We’ve established the main difference between self-defense and fighting, which is that in self-defense, you don’t have to win. You just have to protect yourself. Another very important distinction relates to choice: If you have a choice, it’s a fight. If you have no choice, it’s self-defense If someone breaks into your house, you didn’t have a choice in that one. It’s self-defense. Even if they break in carrying two pairs of boxing gloves and a timer set to 3-minute rounds, it’s a self-defense situation. You didn’t pursue it, you didn’t encourage it, and you didn’t have a choice. Let’s take a different end of the spectrum. You’re at a bar, someone bumps into you, spills their drink, and wants to fight. Right now, you’re in a self-defense situation. They’re being verbally aggressive, and they’re threatening violence, but you do have a choice in how you play it out. If you give them the aggression right back, tell them to take it outside, and start throwing down, you have chosen to be in a fight. Even though everything that started it was their actions, you chose not to pursue an avenue of deescalation. If you did pursue deescalation and the other party just wouldn’t accept, no matter what you did they insist on getting violent, however this “fight,” ends up happening, you’re still in a self-defense situation. You didn’t pursue the violence, you tried to avoid it, but ultimately, you didn’t have a choice. The rules (or lack thereof), the environment, and all the other logistical factors are not what make something a fight. What makes it a fight is the agency of the participants, and if one party didn’t have a say in the matter then it’s not a fight, it’s an attack. And that means self-defense.
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