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52Not in Their Name: Are Citizens Culpable for Their States' Actions?Oxford University Press. 2019.There are many actions that we attribute, at least colloquially, to states. Given their size and influence, states are able to inflict harm far beyond the reach of a single individual. But there is a great deal of unclarity about exactly who is implicated in that kind of harm, and how we should think about responsibility for it. It is a commonplace assumption that democratic publics both authorize and have control over what their states do; that their states act in their name and on their behalf…Read more
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36Act Consequentialism and the No-Difference ChallengeIn Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, Oxford University Press. 2020.In this chapter we explain what the no-difference challenge is, focusing in particular on act consequentialism. We talk about how different theories of causation affect the no-difference challenge; how the challenge shows up in real-world cases including voting, global labour injustice, global poverty, and climate change; and we work through a number of the solutions to the challenge that have been offered, arguing that many fail to actually meet it. We defend and extend one solution that does, …Read more
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36Why Does Workplace Gender Diversity Matter? Justice, Organizational Benefits, and PolicySocial Issues and Policy Review 14 (1): 36-72. 2020.Why does workplace gender diversity matter? Here, we provide a review of the literature on both justice‐based and organizational benefits of workplace gender diversity that, importantly, is informed by evidence regarding sex differences and their relationship with vocational behavior and outcomes. This review indicates that the sexes are neither distinctly different, nor so similar as to be fungible. Justice‐based gains of workplace gender diversity include that it may cause less sex discriminat…Read more
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29Democratic authority to geoengineerCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (5): 600-617. 2020.
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94Responsibility for states' actions: Normative issues at the intersection of collective agency and state responsibilityPhilosophy Compass 12 (11). 2017.Is the state a collective agent? Are citizens responsible for what their states do? If not citizens, then who, if anyone, is responsible for what the state does? Many different sub-disciplines of philosophy are relevant for answering these questions. We need to know what “the state” is, who or what it's composed of, and what relation the parts stand in to the whole. Once we know what it is, we need to know whether that thing is an agent, in particular a moral agent capable of taking moral respon…Read more
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523On Satisfying Duties to AssistIn Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, Oxford University Press. 2019.In this paper, we take up the question of whether there comes a point at which one is no longer morally obliged to do further good, even at very low cost to oneself. More specifically, they ask: under precisely what conditions is it plausible to say that that “point” has been reached? A crude account might focus only on, say, the amount of good the agent has already done, but a moment’s reflection shows that this is indeed too crude. We develop and defend a nuanced account according to which con…Read more
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69Punishing Groups: When External Justice Takes Priority over Internal JusticeThe Monist 102 (2): 134-150. 2019.Punishing groups raises a difficult question, namely, how their punishment can be justified at all. Some have argued that punishing groups is morally problematic because of the effects that the punishment entails for their members. In this paper we argue against this view. We distinguish the question of internal justice—how punishment-effects are distributed—from the question of external justice—whether the punishment is justified. We argue that issues of internal justice do not in general under…Read more
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54Are ‘the affluent’ responsible for global poverty?Ethics and Global Politics 12 (1): 61-67. 2019.
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85XIV—What’s Wrong with Collective Punishment?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (3): 327-345. 2018.
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10978In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish that suc…Read more
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27The Comparative Culpability of SAI and Ordinary Carbon EmissionsEthics and International Affairs 31 (4): 495-499. 2017.
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35Global Justice (edited book)Ashgate. 2012.This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. This volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of s…Read more
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138Offsetting Class PrivilegeJournal of Practical Ethics 4 (1): 23-51. 2016.The UK is an unequal society. Societies like these raise significant ethical questions for those who live in them. One is how they should respond to such inequality, and in particular, to its effects on those who are worst-off. In this article, I’ll approach this question by focusing on the obligations of a particular group of those who are best-off. I’ll defend the idea of morally objectionable class-based advantage, which I’ll call ‘class privilege’, argue that class privilege can be non-culpa…Read more
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823Benefiting from Failures to Address Climate ChangeJournal of Applied Philosophy 31 (4): 392-404. 2014.The politics of climate change is marked by the fact that countries are dragging their heels in doing what they ought to do; namely, creating a binding global treaty, and fulfilling the duties assigned to each of them under it. Many different agents are culpable in this failure. But we can imagine a stylised version of the climate change case, in which no agents are culpable: if the bad effects of climate change were triggered only by crossing a particular threshold, and it was reasonably, but m…Read more
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51Feasibility Constraints and the Cosmopolitan Vision: Empirical Reasons for Choosing Justice Over HumanityIn Stan van Hooft & Wim Vandekerckhove (eds.), Questioning Cosmopolitanism, Springer. pp. 137--150. 2010.
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824Unethical Consumption & Obligations to SignalEthics and International Affairs 29 (3): 315-330. 2015.Many of the items that humans consume are produced in ways that involve serious harms to persons. Familiar examples include the harms involved in the extraction and trade of conflict minerals (e.g. coltan, diamonds), the acquisition and import of non- fair trade produce (e.g. coffee, chocolate, bananas, rice), and the manufacture of goods in sweatshops (e.g. clothing, sporting equipment). In addition, consumption of certain goods (significantly fossil fuels and the products of the agricultural i…Read more
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133Does Purchasing Make Consumers Complicit in Global Labour Injustice?Res Publica 24 (3): 319-338. 2018.Do consumers’ ordinary actions of purchasing certain goods make them complicit in global labour injustice? To establish that they do, two things much be shown. First, it must be established that they are not more than complicit, for example that they are not the principal perpetrators. Second, it must be established that they meet the conditions for complicity on a plausible account. I argue that Kutz’s account faces an objection that makes Lepora and Goodin’s better suited, and defend the idea …Read more
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14Accelerating the Carbon Cycle: the Ethics of Enhanced WeatheringBiology Letters 13 (4): 1-6. 2017.Enhanced weathering, in comparison to other geoengineering measures, creates the possibility of a reduced cost, reduced impact way of decreasing atmospheric carbon, with positive knock-on effects such as decreased oceanic acidity. We argue that ethical concerns have a place alongside empirical, political and social factors as we consider how to best respond to the critical challenge that anthropogenic climate change poses. We review these concerns, considering the ethical issues that arise (or w…Read more
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1468The Feasibility of Collectives' ActionsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3): 453-467. 2012.Does ?ought? imply ?can? for collectives' obligations? In this paper I want to establish two things. The first, what a collective obligation means for members of the collective. The second, how collective ability can be ascertained. I argue that there are four general kinds of obligation, which devolve from collectives to members in different ways, and I give an account of the distribution of obligation from collectives to members for each of these kinds. One implication of understanding collect…Read more
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973Collectives’ and individuals’ obligations: a parity argumentCanadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1): 38-58. 2016.Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into w…Read more
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2022Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law (by Larry Alexander et al.) (review)Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 35 152-158. 2010.
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373Juha Räikkä, Social Justice in PracticeJournal of Value Inquiry 1-6. 2014.Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, marveling at the terrain below, wondering about all the sights currently obscured from your view, and lamenting that you just don’t have time to commit to the steep descent in and long trek across, which would give you a perspective from right up close. Being handed Juha Räikkä’s new book Social Justice in Practice is like being told there’s a flying fox you can take: the canyon is applied political theory, and the flying fox allows the reader t…Read more
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1142Feasibility Constraints for Political TheoriesDissertation, Australian National University. 2010.
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184Offsetting Race PrivilegeJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 11 (2): 1-23. 2017.For all the talk there has been lately about privilege, few have commented on the moral obligations that are associated with having privilege. Those who have commented haven't gone much beyond the idea that the privileged should be conscious of their privilege, should listen to those who don't have it. Here we want to go further, and build an account of the moral obligations of those with a particular kind of privilege: race privilege. In this paper we articulate an understanding of race privile…Read more
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1657Difference-Making and Individuals' Climate-Related ObligationsIn Clare Hayward & Dominic Roser (eds.), Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World, . pp. 64-82. 2016.Climate change appears to be a classic aggregation problem, in which billions of individuals perform actions none of which seem to be morally wrong taken in isolation, and yet which combine to drive the global concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) ever higher toward environmental (and humanitarian) catastrophe. When an individual can choose between actions that will emit differing amounts of GHGs―such as to choose a vegan rather than carnivorous meal, to ride a bike to work rather than drive …Read more
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727Peter Corning: The Fair Society: The science of human nature and the pursuit of social justice: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011 (review)Biology and Philosophy 27 (2): 313-320. 2012.Peter Corning: The Fair Society: The science of human nature and the pursuit of social justice Content Type Journal Article Category Review Essay Pages 1-8 DOI 10.1007/s10539-011-9304-0 Authors Holly Lawford-Smith, Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Philosophy, Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia Journal Biology and Philosophy Online ISSN 1572-8404 Print ISSN 0169-3867
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578Cosmopolitan Global Justice: Brock vs. The Feasibility ScepticGlobal Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric (4). 2011.
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707IntroductionIn Christian Barry & Holly Lawford-Smith (eds.), Global Justice, Ashgate. 2012.This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of so…Read more