The Right to Wage Private Wars of Subsistence

Some philosophers have recently argued for the revisionist just war doctrine that individuals can have the right to initiate war in defense of their human rights when their government fails in its duty to protect them. It was a central tenet of early modern just war theory, too, that when judicial recourse is not available, individuals are entitled to enforce their basic rights by force of war. How should we conceptualize such remedial rights to secure basic rights by armed force? And where to fit such rights within ethical theories of war? This chapter explores these questions by critically contrasting two ways to ground individual rights to wage so-called “private subsistence wars”: via “modern” duties of global justice and via “old” rights of necessity. I argue that the right-of-necessity model—for better or worse—can sidestep problems of indeterminate and underdetermined moral liability by grounding resistance rights in enforceable rights (of subsistence) rather than in enforceable duties (of global justice). My analysis thus charts normative implications of dispensing with the legitimate authority condition by analyzing what it means for rights and duties to be enforceable.