Michael H. Otsuka (born 1964) is an American[2] left-libertarian political philosopher and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University.
[3] Otsuka earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in politics from Balliol College, Oxford, under the direction of G. A. Cohen, on a Marshall Scholarship, after graduating from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in political science summa cum laude in 1986.
[4] Otsuka has written extensively in political philosophy on topics such as equality and left-libertarianism.
Otsuka is a proponent of actual-consent forms of government, in opposition to the mainstream of political theory which has thought such systems to be unworkable.
[5]One of Otsuka's most influential articles—cited and critiqued by Jeff McMahan in his own work The Ethics of Killing—is "Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense" (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1994) In this article, Otsuka develops what he calls the Moral Equivalence Thesis, according to which Innocent Threat (e.g., the body of Falling Person is about to kill you by crushing you to death but who was thrown off the top of a building by an evil Villain) is on a moral par with Bystander, or one who is not at all responsible for whatever endangers your life.