Against Enemies:
A Negative Politics for Contentious Times1
Jason Gardner
Abstract The world is a contentious place, both politically and personally. As a result,
virtually all people have enemies both at home and abroad. This essay argues that we
should annihilate these enemies, all of them, future as well as present, and do so forthwith.
It begins with a metaphysical sketch of enemies, which reveals how such an annihilation
is possible and much easier than we generally suppose. It continues by arguing, first, that
general prudential considerations yield a prima facie case that it is in our best interest
to annihilate our enemies and, second, that moral reasons require this because enemies
are persons. The essay ends by briefly considering some implications of this destructive
proposal.
Keywords: Enemy status; default status; enmity; individual enmity; group enmity
Introduction
The purpose of this essay is to show that we can and should immediately annihilate
our enemies, both personal and political, in the present and for the future. This may
seem a hard proposal to entertain. While each of us doubtless finds our enemies
tiresome or worse, few have endorsed a response so thoroughgoing or hasty. This
is because such an annihilation has been supposed to require a degree of violence
and invite a variety of consequences that would cause the annihilator an unendurable
emotional discomfort, not to mention the moral cost. I shall show these suppositions
are incorrect. The total and immediate annihilation of enemies can be emotionally
tolerable, and it aligns with moral reasons as well as selfish ones. I thus invite the
morally serious reader, who may find this thesis especially hard to bear, to persist until
they are quite sure they grasp my view and the evidence for it.
That view emerges as follows. First, I survey what we tend to think, and what
little philosophers have said, about the nature of enemies. Following a venerable
Aristotelian method, I use these sparse endoxa, or respectable views, to develop a
metaphysics of enemies—an account of who they are and whence they come. It is
this account that reveals how one can easily and rapidly annihilate one’s enemies. I
then offer several ethical arguments establishing that both self-interested and moral
reasons indicate we should do so. I end by surveying implications of this proposal.
© Washington University Review of Philosophy, Volume 2, 2022, pp. 114–135
Open access. Distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.
Against Enemies
115
I. The Endoxa
It is unfortunate that most people, perhaps all, have those whom they regard as
enemies and know of others who regard them as the same. Many recognize enemies
at the national level, in some nation of people with whom their own nation is locked in
economic or military contests. Many too belong to antagonistic groups, often political
parties or other groups who share a common interest, having united precisely in order
to combat a different group who share a competing interest. And all people have their
local enemies: the coworkers who covet their same promotion, or the neighbors who
eye their beloved. Whoever they are, our enemies tend to be those against whom we
would like to act, often violently, or sometimes through a Machiavellian program of
manipulation.
It is also unfortunate that philosophers have not inquired much into the nature of
enemies. This is surprising, given the rich attention paid to friends and the dangers
one might suppose enemies pose to them. But there is some discussion, and it can
be surveyed quickly. We meet, for instance, with an idea of enemies in the opening
books of Republic, where Socrates disputes with several interlocutors who claim that
enemies are people just action rightly harms, as opposed to friends, whom it rightly
benefits.2 This suggests the demotic conception in Athens was that enemies are people
deserving of maltreatment. More recent work in political philosophy sometimes uses
the word “enemy” without pinning down any definition. One example is F.M. Kamm’s
Ethics for Enemies.3 Kamm, it would seem, presumes “enemies” are those upon
whom we contemplate visiting maltreatment of a pro tanto morally problematic sort,
as the book is concerned with what arguments can be made for or against actions such
as torture—during war and other violent conflicts—if certain moral principles hold
generally.4 Recent political philosophy also contains a debate that seems to concern
enemies without naming them, a debate about when agents who do or threaten to
harm others are liable to defensive harms in turn. Jeff McMahan (2008) and Jonathan
Quong (2012) are representative samples.5 Partisans of this debate generally argue that
some acts of harm have features that make the agents of these acts liable to defensive
harms morality otherwise prohibits, though the partisans disagree about what the
relevant features are.
There is also one thoroughgoing work on the enemy. This too is unfortunate, for it
is The Concept of the Political by the infamous Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt, and the
book itself appears to be an apologetics for Nazi terror.6 Schmitt contends that actions
and motives are political in kind if they “reduce,” in some sense, “to [the distinction]
between friend and enemy.”7 He specifies the enemy, here, as a political opponent—a
member of some opposing group—though he acknowledges a personal sort of enemy
as well.8 Schmitt further distinguishes the enemy opponent from the competitor
opponent, a party with whom one is in a conflict that falls short of enmity.9 Enmity
requires that one feel against the competitor an antagonistic emotion surpassing a
certain disturbing threshold, such that one becomes willing to enter violent combat
against, and thereby risk killing, this other person.10 In Schmitt’s view, the willingness
116
Washington University Review of Philosophy
to kill—a maltreatment of perhaps the worst kind—is crucial to political enmity.
II. The Metaphysics of Enemies
These sparse endoxa point to a general view that can be captured in two theses.
One, a first-order metaphysical thesis (FOM), says:
FOM: An enemy is a person who troubles another and is subject in turn to a
diminishment of moral concern, i.e., does not receive from the other the consideration
moral reasoning demands pro tanto for persons.
FOM begins by requiring that enemies be people who trouble others. In what
follows, I usually capture this by saying enemies provoke others. By this I only mean
that others find the enemy problematic, and not that an enemy must have done anything
to “provoke” this.11 FOM then distinguishes enemies from other provocateurs as those
who acquire, in response to their provocation, a peculiar moral status, which I call
enemy status. This affects how the enemy is treated in practical reasoning and thus
how they are treated in actions based on it.
I call the contrasting moral consideration typically accorded to persons default
status. Enemy status is negative. It denies a person the default consideration. While it
is not a purpose of this essay to sort out long-running disputes within normative ethics,
it is possible to make some relatively uncontroversial general assumptions in order to
clarify what default status demands. Moral philosophy directs us quite generally, as
do the conventions of everyday thought more roughly, to consider three ways in which
our prospective actions might harm (or benefit) others. These are the imposition of
suffering (or enjoyment), the restriction (or facilitation) of rational autonomy, and the
imposition of unfair distributions of benefits and burdens (or distributing fairly). To
say default status demands consideration of such harms pro tanto is to say it demands
they carry a weight to some extent in our thought about what to do, thus allowing that
other considerations might, in certain cases, outweigh them. A person of enemy status,
then, is someone for whom being subject to these moral harms carries no weight, or
significantly less than for the person of default status. Enemy and default contrast
with other statuses, which accord more weight to moral harms and accord weight
to additional intersubjective considerations. Examples of such statuses are business
partner, ally, neighbor, family member, and friend.12
It is important to distinguish the person who has enemy status from another who,
we might say, suffers a moral misfortune.13 Like the former, the latter may be subject
to a morally harmful action, but the two differ in the consideration they receive in
an agent’s deliberations. The agent of enmity does not consider a harm against the
enemy to have its default moral weight. In moral misfortune, the agent omits a moral
protection they would normally provide, while yet according default moral status to the
person denied it. The misfortune arises because some weightier moral consideration
demands the omission, as when the suffering that might be caused to one person is
outweighed by a greater suffering that would otherwise be caused to five people. Here
Against Enemies
117
the agent does not treat the harmed person with less consideration, whereas in enmity
they do.
FOM is a first-order thesis. It describes the nature of enemies with a bare-bones
account of what we ordinarily call “an enemy.” FOM allows us to infer a second-order
metaphysical thesis (SOM) that categorizes enemy status, among classes of phenomena
encountered in ordinary experience, according to the determinants of this nature.
SOM: Enemy status is a construct and is determined by the fact that at least one
person chooses to conceive of some other as their enemy.
Ordinary-world phenomena can be classified by distinguishing the objective, or
mind-independent, from the constructed, which have certain subjective or mental
determinants. The literature on metaphysical construction is rich but not very
homogeneous.14 Nevertheless, it offers a couple of truistic planks we can grip to float
through the present inquiry. First, a construct, though relatively subjective, is also
real; it exists and can play a causal role in the ordinary world. Second, there is more
than one way to be constructed because more than one kind of mental determinant
possesses constructive “power.” The kinds referenced in the literature include minds
(individually and in concert), mental activities (individual and collective) and nonactual yet somehow “ideal” rational agents. SOM identifies, as the determinant of
enemy status, the actual choice of at least one person to regard another person as such.
In the language of constructivism, the one whose regard plays this role is said to confer
enemy status on the other. Enmity, then, is a person’s persistent conferral of enemy
status on another.15 Since this conferral takes place in the mind of the conferring
agent, we do not find enemies and we are not born with them. Any enemy we have,
we ourselves make, through a relatively simple mental act.
Constructs vary according to their fragility. Some constructs, especially social
constructs achieving the status of common coin, come to structure the thought of an
entire culture in a fundamental way and thus are especially durable. Despite their
subjectivity, one cannot easily or simply live apart from these.16 Races and genders,
for instance, are argued to be constructs of this sort.17 Enemy status is far more fragile,
as it is a matter of choice for the conferring agent whether to regard another as an
enemy.18 To say a choice exists is not to call it arbitrary. Often, but not always, the
enemy does something to provoke the other to consider enmity, and some provocations
are so dangerous or heinous that they make enmity extremely tempting. Nevertheless,
regardless of the provocation, the other may continue to confer default status upon the
provocateur, thereby not making them an enemy.
The metaphysical fragility of enemies, and our creative power as conferring agents,
allow us to see how enemies can be annihilated easily and instantaneously. An
enemy qua enemy has two basic elements: a human person and a conferred moral
status. If either is eliminated, the enemy is annihilated. Human beings are difficult to
destroy—they are quick, strong, and intelligent. They go to great lengths to preserve
themselves and become dangerous when threatened. Furthermore, it pains us to
118
Washington University Review of Philosophy
observe, or even imagine, their corporeal destruction. Indeed, we suffer intense and
lasting trauma when we violently harm others.19 The destruction of human beings
is also likely to bring a high social cost. Simply put, killing human beings is not an
efficient or desirable way to rid ourselves of enemies.
On the other hand, no similarly weighty concerns tell against revoking a diminishment of moral status, which halts the conferral of enemy status. It may be emotionally
difficult, for it may require giving thoughtful consideration to the interests of a person
one fears or despises. But this is nothing compared to the difficulty of destroying a
living human being. Yet, it is equally possible to annihilate one’s enemies by doing
so. So, whenever it turns out that, aside from the cost of annihilating them, we are
better off not having enemies, the best thing for us to do is to annihilate our enemies
by revoking this diminishment of concern, restoring to any human beings who are our
enemies the considerations prescribed by default status.
III. Against Enemies
I turn now to why we have compelling reasons to annihilate our enemies completely, forthwith, and ever after. First I explain how having enemies contravenes
intrasubjective, or egoistic, reasoning, which I call prudence. Then I explain how it
contravenes intersubjective, or moral, reasoning, which I call morality.
These arguments are primarily couched in terms of enmity among individuals, for
two reasons: first for theoretical simplicity in presenting the arguments, and second
because group enmity reduces to the enmity of individuals while enemy groups reduce
to groups of individual enemies. However, some distinct reasons bear on groups
that do not emerge when discussing individuals. So, I end this section by discussing
further points concerning group or political enemies. On to the arguments.
3.1 The Merely Prudential Argument
Practical reasoning—ethics in its broadest and original Greek sense—is thinking
about what to do, about what is best or what one should do. It is merely prudential
when it comprehends the reasoning agent’s interests alone, excluding the interests of
others.
I shall make several arguments that together show we have compelling prudential
reasons to annihilate our enemies by restoring their default status. These arguments
do not require endorsing any specific view on the substantive grounds of prudence,
but they do require a very general consideration of such views. Two kinds are
possible. Views following the objective welfare model claim it is prudent to do just
what optimizes achieving one’s own objective welfare, whatever that comprises and
however one feels about it. Views following the desire-satisfaction model, on the other
hand, contend it is prudent to do just what optimizes the satisfaction of one’s desires,
idiosyncratic though they might be.20
The arguments below rest partly on a claim both kinds of view share, that prudence
Against Enemies
119
involves the optimal achievement—often misleadingly called the “maximization”—of
prudential goals.21 While the arguments appeal in a general way to partisans of either
model, the desire-satisfaction model alone permits people who possess ultimate desires
to harm others to find a prudential benefit in keeping enemies that does not obtain
for others. As a shorthand and going forward, I shall call such people sociopaths.
As I offer the arguments below, I will point out some places in which they have
slightly different implications for sociopaths if the desire-satisfaction model obtains.
However, the dialectical import of these implications should not be overstated. When
the full range of prudential arguments is considered, even the sociopath has compelling
prudential reasons to annihilate their enemies, even if the desire-satisfaction model
obtains.
A more significant qualification is also in order. The second set of prudential
arguments deal with very general considerations for or against the instrumental value
of enmity for actual persons in the actual world, considerations relating specifically
to contests of power. These arguments only support claims about instrumental value
in the vast majority, and in typical cases, of such contests—Aristotle would say it
supports the claims ως επι τ πoλυ (hōs epi to polu). I side with him in believing
human nature and life are too woolly and varied to neatly capture in truly universal
generalizations, but hōs epi to polu generalizations are available and worth considering.
At any rate, I concede that the case for the prudential costs of enmity arising from cost
of contests of power is and only can be prima facie. However, it is almost certain that
enmity will remain imprudent even in highly idiosyncratic cases because the final set
of prudential arguments, which spell out prudential costs arising from the neglect of
default status, identify considerations of much greater weight.
Finally, the prudential arguments below assume several well-worn truisms about
human action. Among human behaviors, actions are the intentional ones, which we
perform consciously, according to some plan, pursuant to some consciously intended
goal. Those who perform actions are agents. Complete actions finish completely
when some final goal is met and then release the agent for unrelated pursuits. One
complete action often comprises several incomplete actions, which pursue merely
intermediate or instrumental goals, as steps in the plan. A goal is any action’s intended
product. The goal often has value for the intending agent, and so constitutes a good
that may be reserved, exchanged, enjoyed, or consumed.22 Final goods need support
no further purpose, they have value for being what they are, while instrumental goods
have value as means, being useful for achieving further goods. Acting in pursuit of
final goods, agents expend resources, i.e., instrumental goods near to hand, such as
effort, time, and materials. An important if intangible resource expended by action is
the opportunity, the chance to act otherwise, foreclosed by choosing one plan over
alternatives. Practical reasoning—the prior intellectual activity whereby agents plan,
choose, and regulate their actions—also expends resources: time, opportunity, and
any other requirement for thinking about how to achieve a goal.23
These truisms afford a formal or rationalistic, if not substantive, definition of
120
Washington University Review of Philosophy
prudential action. It is:
Prudential Action: an action whose goal is or is means to a final good, and whose
plan is both minimally reasonable, having total expenditures of less value for the
agent than its goal, and optimal, expending the least valued pool of resources among
the class of pools required by the various plans for achieving that final good.
To question whether enmity is prudent, then, is to question generally whether a
plan involving enmity can assist in the pursuit of a final good, as specified for some
agent by the correct substantive view of prudence, and do so both profitably and more
efficiently than any alternative plan for that good.
3.1.1 The Imprudence of Enmity as a Final Goal
Let us assess, then, the prudence of enmity. From FOM, we know an enemy
is someone upon whom a conferring agent is willing to visit more suffering, more
restriction of autonomy, or less fair treatment than morality permits in the default case.
The perpetration of these harms itself requires time, energy, and perhaps material
resources. The perpetrating agent also forecloses valuable opportunities associated
with other interpersonal statuses, such as friendship. That is, enmity automatically
incurs various immediate costs. It also portends further expenditures because enmity
typically results in what I shall call a contest of power. Because the agent of enmity
constitutes himself a source of harm for the enemy, the enemy becomes likely to
react by attempting retaliatory harms in turn. Such contests can be extremely costly,
especially when prolonged. In addition to further expenditures of time, energy, and
resources, they carry the cost of forgoing opportunities to do something besides
participating in a violent contest.
Those are intrinsic costs—they belong to the nature of enmity. Enmity offers no
similarly intrinsic profits. There is no direct furtherance of any final end: neither harming, defending against retaliation, nor foreclosing opportunities will be intrinsically
valuable. Perhaps the first one, harming, is an exception, but only for the sociopath
and only if desire-satisfaction defines prudence. For the rest of us, or if objective
welfare defines prudence, enmity cannot be a final prudential good. Thus, we have a
first argument. Enmity is intrinsically imprudent—it is costly but non-productive in
itself of final goods. This does not entirely rule out the prudence of enmity, which is
generally pursued as an instrumental, rather than final, good. But it does establish the
imprudence of a certain timocratic spirit—one that glorifies military conquest—or of
an unfriendly competitive spirit that holds up competitive “wins” as final goods. This
warrants attention.
3.1.2 The Prudential Cost of Contests of Power
The more pressing question here is whether having enemies is instrumentally
prudent, whether it is a prudent means to a final good. In typical cases of enmity,
an agent is provoked by a person who interferes with the optimization of some goal
and wishes to respond by visiting a moral harm upon the provocateur. This would be
Against Enemies
121
instrumentally prudent if the goods expended in enmity should have less value for the
agent than the goal interfered with, on the one hand, and less value than the various
expenditures required by alternative plans for pursuing it, on the other.
In the vast majority of and in typical cases, the prudential costs of enmity are high.
There are many general cases where enmity cannot be even minimally reasonable.
Enmity generally results in contests of power. Call an agent’s store of resources
expendable in action, including open opportunities, her power for action. This is all
she might expend in some contest. A prospective enemy will bring either significantly
more, significantly less, or roughly the same power to the contest as the agent. If
the enemy’s power is far greater, the moral harms an agent might visit will not deter
the enemy, but rather make this powerful enemy more likely to multiply assaults,
adding intense retaliatory arms on top of the provocative interference. Enmity is not
minimally reasonable for the weaker party in such a contest.
If the prospective enemy’s power is similar to the agent’s, the costs of a contest of
power are only likely to be (much) higher. Equality of power will cause a prolonged
and resource-intensive contest with heavy intangible losses over time in general
opportunities to pursue final goods. The moral harms of enmity are likely to escalate
the arms race (or harms race!) further and more rapidly than it would in a contest
where moral harms are absent. It is also unlikely that enmity against a combatant of
equal power will be minimally reasonable.
A defender of enmity against equal parties might concede these points about the
general imprudence of setting off costly contests of power but argue I have neglected
a general case where things work out differently. This is the case where the enemy
interferes with an especially fundamental good, one on which many other goods hang,
such as simple survival. In the case of protecting fundamental goods, the defender
might say enmity is almost certain to be instrumentally prudent.
If this is correct, it is correct only in a small class of such cases. Some goods, final
as well as instrumental, are fundamental to other goods and thereby gain significant
added value from the cost of foregoing them. They are therefore goals it is prudent to
pay a relatively high cost to pursue. But a prolonged contest of power is costly in just
the same way. That is, avoiding an intensive and prolonged contest of power is itself
a fundamental good because such contests foreclose the opportunity to pursue final
goods. Furthermore, fundamental goods, including survival, only retain their added
value of promoting other goods when a contest entered for their sake is winnable in
due course. Only then will the agent recover the opportunity to pursue the other goods
that hang on the fundamental one. Equal contests of power are, by definition, not too
winnable. Consider the wars we are all familiar with in various parts of the globe,
persisting for generations and consuming the lives of generations of people. A life
salvaged for enduring war is of little prudential value for the one who lives it, since
only a life spent pursuing the final goods foreclosed by war can have much prudential
value. Often it would be better, from the merely prudential point of view, to die sooner
at the prospective enemy’s hands than to spend a long life trading moral harms with
122
Washington University Review of Philosophy
him.
This leaves the contest where a prospective enemy has significantly less power than
the conferring agent. In many such contests, the harms of enmity are overkill, being
more expensive than enduring the minor insults of a weakling. But in some cases, a
party may be weak yet cause a more powerful agent some problem too significant to
shrug off. Here a powerful agent might find it easier to bear the expense of pursuing a
brief contest of power against the weak than it is to bear the insult.
It may seem, then, that enmity against the weak, visiting moral harms upon a far
weaker other person, will meet the requirement of minimal reasonability, since the
cost of such a “contest” is so low. But that is because we have only as yet surveyed
costs relating to the initial visiting of harms and to contests of power. Enmity against
the weak is distinct from the other contests because it brings greater costs of another
sort. These come from neglecting default status, which I discuss in the next section.
These are the costs of being or being seen as a bad person, and here my claim is that
one must pay more of these costs when one’s target of harm is vulnerable. Once those
additional costs are weighed, enmity against the weak also fails, in a general way, to
be minimally reasonable.
So much for basic contest costs of enmity. Assessing its overall instrumental
prudence requires considering whether, for any cases where it might be minimally
reasonable, the costs are less than the costs of other plans for mitigating another’s
interference. Although I have shown there are not likely to be many such cases, there
may be some very specific circumstances where things shake out differently than
indicated in my general arguments, with their hōs epi to polu conclusions. Let us
consider, then, the costs of other plans for mitigating interference.
One alternative is to accord default moral status to another while yet defending
against their interference or malice. An objector might worry that even self-protection
violates autonomy. This is wrong. Default status protects the other’s autonomy, but it
does not require material support for their actions, nor does it prohibit obstructing
actions that might unjustifiably harm oneself or others one is obliged to protect. Even
the enhanced moral status of friendship does not require this. Autonomy is only
rational self-control—the general suite of abilities relevant to setting goals, making
plans, and attempting to enact one’s plans. It is the mental wherewithal to do these
things and depends on having knowledge that enables one to understand one’s nature
as an agent and the world in which one operates. It supports but is not identical to the
successful attainment of goals. To interfere with another’s success—in a way that does
not impinge upon their mental wherewithal or their knowledge of circumstances—is
not a violation of the default-status protection for autonomy.
Thus, self-protection is an option that falls short of enmity. In merely protecting
herself, absent enmity, an agent still incurs costs. As does enmity, self-protection
requires resources. But defensive expenditures are necessary whether the agent only
protects herself or also causes further harm through enmity. Further, protective actions
Against Enemies
123
may anger the prospective enemy by frustrating his intentions, provoking a contest of
power like enmity does. But this contest is unlikely to escalate as rapidly or as far as
with enmity, wherein the agent visits moral harms upon the enemy. Opportunities
to do otherwise than engage in this contest will again be foreclosed, but there is not
the foreclosure of other relationships that obtains in enmity. By treating the other
as a person of default status, it remains possible to win their goodwill through the
relatively inexpensive project of rational or emotional appeals. Thus, it is hard to see
how enmity, even in cases where it might be minimally reasonable, could be optimal
as compared to self-protection. If one is a sociopath and the desire satisfaction model
is true, things may shake out differently. However, self-protection seems a generally
more prudent course.
Evasion of interference is also an option. It has the benefit of avoiding a contest of
power. If it is possible to evade while bearing no cost beyond movement with respect
to place, this is the optimal course. The costs of self-protection, while lower than
those of enmity, are significant. Evasion, if successful, will preserve many final goods
whose pursuit contests of power supersede. On the other hand, evasion often has
significant, distinctive costs of its own. A prospective enemy may be violating one’s
autonomy or violating civic privileges such as territorial sovereignty or property rights.
Here, evasion could require abandoning one’s aims or property, so the particulars of
what is at stake when taking evasive action will sometimes make evasion more costly
than self-protection. Then, self-protection remains the generally optimal strategy.
Thus we have our second argument. General facts about contests of power alone
yield a strong prima facie case against the instrumental prudence of enmity over other
measures. Enmity rarely meets the requirement of minimal reasonability. When it
does, it is generally less optimal than evasion or self-protection. It is so unlikely to be
prudent that, for the selfish person, having enemies is hardly worth considering.
Still, the argument to this point holds only hōs epi to polu. In some specific cases
the costs and benefits will not shake out as they generally do. These calculations do
not work for the sociopath if the desire-satisfaction model of prudence is the correct
one. In this case, they may also not work for the fetishist about some desire, a person
who values satisfying some idiosyncratic desire above virtually all else. But I am not
done assessing the prudential costs of enmity, nor have I assessed the highest ones.
3.1.3 The Prudence of Honoring Default Status
The above arguments do not factor in prudential costs that accrue to the conferring
agent because their enmity is an instance of harming people as default status prohibits.
These steep costs will more than tip the balance of instrumental prudence against
enmity in any cases that might escape the arguments relating to contests of power
without that balance yet being so tipped. They accrue in three ways.
First, there is positive prudential value in appearing to be the kind of person who
does not cause suffering, interfere with autonomy, or treat people unfairly. It comes
from the fact that others see one who appears thus as a safe person with whom to
124
Washington University Review of Philosophy
cooperate, which facilitates one’s acquisition of cooperative goods (with vast potential
value). Obviously, some people perpetrate harms proscribed by default status without
appearing to do so. But not visiting moral harms upon others remains a good way to
generate such an appearance, especially not visiting them even when faced with an
especially troublesome actor or a weak provocateur. Not causing default harms thus
carries part of the value of appearing not to cause them. Even if this value is not great,
it warrants consideration when weighing the prudence of enmity in close cases.
Second, the conferral of enemy status is intrinsically bad for the conferring agent
qua agent—bad in several distinct ways. For one thing, it interferes with an agent’s
ability to reason in support of her own self-protection. Below, I argue enmity is ruled
out on moral grounds because general facts about persons provide compelling reasons
against causing the harms default status proscribes.24 For example, the fact of how
suffering feels to persons in general is what warrants the general default proscription
against causing it. In choosing enmity, a conferring agent disregards the rational
weight of these general facts. To continue the example, a conferring agent might
disregard the rational weight of how suffering feels in the case of some provocateur.
This is problematic because the same facts that ground default status also ground
prudential self-protection: how suffering feels to persons is also what warrants the
agent not doing herself violence. Thus, enmity undermines the rational weight of
suffering in her own case. Enmity obstructs rational self-concern wherever this is
based on the features of the self that, when shared with other persons, ground the
default proscriptions. I shall not labor the point, but this prudential cost of enmity is
extraordinarily dear.
On a related point, enmity harms the agent qua agent because being morally good
is extremely likely to itself be a final prudential good. It is likely to feature as a final
good in any plausible objective welfare model of prudence. And, as it ordinarily
features among the goods people actually profess to desire, it must typically be a final
prudential good of the sort that would be acknowledged by any desire-satisfaction
model. Furthermore, among the goods people fetishize, it is one of the most highly
prized. If the moral arguments sketched below hold, one cannot be a good person
while having enemies. Thus, enmity would have a high prudential cost simply because
it makes the agent conferring it a bad person and thereby deprives them of a significant
final good.
Finally, enmity is likely to harm agents qua agents by imposing psychiatric costs.
It is not pleasant to harm others, and causing egregious harm traumatizes the agents
who cause it (often permanently). This is well established in the case of soldiers
returned from active duty in war.25 There may also be psychiatric harms arising from
cognitive dissonance, as occurs when one attempts to see oneself as, say, a fair person
while wantonly visiting unfairness upon one’s enemies.
Aside from the instrumental value of appearing good, and the intrinsic value for
the agent qua agent of being good, honoring default status accrues incomparable
instrumental value because it is a fundamental prudential value in the sense described
Against Enemies
125
above—a good that other prudential goods hang on. It is fundamental in an extreme way.
This is different from the earlier point that avoiding contests of power is fundamental.26
Honoring default status directly facilitates, and may generally be required for, all
egoistic pursuits of significant final value. This relates to the somewhat common view
that moral reasons trump prudential ones, which I call the priority thesis. Insofar as
this thesis concerns honoring default status, it can be justified on prudential grounds
alone—the moral considerations demanded by default status trump various final
prudential considerations for prudential reasons.
I shall only sketch the argument. A general adherence to the moral proscriptions of
default status gives human beings more protection from suffering, more autonomous
leeway in plotting their lives, and a more level playing field from which to pursue
their goals, than is otherwise available. These gifts of adherence directly mitigate
Hobbes’ deliriously brutal state of nature, on the one hand, and the need to submit
to tyranny as protection from that state, on the other. It is only by mitigating these
threats that self-interested pursuits of any rich or delicious sort are possible, since
the options available when they are unmitigated are either struggling to survive the
state of nature or living in servitude to tyranny. Any deviation from honoring default
status invites the evils of the state of nature, or of tyranny, for it compromises a more
general adherence on the part of both conferring agent and provocateur that would
keep these evils further at bay. The degree of self-interest optimization—the extent of
open opportunities—available to us thus differs greatly when we collectively maintain
default status versus when we abandon it to antagonistic contests. Honoring the
proscriptions of default status thus accrues a relative weight in comparison to narrowly
egoistic aims—it is a fundamental prudential good in relation to them.
Thus ends the argument that enmity is imprudent. The third argument shows the
prudential value of honoring default status is weighty. The first two arguments have
established that even if we ignore this, there is a compelling prima facie case that
enmity is imprudent. When the arguments are combined, it is hard to see how enmity
could be self-serving.
3.2 The Moral Argument
What is rational is to act on the basis of all relevant reasons or, at any rate, all
one can discern. So, it is irrational to act exclusively on the basis of prudential
reasons where others exist. Shortly I show how some interests of other people supply
non-prudential reasons and how these moral reasons apply even where prospective
enemies are concerned. A truly rational actor, or reasonable person, will take these
into account when deciding whether to have enemies.
I shall offer three arguments. Each shows that specific intersubjective considerations weigh against enacting one of the moral harms proscribed by default status.
Together, they show enmity is immoral, or contrary to reasoning that comprehends
others’ interests. These arguments share a basic shape. Each depends on the nature of
default status. Default status determines a generic standard of reasonable treatment,
126
Washington University Review of Philosophy
and it exists as a phenomenon of practical reason because all persons share certain
features that supply pro tanto reasons for or against impacting them in certain ways.
First consider suffering. The empiricist tradition, shining in the work of Mill,
explains why we have intersubjective reasons to not cause human persons to suffer. The
argument runs something like this.27 First, I directly perceive that my own suffering is
bad, that I have reason to avoid it on account of how it is. My suffering comprises two
component facts. One fact is that it is suffering, the other is that it belongs to me. In
which does the badness lie? Not in belonging to me. Many things are better for the
very fact that they are near me, part of me, or mine. Furthermore, it is entirely clear
through direct perception that the suffering itself, the experience or feeling, is what is
bad. Now consider this: I have every reason to think, and none to doubt, that any other
person’s suffering is essentially like mine. They draw back from, avoid, and make the
same anguished faces I do when confronted with stimuli that make me suffer. What is
more, I often perceive the badness of others’ suffering as directly as my own, insofar
as seeing another experience severe trauma, such as being hit by a car or losing a child
to cancer, upsets me just as immediately as my own suffering does. Therefore, I have
every reason to think any human person’s suffering is as bad as my own. If another’s
suffering is as bad, there are no grounds for asserting it carries less weight, or that
there is less reason to avoid or not to cause it, than my own suffering. There is a pro
tanto reason not to cause a person to suffer, rooted in my own perception of suffering.
Could there be a reason to think a prospective enemy’s suffering is of less weight
than any other person’s? No. If the enemy suffers as I do, there is no reason to suppose
their suffering is less bad, and every reason to suppose it has the same weight. If the
prospective enemy is cruel, their suffering still feels the same. If they deprive others
of autonomy, or strive to kill me, this will not alter the character of any suffering they
experience. If my suffering is bad, so is theirs. If I believe my suffering warrants not
causing it, I must believe their exactly similar suffering warrants the same. I must
accord their suffering the same weight in my deliberations that I accord the suffering
of myself and others.
Next consider autonomy. Kant explains one reason why autonomy must be honored: to treat persons otherwise requires misapplying a concept, and this corrodes our
practical thought.28 In Kant’s view, all persons are recognizably agents—autonomous
beings with their own values, in control of themselves. Treating persons as mere resources or obstacles, simply manipulating them rather than leaving them autonomously
to their own devices, fails to treat them as what they recognizably are. This conceptual
mistake infects practical reasoning and the actions it supports, like mistaking a bird
for an arrow and trying to fit it to one’s bow. Whether the bird hits the target, this
is not archery. The conceptual mistake corrodes practical reasoning. The autonomy
violator attempts to reason and act, but what they bring about is not what they take
themselves to do. Their reasons and actions are as delusive as the failed archer’s.
So, autonomy must be honored in all persons, in order to maintain the lucidity and
integrity of practical reasoning.
Against Enemies
127
Mill offers a further reason why autonomy should be honored.29 Given that persons
are agents and heavily inclined toward self-determination, any limitations we place on
their behavior will cause them to suffer in two ways. They will suffer first from the
very fact that their natural freedom is limited, as we all suffer when caged. Second,
they will suffer from the fact that they cannot win the goods they desire and would
pursue, but are left instead with something less satisfying, whatever the violator of
their autonomy permits them.
Does a prospective enemy’s autonomy have less moral weight than others’ autonomy? No. Even if the enemy is trying to kill us, harm us, or destroy our own
autonomy, it remains that we deal with a person. To treat a person as a mere obstacle,
to not acknowledge them as a person whose nature is to ply their own course, is still a
conceptual mistake that results in delusive action. Restricting the prospective enemy’s
autonomy will still cause them to suffer. If the fact of being a person grounds respect
for autonomy, it grounds it in the case of the prospective enemy.
Finally consider fairness, an even more difficult notion to pin down. As a
philosophical term of art, it appears to originate in discussions of the rule of law with
Aristotle’s idea that a law is a general rule governing a collective of citizens, each in
the same way.30 Now, fairness is invoked primarily in discussing the distribution of
social benefits and burdens, and the law, through our obedience to it, is classified as a
burden to be borne. These discussions appeal to the reasonableness of distributions,
the idea that distributed items should fall upon those whom it is reasonable to lay them
and be broadcast among such persons in a proportionate way. What is reasonable
and what is proportionate are disputed, and the correct view surely varies according
to the nature of the distributed item, the makeup of the receiving group, and other
factors such as the relationship between the item and the social or political structure
of the group. There is almost always an appeal, footnoting Aristotle, to the idea of
treating like cases alike, or treating relevantly similar persons in relevantly similar
circumstances in the same way. Further egalitarian concerns may also be raised about
what ratio should hold between different persons’ acquired shares. Often too there
is an appeal to reciprocal balancing, the idea that one’s burdens and benefits should
correspond somehow.
Whatever fairness is, it hangs on the basic idea that distributions should be
reasonable and like cases treated alike. An appeal to like cases must be an appeal
to general features of persons that are identified as relevant to a specific distribution.
To be unfair, then, must be to ignore in a particular case the features one generally
appeals to and then to distribute in “light” of that ignorance.
If the prospective enemy possesses features relevant to some fair distribution,
the features that determine like cases, it is not possible to see how a person who
acknowledges these in other persons could reasonably ignore them here. This is not
to say a prospective enemy must always get the same share of some good one would
give to others. It may well be that a provocation of enmity involves or amounts to
possessing features relevant to assessing the likeness of cases, so it might yet be fair
128
Washington University Review of Philosophy
to give the prospective enemy less of some good than others. But if the provocation
does not affect features relevant to fairness, the facts of the prospective enemy’s case
must warrant the same treatment they warrant for other persons.
So much for the three arguments. Default status is the pro tanto consideration a
person deserves in virtue of being a person. It concerns what treatment is reasonable
for persons generally, given general features that persons share. Prospective enemies
are persons. It cannot be reasonable to deny them default status.
A moralistic defender of enmity might object that morality permits or even requires
enmity in certain cases. They might assert that certain prospective enemies, ones
who visit moral harms upon others, thereby compromise their right to the default
consideration.31 This objector might further insist that the moral import of maintaining
default protections to the greatest extent possible justifies us denying this consideration
to persons who themselves ignore these protections.
This position cannot be maintained. The interests of others to avoid suffering, be
autonomous, and be subject to fair treatment, these general features they possess as
persons, are the only possible source of moral import—under present consideration,
at any rate. The objector either believes these general features of persons warrant
the protections of default status, or they do not. If not, no moral claim can be had
against the prospective enemy, for there are no moral claims to be had at all, and
so the objection collapses. Absent moral reasons, prudential reasons alone weigh
decisively against enmity, so the collapse of morality does not imperil my own thesis.
On the other hand, if features of persons warrant protective consideration, as the above
arguments show, we owe the prospective enemy, a person, the same consideration we
owe and demand for ourselves and for people generally.
Though they are mistaken, it may also be possible to mollify this objector. As I
mention above, enmity is distinct from moral misfortune. We are sometimes faced
with deliberations where our various practical options involve trade-offs between
greater and lesser “quantities” of moral value. Sometimes we have to pursue paths
like causing one to suffer to ameliorate the suffering of many, or depriving one of
autonomy so that society at large may enjoy it. When a prospective enemy is an agent
of moral harm, intersubjective reasons may require visiting moral harms upon him in
a trade-off of this sort.32 But we must in visiting them acknowledge the personhood
and value of the one we harm in this unfortunate commerce. We must acknowledge
the full moral cost paid. That is not enmity. Enmity is the conferral of enemy status, a
status according to which we refuse to acknowledge the full weight of visiting moral
harms upon another person. It is imprudent. It is also immoral and, strictly speaking,
irrational.
3.3 Enmity and Groups
For theoretical simplicity, the foregoing discussion is couched primarily in terms
of individuals, discussing cases where one person confers enemy status upon another.
But enmity is often about groups. We often regard whole groups as our enemies,
Against Enemies
129
which I call group enemies. Further, we often see ourselves as members of groups
possessing enemies in common, participating in a collective form of enmity I call
group enmity. Facts about groups can alter the structure of reasons bearing on enmity,
though they generally make it no more rational, and often less so, than in the individual
case.
3.3.1 Group Enmity
Group enmity differs from individual enmity by its provenance, arising in two
distinct forms. One of these is protective group enmity, wherein agents first belong to
a group, then regard another person or group as a trouble for the group or some of
its members. This group enmity may be more or less widespread among members
of a group because here group membership has metaphysical priority over enmity.
Protective group enmity includes cases such as those in which people make enemies
out of concern for family members, colleagues, teammates, fellow citizens, and so on.
Some considerations at issue for individual enmity weigh differently for protective
group enmity because of the different ways in which the costs and benefits of enmity
impact a group. Some multiply. If the final prudential goods of several group members
really are threatened by some provocation, this multiplies any instrumental benefits
of enmity as compared to the individual case. But protective group enmity also
multiplies instrumental costs, both by drawing the whole group into a contest of power
and by associating the whole group with the moral harms of enmity. Some costs, such
as the expense of material resources for combat, can decrease on a per capita basis
because they can be distributed among the group in a way that makes them easier to
bear. However, the prudential costs of failing to honor default status are multiplied
when distributed, and the full cost is borne by each member. Since these costs are
weightier than those of combat, protective group enmity is, generally speaking, more
costly than individual enmity.
This multiplication of the costs of not honoring default status relates to a different
kind of cost that bears on protective group enmity but not individual enmity. A
group member who eschews enmity may be stigmatized as a bad person when other
members take up enmity on his behalf, so he bears the prudential costs of appearing
not to honor default status despite doing so. Since this is undeserved, group members
may thus cause, via enmity, the visiting of harms of unfairness upon their fellow
members. Ironically, in attempting to defend their fellows from the provocation, they
also facilitate the moral harm of these same fellows.
Protective group enmity contrasts with group-identity enmity, where enmity is
constitutive of group membership, or partly so. This enmity is generic to the group,
for it has metaphysical priority over group membership. It may arise because the
group’s members’ self-conception as members includes regarding some party as an
enemy, as is the case for hate groups. Or it may arise because regarding some party as
an enemy is criterial for admittance to the group, as is often the case with street gangs
or military institutions. This kind of enmity includes the collective association of hate
130
Washington University Review of Philosophy
groups, groups in inter-ethnic conflict, xenophobic nationalists, many political parties,
and various other constitutively antagonistic groups.
The considerations bearing on group-identity enmity can differ drastically from
the individual case. This enmity often occurs absent the enemy having performed any
provocative act because the conferral of enemy status attaches to group membership.
People join groups, including constitutively antagonistic groups, for a variety of social
reasons independent from any actions taken by the groups’ chosen enemies. When
there is no provocative act to deter, enmity itself cannot have instrumental value for
the conferring agent. Of course, provocative acts are not always absent. This sort of
enmity is sometimes perpetrated between pairs of antagonistic groups whose identities
demand mutual enmity, and each group engages in provocations that antagonize the
other. But when it is one-sided, group-identity enmity is irrational in the extreme.
Perhaps ironically, there is one way in which group-identity enmity might seem to
gain a prudential value individual enmity lacks. This sort of enmity, as a constituent
of group identity, facilitates group cohesion and, presumably, enhances the group’s
accumulated power for action thereby. Considered in a vacuum, this cohesion and
power appear to be valuable for group members. But it is only an apparent benefit,
for the existence, cohesion, and enhanced power of such a group harms rather than
benefits its members.
The group harms its members, often in a more thoroughgoing way than it harms
its enemies, by interfering directly with two significant aspects of member autonomy.
One is the autonomy to choose one’s associations, to determine individually what
relationships one has with other people. This is sacrificed in the prudentially worst
possible way, insofar as a member is required to make enemies, to absorb the costs
associated with enmity, and to forgo the opportunity for more valuable relationships
with the enemy so made. The member also loses autonomy to pursue their own final
prudential goals rather than the fascistic goal of supporting the group’s contest of power.
Since enmity is both intrinsically and instrumentally imprudent, the optimization of
member’s own goals is sacrificed for moral self-harm in service to the group. The
rationale against group-identity enmity is thus far stronger than that against individual
enmity or protective group enmity.
3.3.2 Group Enemies
When an enemy is an individual, the harms proscribed by default status might
dissuade them from causing a problem to the conferring agent. This is why some have
believed enmity is instrumentally prudent. A similar thought about deterrence might
apply to some group enemies, groups of people regarded as enemies because they
trouble the conferring agent collectively or in the same way, but usually it does not.
Most group enemies are loose collectives rather than organized institutions such
as state-sponsored armies. Typically, a group enemy is everyone whom the conferring
agent associates with a single political party or issue, religion, race, ethnicity, nation,
or demographic category such as the rabble or the rich. When some party feels
Against Enemies
131
provoked by specific activities issuing from such a collective, not every member of
that collective can be a cause of the provocation. Because not every member of such a
group is responsible for the provocation, but every member is treated as an enemy,
making a group enemy multiplies the costs in a way that outpaces the deterrence
benefit available. This makes making group enemies a less prudent matter than
making individual enemies.
Making such enemies also implies a wanton conferral of enemy status on those
group members who have no part in any provocative act. This is, of course, morally
problematic. It also makes enmity against the group less prudent because it therefore
involves a special increase in the cost of neglecting default status by visiting the harms
of enmity upon innocents. Just as it is less rational to perpetrate enmity as a member
of a group than as an individual, so too it is less rational to perpetrate enmity against
groups than against individuals.
IV. The Implications of Annihilating One’s Enemies
We have compelling reasons to extend a basic moral concern to all persons, even if
we acknowledge only our own interests while ignoring others’. These reasons extend
even to persons who provoke or trouble us in any manner whatsoever. And they are
even stronger when we are provoked as members of a group, or provoked by a group,
than when only individuals are involved.
I therefore propose we annihilate our enemies, present and future, by persistently
conferring default moral status on all human persons. This is morally reasonable
because others are persons. It is prudent because enmity is a parasite that consumes
the true prudential goods we might pursue in its stead. I have tried to adduce some
implications of this proposal already. I shall now review them and say a bit more
about what my proposal requires.
It does not require pacifism. Self-defense is permitted by default status, and often
it is prudent. In some cases, moral misfortune even requires us to visit the harms
default status ordinarily prohibits upon others, not because they deserve this, but
because something greater is at stake. In any case, nothing else can be reasonable but
to recognize personhood in others and accord the reasons it generates their proper
weight in our deliberations.
As individuals interacting with other individuals, we should never lose sight of
the personhood we share. When others harm us, manipulate us, or treat us unfairly,
it is in our best interest and it is right to avoid visiting these same harms upon them.
Perhaps we cannot treat our provocateurs as friends, but we can reason about them in
a way that treats them as what they are: persons. Their provocations will doubtless
cause an emotional reaction, but we must remember the difference between acting
blind from fear, sadness, or rage and doing what is in our best interest, or doing what
is strictly reasonable.
While these individual changes are not easy, our enmity as members of groups
132
Washington University Review of Philosophy
poses an even greater challenge. Actions we take as group members face constraints
and pressures that do not apply to solitary action. Simply put, it will be more difficult
to escape from enmity when we find ourselves participating in group enmity than it is
in the solitary case. But if we are to be reasonable, we must escape.
As in the individual case, there is nothing wrong with group members protecting
one another, so long as the protective measures honor the personhood of those who
provoke them. But many groups have enemies constitutively, having formed or still
persisting for specifically antagonistic purposes. Known hate groups are the most
obvious example, and it is not surprising they are generally despised when recognized
for what they are. Obviously, the reasonable person must abstain from identifying as a
member of any constitutively antagonistic group.
This obligation cannot be met simply by refusing to join known hate groups.
Unfortunately, constitutively antagonistic groups of all sizes form in all social spheres.
Sometimes a so-called friend demands we join them in enmity, that we form a
constitutively antagonistic duo alongside them. And some states demand enmity of
their citizens, insisting they treat some internal or external group in the ways default
status proscribes. The reasonable person will not sacrifice autonomy or other goods
to such “friendships" nor willingly pledge allegiance to such “states” as these.
I also fear the reasonable person cannot affiliate with many mainstream political
parties or interest groups, given that these actively seek to harm one another in the
ways default status proscribes. In the US, members of the major political parties
often self-identify as mutual enemies. They regularly use dehumanizing rhetoric
that questions the intelligence and even the personhood of their opponents, and often
seem to deny publicly that their opponents have any right to an autonomy that would
choose aims different from their own. The mainstream parties take various actions
that both strive to and succeed at violating one another’s autonomy, through measures
such as gerrymandering or obstructing the vote. They treat each other unfairly by
preferentially reserving goods, such as the appointment of justices, for themselves. I
am even convinced that, in some cases, the parties actively strive to make each other
suffer.
Of course, these are broad generalizations, and they do not describe the actions of
every member of either major party. National parties are fairly loose collectives and
contain significant regional variations in their behaviors. But if people find their party
affiliation makes them unable to befriend a person of a competing party, or unable to
accord a person of different political aims a basic kind of moral respect, this is good
reason to think they have joined a constitutively antagonistic group, that their political
activities are more like the actions of a hate group than the peaceful coexistence of
groups with competing ambitions. The reasonable person will avoid or leave such
associations in favor of others that contest power in a way that honors the status of
persons. The reasonable person will also refuse to make enemies of those who fail to
do the same.
Against Enemies
133
Jason Gardner is a pedagogy-first philosopher lecturing at Washington University in Saint
Louis, where he received a Ph.D. in 2014. Although his philosophical interests are broad, he
is most fascinated by general metaphysics and what light it can shed on moral and otherwise
axiological questions.
Notes and References
1. I would like to thank Jack Grimes, Nathan Hirscher, Sophia Rainville, and Kyle
Klemme for comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Sophia’s input has helped me
clarify several points that would otherwise be fairly opaque. Nathan has done the same,
and also helped me understand how my thesis relates to a broader discussion about
liability to defensive harm in political philosophy. And Jack has offered invaluable
assistance of both the editorial and, more importantly, the philosophical kind, the
latter relating especially to my discussions of group versus individual enmity and of
the political implications of my view. This essay, however weak it is, would surely be
much weaker without their assistance.
2. Plato, Republic, 331c & ff, especially 334b. In English translations of Republic,
“enemy” translates Plato’s “εχθρς,” a more personal sort of enmity as compared to
“πλεµις,” which is used in the context of war.
3. F.M. Kamm, Ethics for Enemies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
4. In §2 I contend that enemies are people who receive diminished moral
consideration from others. While I believe this captures, in a way, Kamm’s titular
usage of “enemies,” I do not mean to say her substantive views refuse full moral
consideration to people we would call enemies.
5. Jeff McMahan, “Debate: Justification and Liability in War,” The Journal
of Political Philosophy 16, no. 2 (January 2008): 227-244, and Jonathan Quong,
“Liability to Defensive Harm,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 40, no. 1 (Winter 2012):
45-77.
6. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
7. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26.
8. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 28.
9. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 28.
10. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 29-32.
11. Provocations are often actions of some problematic sort. But people are
also troubled by innocuous actions, and by ways of being, such as another person’s
nationality, that are not actions at all. There are even cases where people are troubled
134
Washington University Review of Philosophy
by others because the former have made a mistaken assumption about the latter or
projected some imaginary quality onto them. I include all of these as cases in which a
person is “found provocative.”
12. I am not here attempting to give a complete accounting of the different statuses
people might have in the interpersonal sphere, but only to describe a few alternatives
in order to both clarify what it is to be an enemy and to support the arguments below.
13. For more on the controversial notion of moral luck, see Bernard Williams,
Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Thomas Nagel,
“Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
14. One could do worse to survey the heterogeneous literature on metaphysical
construction than to read Sharon Street, “What is Constructivism in Ethics and
Metaethics?”, Philosophy Compass 5, no. 5 (2010): 363–384; Charles W. Mills,
“But What Are You Really? – The Metaphysics of Race,” in Blackness Visible:
Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); and Ásta,
“The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender,” in Feminist Metaphysics, ed. Charlotte Witt
(Springer, 2011): 47-65.
15. I am speaking in individual terms, but a group can collectively confer enemy
status, and a person or group can confer enemy status on members of some group
collectively. I address both collective phenomena in §3.3 below.
16. Mills, “But What Are You Really?”
17. See, for instance, the discussion in Kimberly Ann Harris, “Steve Biko and
the Liberatory Potential of Non-Racialism and Post-Racialism,” Critical Philosophy
of Race, Special Issue: Race after Obama, and Non-Racialism, Color-blindness, and
Post-Racialism 5, no. 2 (2017), and Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans.
Judith Thurman (New York: Vintage, 2011).
18. I am not offering a claim that requires a defense of the objective existence of
libertarian free will. Rather, this is a description of how we experience enmity as a
choice. We experience that we choose our friends and enemies and that we can revoke
these statuses at will.
19. See, for instance, M.L. Kelley, A.J. Bravo, H.C. Hamrick, A.L. Braitman,
and M.R. Judah, “Killing during Combat and Negative Mental Health and Substance
Use Outcomes among Recent-Era Veterans: The Mediating Effects of Rumination,”
Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 11, no. 4 (2019):
379–382.
20. This desire-satisfaction model includes variants that mitigate the idiosyncrasy
of desires relevant to prudence. For instance, there is the view that prudence concerns
only second order desires, or achieving only what one desires to desire rather than
achieving every inconsistent and regrettable desire one happens to have.
21. I shall not defend the view here, and it does not impact my argument, but I
Against Enemies
135
deny that what is fully prudent or otherwise fully rational is generally identical to the
maximal accumulation of some good or goods. Rather, prudence (and also rationality)
involves the optimal acquisition of the right goods, in the right amount, for a particular
person.
22. When a goal has value for the agent, only then is it a good for the agent. Goals
fail to be goods either when the agent is mistaken about their value, or when another
party makes the agent pursue them.
23. For the majority of these truisms, I am indebted to Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics, Third Edition, ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing,
2019), especially the early books of that work, either to reading it or thinking about it.
24. See §3.2.
25. See note 19.
26. See §3.1.2.
27. I surmise this to be the argument in J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism
and the 1868 Speech on Capital Punishment, ed. George Sher (Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing, 2001), 1-64.
28. I surmise this to be the argument in Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37-108.
29. I surmise this to be the argument in J.S. Mill, On Liberty, in ‘On Liberty’ and
Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
1-115.
30. Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1986-2129.
31. Quong (2012) defends a position of this sort (pp. 67; ff.). Quong does not
there endorse the account of default moral status I offer here, or any other substantive
account, but he does argue that agents who do or threaten harms in contravention to
another’s moral rights against harm thereby become themselves liable to defensive
harms. This “liability” is identical to a forfeiture of one’s own rights to not be
so harmed. I take it that I am disagreeing with Quong, on the grounds, first, that
the considerations that count as reasons for me not to cause a person the harms
proscribed by default status stand whether that person has harmed me or not and,
second, that I believe morality permits others to be harmed only under conditions of
moral misfortune, and that it may do so even when they themselves have perpetrated
no moral harm.
32. It may likewise require nothing of this sort. It simply depends on what else
of moral value is at stake, and what reasoning about the matter shows to be the best
compromise when a compromise of moral value is necessary.