Let us begin with a case:
Standing One’s Ground.1 Threatener will culpably kill Victim unless Victim takes some preventive action. She has two options, both of which she knows will be effective. She can (1) retreat from the confrontation without risk or cost and alert the police, who will then be able to subdue Threatener without harming him, or (2) stand her ground and kill Threatener in self-defence.
Some believe that Victim is justified in standing her ground and killing Threatener. They believe that, because of the threat he poses, Threatener is liable to suffer defensive harm. To say that a individual is liable to be harmed is to say that harming him would not wrong him nor violate his rights, and so he would not be justified in defending himself.2 However, this verdict is at odds with a condition commonly applied to liability to east jump defensive harm—necessity. Standardly, necessity requires that, for a defensive act to be justified it must be the least harmful of the agent’s available effective means of averting the threat. Such is not the case in Standing One’s Ground.
This paper considers whether victims can justify what appears to be unnecessary defensive harm by reference to an honour-based justification. The honour-based justification suggests that when a victim is threatened, there are two threats she faces: (1) the direct physical threat; (2) a secondary threat to her honour. It is defending herself against this secondary threat to her honour that renders certain defensive acts necessary (such as Victim’s standing her ground). The primary purpose of this paper is to argue that the honour-based justification faces serious problems. (Along the way, I also suggest why I think that internalism concerning necessity—the view that satisfying the necessity constraint is a necessary condition of a threatener’s liability—is correct, despite its initial intuitive implausibility.)
The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 considers the relationship between necessity and liability. Section 3 advances what I take to be the most plausible version of the honour-based justification. Section 4 raises two worries with the honour-based justification: 4.1 questions whether the honour-based justification can justify defensive harming; 4.2 questions whether the honour-based justification can permit substantial unnecessary harming. Section 5 question what is meant by an honour-based justification in the first place. I argue that, if the purpose of the honour-based justification is expressive, an argument must be given to demonstrate why harming threateners, as opposed to choosing a non-harmful alternative, is the most effective means of affirming one’s honour.
2. Necessity and Liability
Necessity requires that, for a defensive act to be justified it must be the least harmful of the agent’s available effective means of averting the threat.3 There is debate as to the precise role that necessity plays within a theory of self-defence. Internalism holds that necessity is an internal condition of liability to defensive harm: threateners are liable to defensive harm only if that harm is the least harmful means of averting the threat they pose.4 This means that Threatener is not liable to be killed in Standing One’s Ground. (For brevity, “Victim/Threatener” refer directly to Standing One’s Ground, whereas “victim(s)/threatener(s)” characterise the generic.) If internalism is true, and Victim nonetheless stands her ground, this seems to imply that Threatener is, amongst other things, (1) wronged, (2) owed compensation, and (3) permitted to engage in counter-defence against Victim (by hypothesis, Victim is now posing a threat to which Threatener is not liable). It further permits, or even obligates, (4) third parties to defend or assist Threatener in counter-defence, as well as obligating them to refrain from interfering with Threatener’s counter-defensive action. (These implications hold, absent other arguments.5 I set these other arguments aside because our purpose is to discover the work that the honour-based justification can do in justifying what appears to be unnecessary defensive harming.)
Given what some take to be the implausibility of these implications, externalism denies that necessity is internal to liability, though it may bear on the all-things-considered permissibility of defensive action.6 On externalism, because satisfying the necessity constraint is not a necessary condition of a threatener’s liability, victims do not wrong threateners if they violate the putatively external necessity condition, but merely act impermissibly. Given that this still means that victims act wrongly in these cases, externalism remains somewhat intuitively implausible.