Two articles have appeared in 'Law and Philosophy' that provide detailed criticisms of aspects of my account of the justification of individual self-defense. One of these articles misconstrues central aspects of my account. The other raises a less central, but nonetheless an important issue that invites clarification. The criticisms raised in these two articles to which I respond here have important bearing on the nature of the justification of self-defense.

This paper examines the absolutist grounds for denying an agent's responsibility for what he allows to happen in 'keeping his hands clean' in acute circumstances. In defending an agent's non-prevention of what is, viewed impersonally, the greater harm in such cases, absolutists typically insist on a difference in responsibility between what an agent brings about as opposed to what he allows. This alleged difference is taken to be central to the absolutist justification of non-intervention in acute cases: the agent's obligation not to do harm is held to be more stringent than his obligation to prevent (comparable) harm, since as agents we are principally responsible for what we ourselves do. The paper's central point is that this representation of the absolutist response to acute cases- as grounded in a difference in responsibility for what we do as opposed to what we allow- involves a misleading theoretical inversion. I argue that the absolutist justification of non-intervention in acute cases must depend on a direct defence of the nature and the stringency of the moral norm with which the agent's non-intervention complies. The nature and stringency of this norm are basic to attribution of agent responsibility in acute cases, and not the other way around.

The paper sets out elements of a nest of arguments invoked in recent utilitarian defenses of the replaceability of human infants. It argues that none of these arguments genuinely represent the claim that infants are replaceable. The paper highlights a range of controversial tenets and moves on which the various arguments for infant replaceability depend. They include elision of the relevant notion of replacement and rejection of its moral significance and the doubly indirect valuing of infants.

A philosophical discussion of the principles relevant to self- defense as a moral and legal justification of homicide. The book defends a unitary right of self-defense and defense of others, one which grounds the permissibility of the use of necessary and proportionate defensive force against culpable and non- culpable, active and passive unjust threats. Topics include: moral and legal justification and excuse; natural law justifications of self- defense; the Principle of Double Effect and the claim that self- defense is justified as unintended killing; self-defense and the right to life; and the question of self- preferential killing.