Proportionality and Self-Defense

Bargaining with criminals: The morality of witness collaboration in Mexico's “war on drugs”

“…gathering evidence to convict a corrupt public official complicit with criminal organization, or thwarting an operation by one of these organizations), its costs (e.g. the harm they cause to those who conduct it, or to civilians), and the appropriate balancing between benefits and costs (Bellaby, 2012: 114;Hurka, 2005: 38;Macnish, 2015: 532;Uniacke, 2011). While the relevant benefits must be clearly connected to the just cause, there is no parallel restriction with respect to the cost of intelligence.…”

An End to Encryption? Surveillance and Proportionality in the Crypto-Wars

“…V], and in general consideration to the biblical stipulation of "if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" (Exodus 21: 23-24). In contemporary philosophy proportionality has been posited as a central component in the ethics of surveillance [40,60,82,92], intelligence [6,61,70,75], self-defence [95], and jurisprudential sentencing [86]. It also features in three aspects of the typical just war formulation: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and the doctrine of double effect (DDE).…”

Out of Proportion? On Surveillance and the Proportionality Requirement

“…Susan Uniacke, for example, specifies (in the context of just self-defense) that proportionality is both a relational and a normative concept: It is relational in the sense that 'it involves a ratio or comparison of scale between x and y' in which the two variables should be suitable or adequate, and it is normative in the sense that proportionality requires an appropriate balance between the two elements (Uniacke 2011, p. 255). Disproportionate self-defense thus entails that 'x is either excessive or deficient on the relevant side' (Uniacke 2011). A tricky aspect of the proportionality principle is thus assessing the appropriateness of a specific balance between x and y. Macnish lists some versions of how the balance could be understood in the context of surveillance, for instance, in terms of the goods outweighing the harms; the production of a great deal more goods than harms; or the middle path, in which 'the benefits should equal the harms' (Macnish 2015 -my emphasis).…”

“…Wide proportionality is articulated as inflicted harms upon non-liable agents. Inflicting such harms is considered aggressive, in contrast to the defensive harms inflicted in the case of narrow proportionality, in which the agent is liable to suffer from defensive harm due to his involvement in the problem (McMahan 2009a, p. 21;Uniacke 2011). Determining wide proportionality depends upon the specific context and entails the assumption that harming non-liable individuals creates a better situation than the projected alternative, which is prevented by inflicting harm on those individuals.…”