In recent years, philosopher Jeff McMahan has solidified an influential view that moral desert is irrelevant to the ethics of self-defense. This work aims to criticize this view by demonstrating that there are cases in which moral desert has a niche position in determining whether it may be permissible to kill a person in self- (or other-)defense. This is done by criticizing McMahan’s Responsibility Account of liability as being overly punitive against minimally responsible threateners (MRTs), and by demonstrating, through reference (...) to Saba Bazargan’s Hybrid Account of liability to defensive harm, that further justification than mere liability is necessary in the justification of killing these kinds of threateners. It is also argued that other kinds of justifications like lesser-evil justifications are not necessarily strong enough to justify killing MRTs, even on top of established liability. This paper puts forward the view that, where a strong enough moral difference between threatener and innocent victim cannot be established, a justification on the basis of the implications of prior moral acts might, on some occasions, give us reasons to kill or not kill MRTs in self-defense. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 355-363 [Access article in PDF] Plato on Power, Moral Responsibility and the Alleged Neutrality of Gorgias' Art of Rhetoric (Gorgias 456c-457b) James Stuart Murray 1. Introduction You are sitting in your office on a quiet Thursday afternoon when an agitated university administrator enters with news that the students in your "Plato class" have just been interviewed on the city's largest radio station. According to (...) them, their professor claimed that the demise of their university is a direct result of the fact that senior administrative positions are held by a motley assortment of business-oriented, academically cynical, "renewal"-promoting "innovators" whose main preoccupation is "government funding opportunities" in areas of dubious academic importance.Your response might be: "That's not what I taught them." Or perhaps you might say, "That's not exactly what I taught them--I didn't say it was a 'motley' assortment." In either case, you would be relying on some form of what Robert Wardy (170, n.r 20) has dubbed the "blame students, not teachers defence." He asserts, perhaps correctly, that this defense gained the status of topos within the ancient rhetorical tradition. A version of it certainly does seem to show up in Isocrates' Antidosis (250-52) and perhaps in his Nicocles (3-4), and it is suggested by remarks in both Aristotle's Rhetoric (1355b) and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (II,16,5). On this occasion, however, I am concerned with only one rendition, probably its earliest extant instance in Greek literature. In Plato's Gorgias, the eponymous sophist argues as follows: Imagine someone who after attending wrestling school, 1 getting his body into good shape and becoming a boxer, went on to strike his father and mother or any other family member or friend. By Zeus, that's no reason to hate physical trainers... and to exile them from their cities! For while these people imparted their skills to be used justly against enemies and wrongdoers, and in [End Page 355] defense, not aggression, their pupils pervert their strength and skill and misuse them. So it's not their teachers who are wicked, nor is this a reason why the craft should be a cause of wickedness; the ones who misuse it are supposedly the wicked ones. And the same is true for oratory as well. The orator has the ability to speak against everyone on every subject, so as in gatherings to be more persuasive, in short, about anything he likes, but the fact that he has the ability to rob doctors or other craftsmen of their reputations doesn't give him any more of a reason to do it. He should use oratory justly, as he would any competitive skill. And I suppose that if a person who has become an orator goes on with this ability and this craft to commit wrongdoing, we shouldn't hate his teacher and exile him from our cities. For while the teacher imparted it to be used justly, the pupil is making the opposite use of it. So it's the misuser whom it's just to hate and exile or put to death, not the teacher. (Gorgias 456d, 457a-b) 2Change "exile from our cities" to "fire from our universities" and this makes a good passage to remember when confronted by that agitated administrator mentioned above. Blame the students, not the teachers.Not much comment has been provoked by this defense of Gorgianic rhetoric and its underlying rhetor/boxer analogy, except over the question of whether we should read the passage as an accurate reflection of the words of the historical Gorgias or as a Platonic invention. In a previous generation, E. R. Dodds (212) reckoned that this defense was "probably the standpoint of the historical Gorgias," while E. A. Havelock (195) cautioned that "there is little--very little--that he [i.e., Plato] lets Gorgias say in the Gorgias." In our own day, and on a more general level, Thomas Cole (151) states that "Plato's... (shrink)