David Rodin's War and Self-Defense

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹It should be noted at the outset that Rodin's discussion of rights, based as it is on the work of the legal theorist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, is extremely technical and perhaps best avoided by the reader solely interested in the question of whether self-defense can serve as just cause for war. It is also worth noting that despite Rodin's reliance on Hohfeld, his conception of rights differs in two important respects. First, although Hohfeld himself believes that a right in its simplest form is nothing but a claim and therefore a correlate of duty, Rodin rejects this view, believing that not all rights can be reduced to this one relation. In addition to claims and correlative duties, Rodin argues that rights can and often do consist of relations between liberties and correlative no-claims, powers and correlative liabilities, immunities and correlative disabilities and in many cases some complex combination of all four. Second, where Hohfeld believes that these concepts of claim, duty, liberty, no-claim, power, liabilities, immunities and disabilities consist of a three-fold relation between subject, content and object, Rodin believes that they consist of a four-fold relation between, subject, content, object and end. See Hohfeld (1919).

²Indeed, the right of self-defense, like all defensive rights, is a derivative right. That is, it is derived from more fundamental rights and duties, such as the right to life and the duty of care towards others to whom one is obligated to protect, as a parent is towards a child.