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145Gender-Critical FeminismOxford University Press. 2022.The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view on which gender is an 'identity', a way that people feel about themselves in terms of masculinity or femininity, regardless of their sex. On this view, sex is dismissed as unimporta…Read more
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139Offsetting 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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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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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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90Climate Matters Pro Tanto, Does It Matter All-Things-Considered?Midwest Studies in Philosophy 40 (1): 129-142. 2016.In Climate Matters (2012), John Broome argues that individuals have private duties to offset all emissions for which they are causally responsible, grounded in the general moral injunction against doing harm. Emissions do harm, therefore they must be neutralized. I argue that individuals' private duties to offset emissions cannot be grounded in a duty to do no harm, because there can be no such general duty. It is virtually impossible in our current social context―for those in developed countrie…Read more
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88XIV—What’s Wrong with Collective Punishment?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (3): 327-345. 2018.
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70Punishing 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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56Are ‘the affluent’ responsible for global poverty?Ethics and Global Politics 12 (1): 61-67. 2019.
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56[Comment] A brief note on the ambiguity of ‘ought’. Reply to Moti Mizrahi’s ‘Ought, Can and Presupposition: An Experimental Study’.Methode: Analytic Perspectives 4 (6): 244-249. 2015.Moti Mizrahi provides experimental evidence according to which subjects judge that a person ought to ? even when she cannot ?. He takes his results to constitute a falsification of the alleged intuitiveness of the ‘Ought Implies Can’ principle. We point out that in the light of the fact that (a) ‘ought’ is multiply ambiguous, that (b) only a restricted set of readings of ‘ought’ will be relevant to the principle, and that (c) he did not instruct his subjects appropriately – or otherwise ensure …Read more
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55Is There Collective Responsibility For Misogyny Perpetrated On Social Media?In Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2023.Women, particularly those in public positions (e.g. journalists, politicians, celebrities, activists) are subject to disproportionate amounts of abuse on social media platforms like Twitter. This abuse occurs in a landscape that those platforms designed, and maintain. Focusing in particular on Twitter, as typical of the kind of platform we’re interested in, we argue that it is the platform not (usually) the individuals who use it, that bears collective responsibility as a corporate agent for mis…Read more
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53Not 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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52Big Data Justice: A Case for Regulating The Global Information CommonsJournal of Politics 83 (2): 577-588. 2021.The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) challenges political theorists to think about data ownership and policymakers to regulate the collection and use of public data. AI producers benefit from free public data for training their systems while retaining the profits. We argue against the view that the use of public data must be free. The proponents of unconstrained use point out that consuming data does not diminish its quality and that information is in ample supply. Therefore, they suggest,…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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46Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical PhilosophyOxford University Press. 2023.Sex Matters addresses a cluster of related questions that arise from the conflict of interests between rights based on sex and rights based on gender identity. Some of these questions are theoretical, including: who has the more ambitious vision for women's liberation, gender-critical feminists or proponents of gender identity? How does each understand what gender is? What are the arguments for the refrain that 'trans women are women!', and do they succeed? Other questions taken up in the book a…Read more
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38Act 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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36Can debate ever do harm?Eureka Street. 2024.How can we make progress on the question of whether debate can do harm, and if it can, whether that’s a sufficient reason to suppress particular debates, or to adopt a ‘no debate!’ approach to particular topics ourselves? Obviously we’ll need to get clear on the key ingredients of the claim, which are what we’re counting as debate, and what we’re willing to countenance as harm. But we’ll also need to think about what exactly the harms are thought to be, of debating any one of these controversial…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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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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31Is 'TERF' A Slur?In Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2023.
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30Democratic authority to geoengineerCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (5): 600-617. 2020.
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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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25Was Lockdown Life Worth Living?Monash Bioethics Review (1): 40-61. 2022.Lockdowns in Australia have been strict and lengthy. Policy-makers appear to have given the preservation of quantity of lives strong priority over the preservation of quality of lives. But thought-experiments in population ethics suggest that this is not always the right priority. In this paper, I'll discuss both negative impacts on quantity of lives caused by the lockdowns themselves, including an increase in domestic violence, and negative impacts on quality of lives caused by lockdowns, in or…Read more
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25Juha Räikkä, Social Justice in Practice: Switzerland: Springer, 2014. ISBN 978-3-319-04633-4 £72.00 pbJournal of Value Inquiry 50 (2): 473-478. 2016.
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24Is It Wrong to Buy Sex?Routledge. 2024.Is it wrong for a man to buy sex from a woman? In this book, Holly Lawford-Smith argues that it is wrong: commercial sex is quintessentially hierarchical sex, and it is wrong both to have, and to perpetuate a market in, hierarchical sex. Angie Pepper argues that it isn’t wrong: men are permitted to buy sex from those women who freely choose to sell it. Important but different interests are at stake in these two positions. According to the first, we should prioritize the interest of all women in …Read more
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23What is an ally?Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. forthcoming.For all the recent talk of people failing or succeeding as allies to oppressed groups, a well worked out philosophical theory of what it is for someone to be an ally is conspicuously absent. This makes it difficult to evaluate the claims of people failing or succeeding as allies, and consequently diminishes the concept’s usefulness to disadvantaged groups by making it difficult to identify who will genuinely help to further their interests. We aim to rectify this absence by answering the followi…Read more
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15Ending Sex-Based Oppression: Transitional PathwaysIn Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2023.
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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