Violence in Proportion

Abstract

Abstract Almost everyone agrees that in order to be justified, violence must be proportionate. This claim, and related claims, extends across an array of moral, political, and legal contexts—including just war, self-defence, punishment, and human rights law. This proportionality principle may seem fairly simple: in order to be justified, inflicted harm must produce enough good. But this simple idea conceals hidden philosophical depths. In this book, Patrick Tomlin uncovers, explores, and proposes solutions to several philosophically knotty problems that any account of proportionate violence will need to address. These include how to understand the ‘baseline’ against which we measure whether some defensive or preventive action is proportionate, how to make proportionality decisions under uncertainty, how to understand the relationship between proportionate acts and proportionate courses of action, and how and when harms should or should not be aggregated to render conduct disproportionate.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.