Response: Limiting Defensive Rights SETH LAZAR Arthur Ripstein’s article 1 draws on more resources than I can deploy in this response to it. I will restate what I take to be the central claims of the article, then present a reply. Ripstein does not strictly argue for his view of proportionality in defensive force. Instead he paints a picture of a moral system that one might adopt, and indicates the role of the proportionality constraint therein. So after outlining how I understand that picture, I will draw an alternative one. I’ll then suggest that my alternative has a few virtues that Ripstein’s lacks. I should emphasise that mine will be a lightweight recon- struction of Ripstein’s view, without much of the Kantian architecture. Perhaps that architecture is fundamental to its plausibility, as part of a broader worldview. Nonetheless, I cannot address the totality of a Kantian system in a short commentary, so I’ll concentrate on the elements most pertinent to the problem at hand. What, then, is that problem? Under what circumstances can those who would other- wise be permitted to use seriously harmful defensive force – let’s just focus on killing for simplicity – be required to forebear from doing so, in order to spare their target from harms which, under other circumstances, the target would have no legitimate complaint against suffering? It is clearly permissible to kill a culpable assailant who will otherwise kill you, when there is no alternative to doing so. But if you can avoid that threat simply with a costless sidestep, then it is clearly wrong for you to kill ‘to save your life’. These are the easy cases. The question is whether retreat is required when it involves the defender bearing some cost or risk, and if so, how great the cost or risk one can be required to bear to spare one’s assailant’s life. 2 Ripstein’s approach is to fit his answer to this problem into a sketch of a comprehen- sive view of moral, legal, and political philosophy, which is developed in detail else- where. The starting point is an account of individual rights, which Ripstein takes to be fundamental to deontic morality, which he distinguishes from virtue ethics. As I under- stand this contrast, rights determine what we can be morally required to do; virtues determine what would be best for us to do, though it is permissible to be less than fully virtuous. 3 The rights in question are wholly negative: their task is to tell us who is in charge of what, and the ‘what’ in question is first and foremost our bodies. Each of us is in charge of his or her own body. This right is absolute: others don’t get to use our bodies for their purposes, however minor the cost they thereby impose on us; they also may not subordinate our bodies to their purposes, harming us as an unintended side- effect of pursuing their ends. These rights, Ripstein emphasises, apply irrespective of the particular goals in service of which one’s body would otherwise be used or to which it would be subordinated. No matter the importance to you of touching my hair, it’s up to me to decide whether you get to do it, even if I will not know you ever did so. There is no space in this picture for positive rights – rights that others bear costs for my sake. Ripstein then makes the important point that the fact that one has a right, and the details of how one may enforce that right, are conceptually distinct. We cannot simply © Society for Applied Philosophy, 2017, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 34, No. 1, February 2017 doi: 10.1111/japp.12257