Much critical attention has been given to Alan Gewirth’s argument concerning agents’ move from prudential to moral right-claims. Less ink has been spilled on the question of why prudent agents should claim rights to goods needed by agents in general rather than to goods needed for the realization of their individual and particular purposes. In this paper, I intend to show that Gewirth’s concept of prudence makes it necessary for agents to identify with the role of a generic agent and that this identification provides them with rationally valid reasons not only to claim prudential rights to freedom and well-being but also to recognize a moral principle stating that all agents have these rights. More generally, my argument points to the central role played by the concept of prudence in his theory.

This article argues that the moral responsibility for the deaths of Palestinian non-combatants in the 2023–24 Gaza War rests with Hamas. Its argument is philosophical rather than legal, based on an analysis and discussion of the rules of just war theory and what these rules imply for the moral assessment of the use of human shields. One main conclusion will be that the moral responsibility for the killing of human shields in the context of morally legitimate attacks on military targets should be assigned to the side that tried to benefit from the presence of the shields in the first place. Questions concerning proportionality are still relevant, but have to be understood and resolved in relation to what is at stake in a particular war. The more extreme the war aims of an unjust attacker are, the greater is the need to prevent it from winning the war. Hence, whether or not the number of non-combatant deaths in Gaza is proportionate should not be determined by the significance of individual military targets alone but also by the prospects of allowing a genocidal enemy such as Hamas to remain in control of Gaza.