otsuka, “Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense,” 87.
41. Frowe independently developed a similar objection to Otsuka. See Frowe, “Equat-
ing Innocent Threats and Bystanders.”
42. By ‘presence’ I mean their presence in the current circumstances, not their
existence more generally. The principle is thus temporally specific, and so I believe it is
not vulnerable to a certain form of objection that might be pressed against it. For the
form of this objection in a different context, see Kagan, The Limits of Morality, 95–99. The
justification for this temporal restriction is discussed in sec. B of the appendix.
43. This example is borrowed from Thomson, “Self-Defense,” 291.
taking advantage of, or exploiting, their presence: you would be safe

from the oncoming trolley if they were not present. Cases like this thus
appear to pose a serious problem for our proposed principle.44 Consider,
for example, the following objection to the argument thus far.45 Even
if we grant the distinction I have drawn (or Quinn’s similar distinction)
between acts which require the presence of the person who is harmed
and acts which do not require the presence of the person who is harmed,
and even if we further grant that the former acts are morally worse than
the latter acts, this does not establish that the latter acts are permissible.
It is still impermissible to kill an innocent person to save your own life,
the critic might say, though it may be even worse to do so when the
killing is also a ‘using’ in the manner I have specified. In support of
this claim, the critic can then point to examples involving Innocent
Obstructors. In these cases, like Alcove, it is impermissible to kill the
Innocent Obstructor even though doing so would not be a ‘using’. If
it is impermissible to kill Innocent Obstructors even though such killings
do not involve ‘using’ Obstructors, surely it should also be impermissible
to kill Innocent Threats and Aggressors?
I believe there is an effective reply to this objection. The objection
assumes that it is always impermissible to kill Innocent Obstructors, but
this is false. Consider the following example:
Meteor: A small meteor is falling toward you and will kill you if it
lands on you. The only safe place where you can avoid the meteor
is your very tiny one-person car. But there is already someone in
your car—this person was placed there without their consent by
some third party. You could, however, pull them out of the car,
thereby ensuring they will die, so you can get inside to safety.
I think it is clear that you may act in this case—it is, after all, your
car. It is unfortunate that you and the other person cannot both survive
the oncoming meteor, but you have a prior claim to your car and so
can permissibly remove the other person from the car to save your life.
Here we have a case where it is permissible to kill an Innocent Obstructor
to save your own life. (Some might protest that you do not kill the
Innocent Obstructor in Meteor but rather you let them die since they
only die because you deny them something that belongs to you [your
44. It is partly because of examples such as Alcove that Kagan doubts that the rationale
for self-defense I am offering is sound. See Kagan, The Limits of Morality, 140–44.
45. McMahan offers this objection as a means of showing why Quinn’s distinction
between eliminative and opportunistic agency cannot ground a permission to kill Innocent
Aggressors and Threats in self-defense. See McMahan, Killing in War, sec. 4.1.5.
car].46 But the example can be modified. Suppose the car is on the edge
of a cliff and the only way to remove them from the car is to throw
them out the door and off the edge of the cliff. In this case you certainly
kill the Innocent Obstructor, but I think you are still permitted to do
so.)
Now we must identify the relevant difference between Meteor and
Alcove. I suggest the relevant difference is this: in Meteor you have an
exclusive prior claim to the space being occupied by the Innocent Ob-
structor, whereas in Alcove you do not. This, I think, explains why acting
in the former case is permissible, whereas acting in the latter case is
not. Before elaborating on that thought, let me first defend the claim
that the person in the alcove has a prior claim to that space.
It makes a great deal of sense to suppose that we each have at least
a prima facie claim to the space we occupy, provided we have not entered
someone else’s private property without their consent. Even if no harm
is caused, it is presumptively wrong to move someone without their
permission. Suppose Albert and Betty are in a public park, and Albert
desires to get a better view of the lake but can only do so if Betty moves
from her present location where she is enjoying a picnic. Albert cannot
simply move Betty, even if this causes her no harm, and even if he is
somehow able to do this without touching Betty (thus avoiding violating
any claims she might have against nonconsensual touching). Betty has
a presumptive claim-right to her location even though it is a public park,
and even though it is more or less arbitrary that Betty arrived at that
particular spot first. Of course, Betty’s rights may sometimes be per-
missibly overridden if the benefits to some other person or persons are
substantially greater than any interest of Betty’s in remaining where she
is. But we cannot simply ignore Betty’s rights whenever there might be
some small overall good in doing so. The same consideration that sup-
ports the view that people have presumptive claim-rights over their body
motivates the thought that people must have presumptive claim-rights
over the physical space where their body is. Without a right over the
space they occupy, people would have almost no control over their own
life. Without such rights we would lack the most basic elements of human
agency—we would be unable to limit others from using our body for
their own purposes. We must, at a minimum, have control over our own
body, and the space it occupies, in order to realize an idea of persons
46. For the idea that the main difference between killing and letting die depends
on whether the acting agent deprives the dying person only of things (aid or resources)
which belong to the acting agent, see F. M. Kamm, Morality, Mortality (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), vol. 2, pt. 1; or McMahan, “Killing, Letting Die, or Withdrawing
Aid,” Ethics 103 (1993): 250–79.
as more than mere means to be used for others’ purposes.47 It would

be strange to assert rights over the body grounded in a view of persons
as self-directing agents rather than mere tools yet insist that individuals
lack any claim against others from having their body moved without
their consent.
If the foregoing remarks about each person’s prima facie claim to
the space they occupy are sound, we are now in a position to see how
this ought to inform our more general principle of infringing in defense.
Suppose I am right, and it is permissible to kill in Meteor but imper-
missible to kill in Alcove. We have identified the consideration that
distinguishes the two cases: in the former case, but not in the latter, the
acting agent does not require space to which the Innocent Obstructor
has some legitimate claim. I therefore suggest that killing in Alcove is
relevantly analogous to using a Bystander’s body as a shield to save
yourself from some oncoming lethal projectile. In both cases you cannot
save yourself but for something to which the Bystander or Obstructor
has a prior claim. To kill in such cases would be to take advantage of,
or exploit, the body or the physical space of someone else. In both cases
you take advantage of things over which the Bystander or Obstructor
has a rightful claim, and in doing so you shift the burden of death from
yourself onto them. This, I think, is why killing in such cases would be
impermissible. However, in cases involving Threats and Aggressors, as
well as nonstandard cases of Innocent Obstructors such as Meteor, the
acting agent does not take advantage of, or exploit, the body or the
physical space of someone else.
We can thus use the following counterfactual test to determine if
our killing of an innocent person, X, would be impermissible: if X and
all the things currently belonging to X were suddenly to disappear, would your
life be saved? 48 If the answer to this question is yes, then you do not
47. This thought, for example, is partly what motivates Quinn’s distinction between
eliminative and opportunistic agency. See Quinn, “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences,”
350–51.
48. There are, of course, interesting and difficult questions regarding how to imagine
counterfactuals when the space occupied by an Innocent Obstructor/Bystander is removed
from the situation. I cannot consider this issue in detail, but I believe the following
question, or something like it, is essential in determining the permissibility of actions
which would harm or kill Obstructors/Bystanders: if the Obstructor/Bystander’s space
was suddenly inaccessible to you (e.g., protected by a barrier), could you still save your
life? If the answer is no, then your life-saving action falls foul of the proposed test. So,
for example, if your only escape route from a lethal threat requires driving over and killing
an Innocent Obstructor, you may not do so. This is true because, in the counterfactual,
we imagine the Obstructor’s space is blocked by some barrier, and thus you could not
escape to safety. On the other hand, the proposed test would permit you to redirect a
runaway trolley which was headed toward you on to a side track, even if there was a
Bystander trapped on that side track. This is true because even if the area where the
exploit or take advantage of X by killing them. You merely keep what

you would have (your life) without them. If the answer is no, however,
this shows that you do exploit or take advantage of X in order to save
yourself. You cannot survive but for the presence of X or other things
over which they have a rightful claim. Since your survival depends on
things over which X has a rightful claim, to take them and thereby kill
X would be to shift the harm of death from yourself onto X by using
X’s entitlements against them.49 This, I believe, would be to use X as a
mere means to your own survival, and as such it should be deemed
impermissible. Thus we arrive at our final version of the infringing
principle:

you provided (a) the infringement is proportionate and (b) you
would be able to keep what belongs to you if the other person and
all their property were not present.
Several things are worth noting about this principle. First, the prin-
ciple does depend on a theory of justice to tell us what parts of the
world people have prior claims to. In other words, whether an infringe-
ment will be permissible according to our principle will depend upon
our other beliefs about rights or justice, but I do not think this kind of
dependence on further views about justice is surprising or troubling.
Second, I leave open the possibility that infringements which cause only
very small harm in pursuit of a very large benefit may be permissible
even if they fall foul of clause b. In this way Infringing in Defense 4
should be read as providing sufficient conditions for a permissible de-
fensive infringement, and not the necessary conditions. Third, Infring-
ing in Defense 4 assumes only a two-person conflict—I do not claim
that it can be applied to cases where an unequal number of people are
involved. Once the benefits to be had from a proposed infringement
are significantly greater than the harm done by the infringement, some-
thing that will often be true in multiparty cases, we may require a mod-
Bystander is currently trapped was blocked by some barrier, you would still be able to
successfully turn the trolley on to the side track.
49. Note that because the relevant counterfactual is whether your life would be safe
if the innocent person and all their property were absent, you are permitted to use the
property of an Innocent Threat or Aggressor to defend yourself from them. If such a
person and their property suddenly vanished, you would be safe, and thus if you do need
something that belongs to them (e.g., their gun) to defend yourself from them, you may
make use of it since you do not take advantage of the Threat or Aggressor in doing so.
ified, or an entirely different, normative principle.50 Fourth, the prin-

ciple does not rule out all killing or harming of Bystanders: it will
sometimes permit the killing or harming of a Bystander (or an Innocent
Obstructor) provided that the person is not used in the way that By-
standers and Innocent Obstructors are normally used when they are
harmed or killed. Infringing in Defense 4 therefore covers a broader
range of cases than PDK. The latter principle focused only on the subset
of cases where X would otherwise kill you, whereas the former principle
covers all cases where you might infringe one person’s right in order
to defend something that belongs to you.
Consider, however, an example that might seem troubling for In-
fringing in Defense 4:
Bridge : You are being pursued by a Villainous Aggressor and in
order to escape to safety, you must run across a narrow and wobbly
public bridge. Unfortunately, a bird-watcher is currently standing
on the bridge, oblivious to your plight. If you were to get onto the
bridge you would wobble it such that the bird-watcher would fall
off into the ravine below and be killed. It is not possible to com-
municate with the bird-watcher and get them to leave their location
before you are killed by the Villainous Aggressor.51
The bird-watcher in this example is another Innocent Obstructor. But

is this case, like Alcove, one where it is impermissible to kill the Innocent
Obstructor? It might seem as if the account proposed above cannot
explain why killing the bird-watcher would be impermissible. After all,
you do not need access to the precise physical space where the bird-
watcher stands on the bridge (the bridge is wide enough to accom-
modate two people), it is simply that in getting on the bridge you will
foreseeably topple the bird-watcher. Does this mean that you can pro-
ceed? I think not. Because the bridge in this example is so wobbly that
it cannot sustain two people at the same time, it seems best to treat the
bridge as an amount of physical space that can only feasibly contain
one person. To get on one part of the bridge is effectively to seize the
whole bridge (including where the bird-watcher stands) since it is the
kind of structure that can only hold one person at a time. You thus do
need the physical space to which the bird-watcher has a prior claim in
50. So, for example, though some people’s intuitions regarding Thomson’s famous
Loop variant on Trolley appear to conflict with the infringing principle as stated, this need
not undermine the principle’s application in one versus one cases. For Thomson’s Loop
example, see Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, 101–2. For a very persuasive argument
in defense of the view that it is impermissible to kill the one in Loop, see Michael Otsuka,
“Double Effect, Triple Effect, and the Trolley Problem: Squaring the Circle in Looping
Cases,” Utilitas 20 (2008): 92–110.
51. This example is modified from one provided in Thomson, “Self-Defense,” 290.
order to escape the Villainous Aggressor, and this makes it impermissible

to topple the bird-watcher.52
The picture of infringing rights in self-defense that I have presented
resembles the permission to let other people die in certain circum-
stances. When it is permissible to let someone die, I believe a major
part of what makes it permissible is the fact that the dying person loses
only what they would have had by virtue of your efforts, or other things
that belong to you.53 In letting someone die in these permissible in-
stances you merely keep what belongs to you in order to avoid a risky
or costly action. I claim that for an act of killing in self-defense to be
permissible, a related idea should apply. In order to permissibly kill an
innocent person, it must be true that saving your life does not require
their presence or the presence of anything to which they have a rightful
claim. It must be true that saving your life does not depend on acquiring
that other person’s body or property. To act when this condition is not
met would involve treating that other person as a mere means to your
own end. You would be exploiting things over which they have a claim
in order to shift the harm of death from yourself onto them. Your use
of someone in this manner changes the moral character of your action
to such an extent that, I claim, it affects the permissibility of your action.
Although they are not exactly analogous, the moral distinction between
killing and letting die and the constraint on killing in self-defense share
a common deontological structure, one which views each person as an
independent agent who cannot be used merely as a means for another’s
ends.
IV. CONCLUSION
Proponents of the moral responsibility argument deny that it is per-
missible to kill Innocent Threats and Aggressors in self-defense. Like
Bystanders, such Innocent Threats and Aggressors have done nothing
to make themselves liable to be killed, and so the presumption against
killing one innocent person in order to save another should protect
Innocent Threats and Aggressors in the same way it protects Bystanders.
I have argued that this conclusion is mistaken. Each person has an agent-
relative permission to kill in self-defense. This permission extends to
the killing of all Threats and Aggressors, but not (most) Bystanders,
and not (most) Innocent Obstructors. The reason we must treat these
groups differently is grounded in a view regarding what it is to treat
someone else as a mere means to our own survival. We treat someone
52. If the bridge was your exclusive property then, as in Meteor, I believe it would
be permissible to kill the Innocent Obstructor.
53. Again, see both Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. 2, pt. 1; or McMahan, ‘‘Killing,
Letting Die, or Withdrawing Aid.”
as a mere means to our own survival if we kill them when we could not
survive without them or something else to which they have a rightful
claim.
There are a number of further points worth noting about the ar-
gument I have advanced. First, consider what the rationale I have offered
implies about Innocent Shields, a category that is not directly addressed
by PDK. Innocent Shields are people who are not themselves a lethal
threat, but they are attached or close enough to whatever it is that does
pose the lethal threat so that you cannot stop the lethal threat without
killing them.54 For example, an Innocent Shield may be trapped inside
a runaway trolley that is speeding toward you, and the only way to stop
the trolley is by firing a small missile at the trolley which will kill the
Shield (if you do not fire the missile they will survive). If you kill an
Innocent Shield in cases like this you do not fall foul of Infringing in
Defense 4, and I think this explains why many people believe such
killings are permissible.55
Second, remember that Infringing in Defense 4 does not apply to
people who have waived or forfeited their right not to be killed by you.
People such as Villainous Aggressor have no right not to be killed by
you, and so the conditions of our infringing principle are not applicable
to the killing of Villainous Aggressor. This is as it should be. The nor-
mative constraints on your actions should be very different when you
are infringing someone’s rights as compared to cases where you commit
no infringement at all, and so it should be an unsurprising conclusion
that there are things we cannot do to innocent people that we may do
to save ourselves from Villainous Aggressors.
Third, it is possible that Infringing in Defense 4 is merely an in-
stance of a higher-order principle regarding when we can permissibly
infringe other people’s rights generally, not merely in cases where we
defend something that belongs to us. Whether or not this is true, and
if it is true, what this higher-order principle might look like are questions
I hope to pursue in the future.
Finally, consider what would be true if we were not permitted to
kill Innocent Aggressors or Threats in self-defense. A moral theory which
made these acts impermissible would be one where we could each be
required to allow other people to kill us even though we have done
54. Note that my definition of an Innocent Shield will include persons who are
sometimes referred to as Bystanders. For example, on my view X is an Innocent Shield if
he is standing close enough to a runaway trolley such that the only way you can stop the
runaway trolley from hitting you is by throwing a grenade at the trolley which will also
kill X.
55. There can, of course, be more difficult cases where you must also make use of
the Innocent Shield or their property in order to save yourself. In such cases I think the
killing would be impermissible for the sorts of reasons I have outlined.
nothing to waive our rights. This would be an extraordinarily demanding

moral theory. Of course sometimes morality may be very demanding,
but a morality which required us to allow ourselves to be killed when
we have done nothing to forfeit our rights, and when we already possess
the means to save ourselves, blurs the distinction between moral heroism
and moral requirement. It would be heroic to allow yourself to be killed
in this way, but requiring you to do so diminishes the sense in which
your life is your own. PDK, on the other hand, does not require any
innocent person to allow themselves to be killed by someone else pro-
vided they have the means to save themselves. PDK is thus more in tune
with a certain idea that I think is central to deontological morality: that
each of us has only one life to live. I think this means we cannot be
required by morality to allow ourselves to be killed, provided we can
prevent this from happening without treating anyone else as a mere
means to our own survival.
Appendix
In this appendix I confront two further objections that might be pressed
against the arguments in the main text.
A
Consider a luck egalitarian objection.56 This objection begins with the
premise that inequalities between persons that are the result of brute
luck are unjust, and only inequalities which arise from responsible
choices are just. Whenever burdens and benefits are purely a matter of
brute luck, the luck egalitarian will recommend that these burdens and
benefits be equally distributed. But what happens in cases of self-defense
when the Aggressor or Threat is innocent? In such cases we have two
morally equivalent parties (in terms of the chance/choice cut) and one
indivisible burden: death. In these cases it might seem that the appro-
priate luck egalitarian strategy would be to flip a coin or use some other
fair lottery system for deciding who should live and who should die. If
this argument is sound, then PDK is wrong because it does not employ
a fair lottery to determine who will live.
Fortunately for PDK, this luck egalitarian proposal is not sound.
First, as Otsuka points out,57 if you are facing a lethal threat from some
object, say a javelin, it would be morally impermissible to toss a coin to
decide whether or not to push a Bystander in front of you so that the
javelin will kill the Bystander rather than you. An advocate of the luck
egalitarian proposal would face the difficult task of explaining why the
56. The main aim of Levine’s paper is to respond to a similar objection. See Levine,
“The Moral Permissibility of Killing a Material Aggressor in Self-Defence.”
57. Otsuka, “Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense,” 76–77 n. 9.
coin toss is not appropriate in the case of Bystanders but is appropriate
in the case of Innocent Aggressors and Threats.
Second, if the luck egalitarian insists that you must toss a coin in
all cases involving two innocent parties (including Bystanders), they are
not preventing someone from being the victim of brute bad luck, they
are simply changing the moment at which someone becomes the victim
of brute bad luck. The luck egalitarian wants this moment to be when
the coin lands either heads or tails, but why is this moment any different
than an earlier moment when, say, an Innocent Threat falls off a cliff
toward someone with a ray gun? We could instead choose to say that
we all face some ex ante probability of becoming Innocent Threats or
Aggressors, and if we all face the same ex ante probability, there is no
unfairness in instituting a policy which allows people to kill in self-
defense in such cases. It’s not clear what the luck egalitarian can say in
reply. Nothing is being distributed unfairly by PDK—we are all given
the same permission (the permission to kill Threats and Aggressors in
self-defense), we are all assumed to be equally likely to be the target of
this permission, and thus ex ante we are all accorded the same package
of burdens and benefits with regard to killing in self-defense.58
B
Consider a category that I ignored in the main text: Justified or Innocent
Causes.59 Justified or Innocent Causes (hereafter Innocent Causes) are
people who are causally responsible but are either not morally respon-
sible, or are fully justified, in initiating a chain of events which now
results in a threat to your life, but they themselves do not form part of
the direct threat. For example, a Miner who nonnegligently caused a
collapse of the mine shaft which now threatens your life because you
are now trapped in the mine and will die of dehydration is an Innocent
Cause.60
Are such Innocent Causes to be counted as Threats or are they
Bystanders? They certainly appear to be Bystanders relative to the im-
mediate threat (they are not threatening you now as you face the risk
of dehydration), and it seems wrong to claim that you could kill the
innocent Miner who was the cause of the mine shaft collapse if this was
somehow necessary to save your own life. But McMahan claims that
principles of defensive killing, such as PDK, which try to distinguish
between Bystanders as opposed to Aggressors and Threats without mak-
ing reference to the moral responsibility of the targets, will be unable
58. Assuming there are no special reasons to believe that certain types of people are
more likely to end up in one category rather than the other. In cases where some types
of people are systematically more likely to be killed, then things will be different if we
accept the luck egalitarian premise.
59. I take the terms Justified and Innocent Causes from McMahan, “Self-Defense and
the Problem of the Innocent Attacker,” 267.
60. This example is borrowed, with modifications, from ibid., 267.
to reach this intuitively plausible conclusion.61 After all, the Innocent
Cause did cause what now threatens your life, and so why are they any
different from an Innocent Threat?
I suggest that we approach Innocent Cause examples in the same
way I argued we ought to approach other cases, that is, by asking whether,
in killing the Innocent Cause, we would be able to do something we
could not do but for the presence of the Innocent Cause. Suppose the
Miner who nonnegligently caused the collapse of the mine shaft which
now threatens your life is trapped in the mine with you. It will take
rescue crews more than five days to dig both of you out. You and the
Miner each have one bottle of water, unfortunately you would need to
drink two bottles of water in order to avoid dying from dehydration
during this time, whereas the Miner only needs his own bottle to survive.
Can you take his bottle, thereby killing him but saving yourself? It seems
clear to me that you may not do this, and the reason you may not do
this (or similar things which would kill the Miner) is because you obtain
a benefit you could not obtain but for the Miner’s presence or property.
Someone might object that if the Miner had never existed, then
you would not need his bottle of water (since the mine shaft wouldn’t
have collapsed), and so it is not true that but for the Miner’s presence
or property you would not survive. This reply, however, ignores the fact
that the counterfactual test which determines whether we use someone
in the specified manner is temporally restricted (a point made in n.
42). When we evaluate some action and ask whether our action would
constitute using someone as a mere means, we are asking, given the
facts as they are now, does our action have a certain moral feature? To
know if a particular course of action requires the use of some particular
person or their property we must look to the facts as they are, not as
they might have been had the person in question never existed. We
cannot justly appropriate someone’s property in the present by claiming
that if they had never existed, the property would be unowned. The
only relevant counterfactual is whether we could save ourselves if the
person and their property were suddenly removed from the current
situation, but everything else remained as it is.
There are some who might object that this temporal restriction
looks arbitrary. If the Miner is morally innocent at all points in time
(e.g., both when he is about to cause the accident and later when he
is trapped with you), then shouldn’t it be equally permissible or im-
permissible to kill him at all points in time? This worry about arbitrar-
iness, however, ignores a central feature of deontological morality, which
is that differences in space and time can make a difference to the moral
permissibility of our actions since those differences often entail differ-
ences in how we treat the people affected by our actions. Consider the
contrast between the two cases described in Section I: Man on the Track
versus Man on the Overpass. Both men in this pair of examples are
61. Ibid., 278–81.

equally innocent—what differentiates them is merely where they happen
to be located in space. But where they are located in space makes a
difference to how we might treat the two men. Because we do not use
(or perhaps intend) the death of the man on the track it may be per-
missible to turn the trolley in this case, but it is clearly not permissible
to kill the large man on the overpass because this killing would require
that we use (or perhaps intend) his death as a means to our end. Al-
though one’s spatial location does not affect one’s moral status (i.e.,
whether one is morally innocent or culpable), it can affect the permis-
sibility of actions. Since almost all deontologists accept that such spatial
differences between persons can make a difference regarding what is
permissible, it should not be puzzling to suppose that deontological
ethics may also be sensitive to temporal differences.

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Killing in Self-Defense*

Can we ever permissibly kill others in self-defense, and if we can, what

Ethics 119 (April 2009): 507–537

cent Aggressors and Innocent Threats in self-defense.2 They focus on

I. THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY ARGUMENT

Bystanders in self-defense.6 The most the moral responsibility argument

The immediate difficulty, however, is that premise 5 conflicts with

Is it permissible to divert the trolley? Most people believe, and I

If the narrow thesis is true, then the moral responsibility argument

Man on the Track : There is a runaway trolley whose brakes have

there a further moral requirement to compensate them? It will not be

T2: You can permissibly kill X if X will otherwise kill you.15

The problem with T2, as Thomson shows, is that it can be used by

15. Thomson, “Self-Defense,” 289.

is a common view regarding combatants in war). For simplicity, I will

nocent Aggressors or Threats seem to be different. If both the Threat

The second worry is whether it is plausible to suppose that Innocent

33. Uniacke, Permissible Killing, 207.

you, and I therefore do kill you, I think I do owe compensation, for I

III. THE RATIONALE

34. Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, 41.

The person already in the alcove is an Innocent Obstructor. Innocent

taking advantage of, or exploiting, their presence: you would be safe

as more than mere means to be used for others’ purposes.47 It would

exploit or take advantage of X by killing them. You merely keep what

Infringing in Defense 4 : You can permissibly infringe someone else’s

ified, or an entirely different, normative principle.50 Fourth, the prin-

The bird-watcher in this example is another Innocent Obstructor. But

order to escape the Villainous Aggressor, and this makes it impermissible

nothing to waive our rights. This would be an extraordinarily demanding

61. Ibid., 278–81.

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