Joseph Bowen

According to the Wrong Restriction, we are liable to defensive harm only when we threaten to wrong others. While attractive on a first pass, we argue that plausible philosophical claims make the Wrong Restriction difficult to accept. In its place, we offer the Impermissibility Restriction, according to which one is liable to defensive harm only if one would act impermissibly, all things considered. Accepting the Impermissibility Restriction in place of the Wrong Restriction has significant implications for the ethics of self‐defense.

This paper takes up whether the dead are potential right-holders on the Interest Theory of Rights, as well as laying clear how we should approach the question of whether other entities are potential right-holders on the Interest Theory. It argues the dead are potential right-holders on the Interest Theory, but that Matthew Kramer’s argument for this thesis is not very convincing. This is because Kramer’s argument looks in the wrong place by focusing only on the ways in which the dead figure in the lives of the living. Instead, this paper argues we should focus on the nature of the interests of the dead themselves. It suggests that the dead have interests (and that the dead’s interests matter for rights) for much the same reason that the living have interests. Along the way, we work through several choice-points for the Interest Theory, including a taxonomy of different accounts of interests and interests’ relation to the Interest Theory.

This paper examines the role that the consent of intended beneficiaries plays in the moral permissibility of humanitarian intervention. When consent is not unanimous among a group to be defended, as will likely be the case in wars of humanitarian intervention, many doubt that consent has any bearing on the permissibility of defending others. So the thought goes, allowing the refusal of consent to bear on the permissibility of other-defense wrongly enables some subset of the group to control whether the group as a whole is saved. I argue this is mistaken. Ordinarily, one may not justify subjecting people to a risk of harm for their own good—one both may not justify one’s conduct by appeal to the good this does, and peoples’ rights against being subjected to that risk remains in deliberation. All this is true, I argue, when people are part of a group that requires defending. By refusing to consent to intervention, people leave in deliberation their rights against being subjected to risk and make it impermissible for interveners to appeal to the good of saving them. This makes it harder to justify intervention. Conversely, by consenting, people allow interveners to appeal to the prospective good of saving them to justify intervention. This makes it easier to justify intervention.

This chapter examines a range of cases in which it appears one’s rights against harm are violated by another’s behaviour, even though this behaviour has done one no harm. These cases raise a serious problem for most theories of rights, though the problem is most pronounced on the Interest Theory of Rights. According to that theory, rights necessarily protect their holder’s wellbeing. At first glance, one might think that the person’s wellbeing cannot be said to be protected by the right in cases of harmless wronging because they are not harmed in such cases—so, the necessary condition set for the ascription of a right is not satisfied. This paper puts forward a novel solution to this problem, the Safety Condition. The Safety Condition looks beyond what happens in the actual world to close worlds in order that individuals’ wellbeing is robustly protected across circumstances that could just have easily come about.

Many believe that we have duties to rescue. Many believe, further, that these duties to rescue are in principle enforceable. Some defend a third claim: we are sometimes under a duty not to rescue in sufficiently suboptimal ways, even when we are not under a duty to rescue—even when rescuing is supererogatory. My interest concerns what follows from the combination of these claims. I argue that if there are enforceable duties to rescue, as well as duties not to rescue in sufficiently suboptimal ways, then those duties not to rescue in sufficiently suboptimal ways are also enforceable. And I argue these duties are enforceable only by forcing the rescuer to rescue in the optimal way. This means people lack rights against others forcing them not to rescue in sufficiently suboptimal ways, by forcing them instead to rescue in optimal ways, even when they are permitted not to rescue.

This paper considers whether rights hold due to the facts, the best available evidence to people, or people's actual beliefs. While there has been much discussion of this question in the context of what we ought to do, there is less discussion from a rights standpoint. This is a shame, since rights are often thought to be relational in a way that is not true of ought, and this relationality causes complications when prospective right-holders' and duty-bearers' epistemic perspectives differ from one another. While the paper begins with a thorny problem for the view on which rights depend on the facts, it ultimately argues we have the most reason to endorse such a view.

This paper answers two questions. First, on the assumption that risk of harm is of moral significance, does risk’s moral significance lay in its being harmful? Second, is risk of harm itself harmful? I argue that either risk is not harmful or that risk is harmful only in a small range of cases. If risk is not harmful, and yet risk is of moral significance, risk’s moral significance cannot lie in its being harmful. And if risk is harmful only in a small range of the cases in which risk is of moral significance, risk’s moral significance cannot lie in its being harmful.

This article examines Rowan Cruft’s new Addressive Theory of Rights, put forward in his Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual. We begin with an exposition of Cruft’s discussion of the nature of rights and directed duties. We see there are two elements to this: first, a series of arguments that no reductive account of rights succeeds and, second, an introduction to the Addressive Theory. I then offer three critical comments. First, that the two elements to Cruft’s discussion on the nature of rights and directed duties, the antireductivism and the introduction of the Addressive Theory, are independent. Second, that, because of the antireductivism, the Addressive Theory is unmotivated. Third, that part of the Addressive Theory itself, requiring first‐personal thought on the part of capable right holders, is redundant. I conclude by considering what we can learn from these three comments: that we should rethink whether to combine the Addressive Theory with a reductive theory of rights, which grounds rights in features of right‐holders as moral patients.

This chapter evaluates whether AI systems are or will be rights-holders, explaining the conditions under which people should recognize AI systems as rights-holders. It develops a skeptical stance toward the idea that current forms of artificial intelligence are holders of moral rights, beginning with an articulation of one of the most prominent and most plausible theories of moral rights: the Interest Theory of rights. On the Interest Theory, AI systems will be rights-holders only if they have interests or a well-being. Current AI systems are not bearers of well-being, and so fail to meet the necessary condition for being rights-holders. This argument is robust against a range of different objections. However, the chapter also shows why difficulties in assessing whether future AI systems might have interests or be bearers of well-being—and so be rights-holders—raise difficult ethical challenges for certain developments in AI.

The Will Theory of Rights says that having control over another’s duties grounds rights. The Will Theory has commonly been objected to on the grounds that it undergenerates right-ascriptions along three fronts. This paper systematically examines a range of positions open to the Will Theory in response to these counterexamples, while being faithful to the Will Theory’s focus on normative control. It argues that of the seemingly plausible ways the defender of the Will Theory can proceed, one cannot both be faithful to the theory’s focus on normative control as the grounds of rights and achieve extensional adequacy.

This paper considers whether victims can justify what appears to be unnecessary defensive harming by reference to an honour-based justification. I argue that such an account faces serious problems: the honour-based justification cannot permit, first, defensive harming, and second, substantial unnecessary harming. Finally, I suggest that, if the purpose of the honour based justification is expressive, an argument must be given to demonstrate why harming threateners, as opposed to opting for a non-harmful alternative, is the most effective means of affirming one’s honour. Along the way, I also suggest why I think that internalism about the constraints on defensive harming (the view that the satisfaction of the necessity constraint is a necessity condition of a threatener’s liability) is correct. Most importantly, externalism implies that threateners can be liable to suffer gratuitous harm. I take this to be an unattractive consequence of the view.