•  504
    The Permissibility of Aiding and Abetting Unjust Wars
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (4): 513-529. 2011.
    Common sense suggests that if a war is unjust, then there is a strong moral reason not to contribute to it. I argue that this presumption is mistaken. It can be permissible to contribute to an unjust war because, in general, whether it is permissible to perform an act often depends on the alternatives available to the actor. The relevant alternatives available to a government waging a war differ systematically from the relevant alternatives available to individuals in a position to contribute to…Read more
  •  50
    Cosmopolitan War, by Cecile Fabre (review)
    Mind 123 (490): 588-592. 2014.
    Book review for Cecile Fabre's 'Cosmopolitan War'
  •  364
    Morally Heterogeneous Wars
    Philosophia 41 (4): 959-975. 2013.
    According to “epistemic-based contingent pacifism” a) there are virtually no wars which we know to be just, and b) it is morally impermissible to wage a war unless we know that the war is just. Thus it follows that there is no war which we are morally permitted to wage. The first claim (a) seems to follow from widespread disagreement among just war theorists over which wars, historically, have been just. I will argue, however, that a source of our inability to confidently distinguish just from u…Read more
  •  474
    Defensive Wars and the Reprisal Dilemma
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3): 583-601. 2015.
    I address a foundational problem with accounts of the morality of war that are derived from the Just War Tradition. Such accounts problematically focus on ‘the moment of crisis’: i.e. when a state is considering a resort to war. This is problematic because sometimes the state considering the resort to war is partly responsible for wrongly creating the conditions in which the resort to war becomes necessary. By ignoring this possibility, JWT effectively ignores, in its moral evaluation of wars, c…Read more