Zhang, Weijia; (2025) Self-Defence as the Just Distribution of Harm. Masters thesis (M.Phil.Stud), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines the ethics of defensive harm through the lens of distributive justice. I argue that self-defence is best understood not as an exception to ordinary moral constraints, but as a problem of allocating and redistributing unavoidable harms. Chapter 1 addresses the question of the nature of liability. I critically assess rights-based and duty-based theories, including forfeiture, enforcement, and enforceable-duty accounts, and show that they fail to explain proportionality, necessity, and scalar liability. I then advance the discounting account, according to which liability consists in a reduction in the moral disvalue of harms borne by threateners relative to others. Chapter 2 turns to the grounds of liability. I argue that prevailing accounts—culpability, causation, moral status, and enforceable duty—are insufficient. I develop a revised moral responsibility account that treats liability as graded by voluntary initiation of risk, evidence-relative awareness, and causal proximity, and show how this integrates with the discounting framework. Chapter 3 addresses minimally responsible threats. Building on and revising Saba Bazargan’s hybrid justification, I propose a hybrid explanatory account that clarifies why intuitions diverge on the permissibility of killing such threats. The thesis as a whole defends the claim that self-defence is justified when it realises, or most closely approximates, the just distribution of harm.

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