Daniel Rhodes: Thank you for joining me today. Your award-winning paper, “The Duty to Save and the Duty to Minimise Harm,” argues for what you’ve called the Limited Use View of our duties to save. You compare this to Jonathan Quong’s Broad Scope Analysis. Can you briefly summarize these positions?

Helen Frowe: These views are not really in opposition to each other. The Limited Use View offers an account of our duties to rescue based on the idea that a duty to rescue is a duty to make ourselves usefully available to other people. There are limits to the costs that we can be required to bear to make ourselves useful to other people, because individuals are not mere tools to be used for the greater good. So, I can be required to save you from drowning at the cost of getting my clothes wet, or getting mild hypothermia, or breaking my arm. But I am not required to suffer the loss of my leg in order to save your life. You have no claim that I make myself useful to you at such great cost to myself.

The LUV can therefore explain why, for example, I may save myself from the loss of a lesser harm rather than save someone else from a greater harm. When it comes to saving other people, I should normally prevent the most harm that I can. If Alice will suffer the loss of both her legs, and Ben will suffer the loss of only one of his legs, then I ought to save Alice, other things being equal. It would be wrong to save Ben from the lesser harm. But if the choice is between saving both Alice’s legs and saving just one of my own legs, I seem to be permitted to save my own. The LUV explains why this is: Alice has no claim that I make myself useful to her when doing so is very costly for me, as it will be if I suffer the loss of my leg.

An alternative explanation of the permission to prevent a lesser harm to myself, rather than a greater harm to someone else, draws on the idea of agent-relative prerogatives — that is, a permission we each supposedly have to weight our interests more heavily than other people’s interests. Roughly, the idea is that I am allowed to care more about the loss of my leg than the loss of both your legs, because of the special importance that my leg has *for me*.

The orthodox view of these prerogatives — what we can call the Narrow Scope Analysis — is that they weigh against our duties to save, but not against our duties not to harm. So, they explain why I may fail to save you from a greater harm (because I may weight my own interests more heavily than yours) but this does not entail that I may, for example, break your leg to avoid suffering a broken leg myself. The Broad Scope Analysis rejects this restriction on the scope of prerogatives, holding the prerogatives bear on both our duties to save and our duties not to harm. In the paper, I argue that proponents of the Broad Scope Analysis are correct that *if* we had agent-relative prerogatives, then they would weigh against both our duties to save and our duties not to harm. However, I argue that the arguments put forward to support the view that prerogatives weigh against our duties not to harm fail. Prerogatives do not help to justify harming, and so we have good reason to doubt that they justify failing to save.

DR: Turning towards your work on the ethics of war, you’ve pointed out that Just War theorists have split into two camps; the so-called Traditionalists and the Revisionists. What exactly is their point of divergence, and which side do you most align with?

HF: The central disagreement between traditionalists and revisionists concerns the relationship between harming in war, and harming outside of war. Traditionalists hold that there are different moral rules for harming in war — specifically, that harming in war cannot be judged by the same moral principles that govern harming between individuals outside of war. Revisionists — or, as I prefer, reductivists — reject this claim in favor of the view that the same moral principles govern harming within and outside of war. They are called reductivists because they reject the multiplicity of moral spheres, arguing instead that morality is all ‘of a piece’. Reductivism has the advantage of being true!

DR: That certainly is quite the advantage. True to form, you’ve claimed that “war is governed by the same moral principles that obtain in ordinary life” and that “there is no robust collective or political morality that generates special moral permissions for the declaring or fighting of war.” On that account, can there be any ‘just war’ defense for events such as the American Revolution or Civil War, which were fought on more or less political/ideological grounds?

HF: The claim isn’t that political causes can’t be just. The claim is that they’re not just in virtue of being political. The fact that something is political doesn’t tell us anything about its moral status. Genocide is political, but it’s clearly unjust. Abolishing the slave trade is political, but it’s clearly just. What matters are the moral facts, not whether something counts as political or ideological.

Similarly, the fact that one kills at the behest of a group does not affect whether one’s killing is justified. If it’s impermissible for me to kill Alice, I can’t make it permissible to kill her by banding together with more people who hate Alice, and then having them nominate me as the person who will kill Alice on their behalf. What we decide amongst ourselves cannot rid Alice of her right not to be killed by me. The same is true in war: if it was impermissible for British citizens to be killed by Germans in WW2, the fact that German soldiers acted on behalf of a collective does not alter that fact.

DR: One of the advantages of electing a tweeter-in-chief is that military decisions that are normally kept behind closed doors, and kept classified for decades afterwards, are now readily available in real-time to anyone with an internet connection. In commenting on an aborted military strike against Iran, President Trump tweeted, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.” What is your reaction to a statement like this? What about the implicit assumption that a manned-drone would justify 150 Iranian deaths?

HF: I don’t think that forceful retaliation is ever permissible, because permissible force is about achieving proportionate ends. Retaliation is not a form of defence, where one uses force to prevent a harm to oneself or others. It’s more like punishment, in which one creates unnecessary harm, in light of the target’s past wrongdoing. There might be some kind of deterrent justification for using force in such cases, although deterrence is notoriously hard to prove. And again, the justification must still be at least partly forwards-looking: what is the wrong that one hopes to deter, and is it permissible to use force to deter that wrong?

If Trump aimed to deter the future shooting down of American drones (manned or unmanned), the question is whether it’s proportionate to do that in ways that involve killing large numbers of people. And that will turn on what those future drones are going to be doing — that is, the harm that those future drones might prevent. Without knowing that information, one cannot say whether causing 150 deaths is proportionate, because one doesn’t know what those deaths are being weighed against (although one can say that the drones would have to be intended to secure a very substantial good, and that the deterrent would need to be very likely to help them secure it).