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What, if anything, grounds the right of national defense? This essay explicates and defends a consequentialist answer to that question. After explaining the relevance and importance of this project, I clarify the meaning of consequentialism and explain how consequentialists understand and justify rights, including the right of national defense. International law enshrines that right. After explaining why it is correct to do so and why that right should be upheld, I examine some issues that this right leaves unsettled and probe its moral limits. I then reply to several objections to a consequentialist approach to national defense, pursuing in particular the criticism that consequentialists cannot justify the Allies' having taken up defensive arms against the Axis powers in World War II.

Consequentialism is a focal point of discussion and a driving force behind developments in moral philosophy. Recently, the debate has shifted in focus and in style: by seeking to consequentialize rival moral theories - in particular those with agent-relative characteristics - and by framing accounts in terms of reasons rather than in terms of value, an emerging new wave consequentialism has presented, at much higher levels of abstraction, theories that proved extremely flexible and powerful in meeting long-standing and influential objections. This volume on new wave consequentialism initiates and stimulates novel lines of discussion among proponents and their critics