Mistaken Defense and the Unbundling of Rights

Central to the ethics of harm is the project of developing a theory of when and why persons forfeit rights to not be harmed. I argue that standard accounts of forfeiture are too coarse-grained to make sense of a range of cases involving “merely apparent attackers.” Making sense of these cases requires that we distinguish between the forfeiture of rights and the forfeiture of the contingent, moral “perks” of those rights. Appreciating this distinction has various upshots for the theory of forfeiture and may also bear fruit in other domains of moral philosophy.