| Summary: | In The Morality of Defensive Force, Quong defends a powerful account of the
grounds and conditions under which an agent may justifiably inflict serious
harm on another person. In this paper, I examine Quong’s account of the necessity constraint on permissible harming - the RESCUE account. I argue that
RESCUE does not succeed. Section 2 describes RESCUE. Section 3 raises
some worries about Quong’s conceptual construal of the right to be rescued
and its attendant duties. Section 4 argues that RESCUE does not deliver the
verdicts which Quong wants. In those sections, I assume that the attacker is
culpable for the threat he poses. Section 5 considers cases where the attacker,
though responsible for the wrongful threat he poses and therefore liable to defensive force, has an epistemic justification for acting as he does and thus is not
morally culpable. In his discussion of necessity, Quong does not explicitly such
cases. I suggest that RESCUE does not operate in the same way when attackers
are mistaken as when they are morally culpable.
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