Susanne Burri

This paper argues that under conditions of uncertainty, there is frequently a positive option value to staying alive when compared to the alternative of dying right away. This value can make it prudentially rational for you to stay alive even if it appears highly unlikely that you have a bright future ahead of you. Drawing on the real options approach to investment analysis (see e.g. Dixit and Pindyck, 1994), the paper explores the conditions under which there is a positive option value to staying alive, and it draws out important implications for the problems of suicide and euthanasia.

This paper examines whether an agent becomes liable to defensive harm by engaging in a morally permissible but foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustifed harm. It first clarifies the notion of a foreseeably risk-imposing activity by proposing that an activity should count as foreseeably risk-imposing if an agent may morally permissibly perform it only if she abides by certain duties of care. Those who argue that engaging in such an activity can render an agent liable to defensive harm ground this liability in the luck egalitarian thought that we may justly hold individuals responsible for the consequences of their voluntary choices. Against this, I argue that a luck egalitarian commitment to holding people responsible cannot, by itself, ground liability to defensive harm. It can help ground such liability only against the backdrop of a distributively just society, and only if further considerations speak morally in favour of attaching certain well-defined costs to individuals' risk-imposing choices. I conclude by suggesting that if an account of liability applies robustly across distributively just and unjust contexts alike, then what grounds an agent's liability is plausibly not her responsibility for threatening objectively unjustified harm, but her culpability for doing so.

In 1944, the German Wehrmacht started terror bombing London with guided missiles called V-weapons. With the help of double agents that the British authorities had recruited among German spies, it would have been possible to deceive the enemy into redirecting his weapons away from Central London. This would likely have greatly reduced civilian casualties in Central London, while leading to a comparably smaller increase of civilian deaths in some areas of South London. While the British deception authorities were in favour of redirection, the War Cabinet's Ministers were opposed.
In this paper, I investigate whether the Ministers had moral reason for their qualms. I argue that they did, as redirecting the V-weapons meant showing unequal concern for the safety of different parts of the population. I suggest that all things considered, redirecting the weapons could nevertheless have formed part of a morally optimal response to the German attack. My discussion draws on insights from the moral philosophical literature that makes extensive use of hypothetical cases. Critics of this literature worry that its method renders its insights practically irrelevant. My paper suggests that this worry is exaggerated, but not without merit. The historical case that I discuss is not easily resolved using ideas from the case-based literature, but such ideas still help illuminate the decision the British authorities faced.

Civilian Immunity (“Immunity”) is the legal and moral protection that civilians enjoy against the effects of hostilities under the laws of armed conflict and according to the ethics of killing in war. Immunity specifies different permissibility conditions for directly targeting civilians on the one hand, and for harming civilians incidentally on the other hand. Immunity is standardly defended by appeal to the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). We show that Immunity’s prohibitive stance towards targeting civilians directly, and its more permissive stance towards harming them incidentally, can be defended without appealing to the DDE if agents suffer from overconfidence. Overconfidence is a cognitive bias that affects agents who are required to make decisions in the presence of significant uncertainty.

We argue that even if an agent’s initial responsibilities are not very demanding, it can become permissible to burden her with significant costs if she culpably fails to discharge those responsibilities. In particular, we defend the claim that even if our responsibilities to assist others are not initially very demanding, our failure to liveup to them can make us liable to possibly burdensome enforce-ment costs. Christian Barry and Gerhard Øverland (2016) disagree.They claim that other things equal, fewer costs may be imposed on an agent if she culpably fails to live up to her assistance-based responsibilities as opposed to her responsibilities not to contribute towards harm. Their thought is that our responsibilities to assist others are less demanding than our responsibilities not to contribute towards harm, and they assume that this asymmetry is matched by an asymmetry in the enforceability of the two types of responsibility. We agree with Barry and Øverland (2016) that our assistance-based responsibilities are less demanding than our contribution-based responsibilities. We argue that autonomy-based reasons support this asymmetry. Pace Barry and Øverland (2016),we claim that there is no reason to think that the two types of responsibility differ in their enforceability.

According to the deprivation account, a person's death is bad for her if she would have lived a better life had she not died when she did in fact die. While the deprivation account rightly draws our attention to the fact that a person's death can be overall bad for her in this way, there are also other ways in which a person's death can affect her adversely. In this chapter, I explore two of these other ways, both of which are related to the fact that we live our lives as agents. I argue that as agents, the prospect of our death sometimes puts limits on what enjoyable activities we may reasonably pursue. I also argue that when a person's death frustrates her plans, it is to that extent absolutely bad for her: it provides a correct explanation for the presence of intrinsic badness in the person's life. I conclude by showing how focusing on agential value can help us make sense of the judgment that the deaths of infants and adolescents can be similarly bad in a way that is relevant for policymaking.

An autonomous weapon system (AWS) is a weapons system that, “once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator” (US Department of Defense directive 3000.09, November 21, 2012). Militaries around the world are investing substantial amounts of money and effort into the development of AWS. But the technology has its vocal opponents, too. This chapter argues against the idea that a targeting decision made by an AWS is always morally flawed simply because it is a targeting decision made by an AWS. It scrutinizes four arguments in favor of this idea and argues that none of them is convincing. It also presents an argument in favor of developing autonomous weapons technology further. The aim of this chapter is to dispel one worry about AWS, to keep this worry from drawing attention away from the genuinely important issues that AWS give rise to.

In this paper, I defend the inviolability approach to solving the paradox of deontology against a criticism raised by Michael Otsuka. The paradox of deontology revolves around the question whether it should always be permissible to infringe someone's right to non-interference when this would serve to minimize the overall number of comparable rights infringements that occur. According to the inviolability approach, rights to non-interference protect and give expression to our personal sovereignty, which is not advanced through the minimization of rights infringements. This seems to dissolve the paradox. Otsuka, however, contends that the proposed solution relies on too narrow an understanding of personal sovereignty. He argues that there is an enforceability dimension to personal sovereignty that would seem to undermine the inviolability approach. While I agree with Otsuka that enforceability is an important aspect of personal sovereignty, I argue that properly construed, the enforceability dimension of personal sovereignty does not undermine the inviolability approach.