•  28
    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
  •  31
    Why Does Workplace Gender Diversity Matter? Justice, Organizational Benefits, and Policy
    with Cordelia Fine and Victor Sojo
    Social 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
  •  24
    Democratic authority to geoengineer
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23 (5): 600-617. 2020.
  •  85
    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
  •  496
    On Satisfying Duties to Assist
    In 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
  •  61
    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
  •  82
    XIV—What’s Wrong with Collective Punishment?
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (3): 327-345. 2018.
  •  10875
    In 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
  •  23
    The Comparative Culpability of SAI and Ordinary Carbon Emissions
    Ethics and International Affairs 31 (4): 495-499. 2017.
  •  237
    What 'we'?
    Journal of Social Ontology 1 (2): 225-250. 2015.
    The objective of this paper is to explain why certain authors - both popular and academic - are making a mistake when they attribute obligations to uncoordinated groups of persons, and to argue that it is particularly unhelpful to make this mistake given the prevalence of individuals faced with the difficult question of what morality requires of them in a situation in which there's a good they can bring about together with others, but not alone. I'll defend two alternatives to attributing obliga…Read more
  •  874
    Non-Ideal Accessibility
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3): 653-669. 2013.
    What should we do when we won't do as we ought? Suppose it ought to be that the procrastinating professor accept the task of reviewing a book, and actually review the book. It seems clear that given he won't review it, he ought not to accept the task. That is a genuine moral obligation in light of less than perfect circumstances. I want to entertain the possibility that a set of such obligations form something like a 'practical morality'; that which we ought to do given that we're unlikely or un…Read more
  •  56
    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
  •  852
    Debate: Ideal Theory—A Reply to Valentini
    Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (3): 357-368. 2009.
    In her ‘On the apparent paradox of ideal theory’, Laura Valentini combines three supposedly plausible premises to derive the paradoxical result that ideal theory is both unable to, and indispensable for, guiding action. Her strategy is to undermine one of the three premises by arguing that there are good and bad kinds of ideal theory, and only the bad kinds are vulnerable to the strongest version of their opponents’ attack. By undermining one of the three premises she releases ideal theorists fr…Read more
  •  838
    The Importance of Being Earnest, and the Difficulty of Faking It
    In M. Baurmann, G. Brennan, R. Goodin & N. Southwood (eds.), Norms and Values, Nomos Verlag. 2010.
    http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ZIF/Publikationen/books/10_Baurmann_NormsAndValues.html
  •  83
    Climate 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
  •  894
    The Transfer of Duties: From Individuals to States and Back Again
    In Michael Brady & Miranda Fricker (eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups, Oxford University Press. pp. 150-172. 2016.
    Individuals sometimes pass their duties on to collectives, which is one way in which collectives can come to have duties. The collective discharges its duties by acting through its members, which involves distributing duties back out to individuals. Individuals put duties in and get (transformed) duties out. In this paper we consider whether (and if so, to what extent) this general account can make sense of states' duties. Do some of the duties we typically take states to have come from individu…Read more
  •  1358
    The Motivation Question: Arguments from Justice, and from Humanity
    British Journal of Political Science 42 661-678. 2012.
    Which of the two dominant arguments for duties to alleviate global poverty, supposing their premises were generally accepted, would be more likely to produce their desired outcome? I take Pogge's argument for obligations grounded in principles of justice, a "contribution" argument, and Campbell's argument for obligations grounded in principles of humanity, an "assistance" argument, to be prototypical. Were people to accept the premises of Campbell's argument, how likely would they be to support …Read more
  •  33
    Global 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
  •  132
    Offsetting Class Privilege
    Journal 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
  •  800
    Benefiting from Failures to Address Climate Change
    Journal 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
  •  789
    Unethical Consumption & Obligations to Signal
    Ethics 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
  •  128
    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
  •  8
    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
  •  1430
    The Feasibility of Collectives' Actions
    Australasian 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
  •  941
    Collectives’ and individuals’ obligations: a parity argument
    Canadian 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
  •  3
    Review of James Pattison's 'The Morality of Private War'
    Times Literary Supplement 5870. 2015.
  •  1963