Liability

Abstract

Chapter 2 develops and defends an original account of liability to defensive harm: the moral status account. On this view, a person renders himself liable to defensive harm when the evidence-relative permissibility of his act depends on the assumption that others lack certain moral rights that they in fact possess, and his act threatens, or reasonably appears to threaten, those rights. The chapter also provides criticisms of competing accounts of liability, in particular, the moral responsibility account influentially developed by Jeff McMahan, among others. The chapter concludes by addressing a number of objections that might be pressed against the moral status account.