✍ Scribed by Douglas N. Husak
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Uniacke's Permissible Killing: The Self-Defence Justification of Homicide is the best available book-length treatment of the many complex moral and legal issues raised by self-defense. Admittedly, Uniacke's book attains this stature by default. Surprisingly, no rival treatment of self-defense exists. But I do not intend to apply faint praise to Uniacke's achievement. Her contribution is impressive; subsequent theoretical examinations of self-defense will be unable to ignore her many valuable insights.
The importance of Uniacke's project extends far beyond the narrow parameters of self-defense. Uniacke ably explores the connections between self-defense and any number of other problems in moral and legal philosophy. Uniacke has much of interest to say about the contrast between justification and excuse, the viability of natural law, the historical development of self-defense, the allthings-considered permissibility of exercising a right, the structure of rights in general and the right to life in particular, the ethics of self-preference, the similarities and differences between defense of self and defense of others, the relationship between law and morality, and a host of other issues.
Although Uniacke's book deserves to be taken very seriously by academics and scholars, laypersons with a more casual interest in self-defense should be warned that Permissible Killing is unlikely to contain material that is directly relevant to their concerns. Some readers may be disappointed that Uniacke does not examine any of three practical problems that have captured the popular imagination and focused media attention on self-defense.
The first such issue involves battered women. In a number of celebrated cases, defendants suffering from "battered women's
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