Lesser-evil justifications: a reply to Frowe

Kerah Gordon-Solmon; Theron Gene Pummer

doi:10.1007/s10982-022-09454-w

Lesser-evil justifications: a reply to Frowe

Kerah Gordon-Solmon, Theron Gene Pummer^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Sometimes one can prevent harm only by contravening rights. If the harm one can prevent is great enough, compared to the stringency of the opposing rights, then one has a lesser-evil justification to contravene the rights. Non-consequentialist orthodoxy holds that, most of the time, lesser-evil justifications add to agents’ permissible options without taking any away. Helen Frowe rejects this view. She claims that, almost always, agents must act on their lesser-evil justifications. Our primary task is to refute Frowe’s flagship argument. Secondarily, it is to sketch a positive case for nonconsequentialist orthodoxy.

Original language	English
Number of pages	8
Journal	Law and Philosophy
Volume	First Online
Early online date	4 Aug 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-022-09454-w
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 4 Aug 2022

Keywords

Lesser-Evil Justifications
Helen Frowe

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10.1007/s10982-022-09454-wLicence: CC BY

Pummer_2022_LP_Lesser-evil_CC
Copyright © The Author(s). This article is an open access publication 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Cite this

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Lesser-evil justifications: a reply to Frowe

Abstract

Keywords

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