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42One Another’s Equals, by Jeremy WaldronMind 128 (509): 249-260. 2019._ One Another’s Equals _, by WaldronJeremy. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 264.
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38What's the Matter? Review of Derek Parfit, On What Matters — ERRATUMUtilitas 24 (3): 441-441. 2012.
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36Forfeiture and the Right to a Fair TrialCriminal Law and Philosophy 14 (2): 203-213. 2020.In his Rights Forfeiture and Punishment, Christopher Heath Wellman argues that his preferred ‘strong’ version of rights forfeiture theory makes the moral rights of due process and a fair trial null and void for guilty offenders. They may still possess legal rights to due process, but these are not strong pre-institutional moral rights. I explain here why I disagree with Wellman. I also suggest that he is not entitled, by his own lights, to affirm strong forfeiture theory, at least in our social …Read more
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32Selective Pressures: No-Platforming and Academic FreedomPea Soup Blog. 2023.I investigate the case for being comparatively relaxed about academic no-platforming, based on the 'gatekeeping argument' and 'selectivity argument'. I find more to be concerned about than these arguments suggest.
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31Discrimination, Partial Concern, and ArbitrarinessIn Ulrike Heuer & Gerald Lang (eds.), Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes From the Ethics of Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 293. 2012.
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28Review of N. Ann Davis, Richard keshen, Jeff McMahan (eds.), Ethics and Humanity: Themes From the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (8). 2010.
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28Review of Christopher Miles Coope, Worth and Welfare in the Controversy Over Abortion (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (2). 2008.
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25Defensive EscalationsThe Journal of Ethics 26 (2): 273-294. 2022.Defence cases with an escalatory structure, in which the levels of violence between aggressor and defender start out as minor and then become major, even lethal, raise sharp problems for defence theory, and for our understanding of the conditions of defence: proportionality, necessity, and imminence. It is argued here that defenders are not morally required to withdraw from participation in these cases, and that defensive escalations do not offend against any of the conditions of defence, on an …Read more
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24Review of David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (5). 2005.
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23Why Not Forfeiture?In Helen Frowe and Gerald Lang (ed.), How We Fight: Ethics in War, Oxford University Press. pp. 38-61. 2014.
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19Defensive Liability and the Moral Status AccountWashington University Review of Philosophy 2 150-169. 2022.Jonathan Quong argues for the “moral status” account of defensive liability. According to the moral status account, what makes it the case that assailants lack rights against the imposition of defensive violence on them is that they are treating defenders as if those defenders lack rights against the imposition of aggressive violence on them. This “as if” condition can be met in some situations in which one person, A, commands very good but factually inaccurate evidence that another person, B, p…Read more
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17Strokes of Luck: A Study in Moral and Political PhilosophyOxford University Press. 2021.Strokes of Luck provides a detailed and wide-ranging examination of the role of luck in moral and political philosophy. The first part tackles debates in moral luck, which are concerned with the assignment of blameworthiness to individuals who are separated only by lucky differences. ‘Anti-luckists’ think that an agent who, for example, attempts and succeeds in an assassination and an agent who attempts and fails are equally blameworthy. This book defends an ‘anti-anti-luckist’ argument, accordi…Read more
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15Review of Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (review)Ethics 131 (1): 143-148. 2020.
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13How Resilient is the War Contract?Law and Philosophy 41 (6): 741-761. 2022.In _War By Agreement_, Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel Statman argue that the morality of war can be governed by a freely accepted agreement over the principles that apply to it. This war contract supersedes the application of the principles of everyday morality to war, thus defying ‘revisionist’ approaches to war, and it upholds a recognizable version of traditional just war theory. This article argues for three claims. First, the contractarian apparatus Benbaji and Statman deploy is actually incons…Read more
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12How Far can you Go with Quietism?Problema. Anuario de Filosofía y Teoria Del Derecho 1 (4): 3-37. 2010.Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs renews and amplifies his earlier attacks on metaethics. This article reviews the main lineaments of Dworkin’s anti-metaethical arguments and discusses, in detail, a number of issues which arise from them. First, it is suggested that Dworkin’s ap- praisal of what is doing most of the explanatory work in his account is largely askew. Second, it is claimed that Dworkin’s allegation that expressivism is self-defeating is wide of the mark, but that another charg…Read more
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9Getting on to the Same Page: War, Moral Fundamentalism, and ConventionPhilosophia 51 (5): 2345-2355. 2023.Uwe Steinhoff’s The Ethics of War and the Force of Law contains an extended critique of ‘moral fundamentalism’, or the project of uncovering an individualist ‘deep morality’ of war governed by the same moral principles and rules that govern ordinary moral life, as well as a more positive account of war that depicts it as a social practice. Much of Steinhoff’s account is indebted to a series of claims involving the standing to blame, reciprocity, and the necessity and proportionality conditions o…Read more
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6Free Speech and Liberal CommunityIn Joe Saunders & Carl Fox (eds.), Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy, Routledge. pp. 105-123. 2019.This essay offers a liberal, neo-Millian account of free speech, which attempts to fix some familiar bugs in Mill's account of free speech by focusing primarily on the right of free association, together with the permissibility of imposing restrictions to deal with, as Mill put it, ‘violations of good manners’ and ‘offences against decency’. It also uncovers a number of more conceptual puzzles with free speech. These can be resolved, it is contended, by regarding free speech as a practice.
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1Review of Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Luck Egalitarianism (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. forthcoming.
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1Gauguin's Lucky Escape: Moral Luck and the Morality SystemIn Sophie Grace Chappell & Marcel van Ackaren (eds.), Ethics Beyond the Limits: New Essays on Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, . pp. 129-47. 2019.Williams’s attack on the ‘morality system’ in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy was preceded by his famous but misunderstood essay ‘Moral Luck’. This essay pursues two principal aims. First and foremost, I take a fresh look at Williams’s argument in ‘Moral Luck’, to assess its defensibility. Second, I investigate how Williams’s treatment of moral luck shapes and informs the wider assault on the ‘morality system’ which reached its fullest expression in the later work. We can learn something abo…Read more
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IntroductionIn Helen Frowe & Gerald R. Lang (eds.), How We Fight: Ethics in War, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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Discrimination, partial concern, and arbitrarinessIn Ulrike Heuer & Gerald R. Lang (eds.), Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press Usa. 2012.
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Targeted KillingIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley. 2022.Targeted killing is a subspecies of assassination, deployed against irregular combatants such as terrorists. The justification for targeted killing bypasses the usual ‘war paradigm’ and ‘criminal enforcement paradigm’, and is thus unusual. There are various ways of securing such a justification, but also a number of dangers attending these arguments.
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Value Theory |