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694Material Contribution, Responsibility, and LiabilityJournal of Moral Philosophy 15 (6): 637-650. 2018.In her inventive and tightly argued book Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe defends the view that bystanders—those who do not pose threats to others—cannot be liable to being harmed in self-defence or in defence of others. On her account, harming bystanders always infringes their rights against being harmed, since they have not acted in any way to forfeit them. According to Frowe, harming bystanders can be justified only when it constitutes a lesser evil. In this brief essay, I make the case that so…Read more
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462Who owns it? Three arguments for land claims in Latin AmericaRevista de Ciencia Politica 37 (3): 713-736. 2017.Indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Latin America make land claims and support them with a variety of arguments. Some, such as Zapatistas and the Mapuche, have appealed to the “ancestral” or “historical” connections between specific communities and the land. Other groups, such as MST in Brazil, have appealed to the extremely unequal distribution of the land and the effects of this on the poor; the land in this case is seen mainly as a means for securing a decent standard of living for m…Read more
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Fairness in Sovereign DebtSocial Research: An International Quarterly 73 649-694. 2006.When can we say that a debt crisis has been resolved fairly? An often overlooked but very important effect of financial crises and the debts that often engender them is that they can lead the crisis countries to increased dependence on international institutions and the policy conditionality they require in return for their continued support, limiting their capabilities and those of their citizens to exercise meaningful control over their policies and institutions. These outcomes have been viewe…Read more
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219Can Withdrawing Citizenship be Justified?Political Studies 64 1055-1070. 2016.When can or should citizenship be granted to prospective members of states? When can or should states withdraw citizenship from their existing members? In recent decades, political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the first question, but have generally neglected the second. There are of course good practical reasons for prioritizing the question of when citizenship should be granted—many individuals have a strong interest in acquiring citizenship in particular political communiti…Read more
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625On the Rights of Temporary MigrantsThe Journal of Legal Studies 47 (S1). 2018.Temporary workers stand to gain from temporary migration programs, which can also benefit sender and recipient states. Some critics of temporary migration programs, however, argue that failing to extend citizenship rights or a secure pathway to permanent residency to such migrants places them in an unacceptable position of domination with respect to other members of society. We shall argue that access to permanent residency and citizenship rights should not be regarded as a condition for the mor…Read more
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85Applying the contribution principleMetaphilosophy 36 (1-2): 210-227. 2005.When are we responsible for addressing the acute deprivations of others beyond state borders? One widely held view is that we are responsible for addressing or preventing acute deprivations insofar as we have contributed to them or are contributing to bringing them about. But how should agents who endorse this “contribution principle” of allocating responsibility yet are uncertain whether or how much they have contributed to some problem conceive of their responsibilities with respect to it? Leg…Read more
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42Global Financial Crisis: The Ethical Issues (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2011.The Global Financial Crisis is acknowledged to be the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s, and one that is unique in its underlying causes, its scope, and its wider social, political and economic implications. This volume explores some of the ethical issues that it has raised.
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499Who Should Pay for the Damage of the Global Financial Crisis?In Ned Dobos Christian Barry & Thomas Pogge (eds.), Global Financial Crisis: The Ethical Issues, Palgrave. 2011.
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246The Feasible Alternatives Thesis: Kicking away the livelihoods of the global poorPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 11 (1): 97-119. 2012.Many assert that affluent countries have contributed in the past to poverty in developing countries through wars of aggression and conquest, colonialism and its legacies, the imposition of puppet leaders, and support for brutal dictators and venal elites. Thomas Pogge has recently argued that there is an additional and, arguably, even more consequential way in which the affluent continue to contribute to poverty in the developing world. He argues that when people cooperate in instituting and uph…Read more
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1012Doing, Allowing, and Enabling Harm: An Empirical InvestigationIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2014.Traditionally, moral philosophers have distinguished between doing and allowing harm, and have normally proceeded as if this bipartite distinction can exhaustively characterize all cases of human conduct involving harm. By contrast, cognitive scientists and psychologists studying causal judgment have investigated the concept ‘enable’ as distinct from the concept ‘cause’ and other causal terms. Empirical work on ‘enable’ and its employment has generally not focused on cases where human agents ena…Read more
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476Local Priorities, Universal Priorities, and Enabling HarmEthics and International Affairs 26 (1): 21-26. 2012.
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731IntroductionIn 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
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1480The Moral Equality of CombatantsIn Lazar Seth & Frowe Helen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of War, Oxford University Press. 2017.The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants holds that combatants on either side of a war have equal moral status, even if one side is fighting a just war while the other is not. This chapter examines arguments that have been offered for and against this doctrine, including the collectivist position famously articulated by Walzer and McMahan’s influential individualist critique. We also explore collectivist positions that have rejected the moral equality doctrine and arguments that some ind…Read more
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596Why remittances to poor countries should not be taxedNYU Journal of International Law and Politics 42 (1): 1180-1207. 2010.Remittances are private financial transfers from migrant workers back to their countries of origin. These are typically intra-household transfers from members of a family who have emigrated to those who have remained behind. The scale of such transfers throughout the world is very large, reaching $338 billion U.S. in 20081—several times the size of overseas development assistance (ODA) and larger even than foreign direct investment (FDI). The data on migration and remittances is too poor to warr…Read more
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985Moral uncertainty and permissibility: Evaluating Option SetsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (6): 1-26. 2016.In this essay, we explore an issue of moral uncertainty: what we are permitted to do when we are unsure about which moral principles are correct. We develop a novel approach to this issue that incorporates important insights from previous work on moral uncertainty, while avoiding some of the difficulties that beset existing alternative approaches. Our approach is based on evaluating and choosing between option sets rather than particular conduct options. We show how our approach is particularly …Read more
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974Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and AgencyCambridge University Press. 2016.This book explores the nature of moral responsibilities of affluent individuals in the developed world, addressing global poverty and arguments that philosophers have offered for having these responsibilities. The first type of argument grounds responsibilities in the ability to avert serious suffering by taking on some cost. The second argument seeks to ground responsibilities in the fact that the affluent are contributing to such poverty. The authors criticise many of the claims advanced by th…Read more
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773How should we conceive of individual consumer responsibility to address labour injustices?In Yossi Dahan, Hanna Lerner & Faina Milman-Sivan (eds.), Global Justice and International Labour Rights, Cambridge University Press. 2016.Many approaches to addressing labour injustices—shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions— focus on how governments should orient themselves toward other states in which such phenomena take place, or to the firms that are involved with such practices. But of course the question of how to regard such labour practices must also be faced by individuals, and individual consumers of the goods that are produced through these practices in particular. Consumers have become increasing…Read more
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1545Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critiqueReview of International Studies 35 485-512. 2009.Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of e…Read more
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2035On the concept of climate debt: its moral and political valueCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 15 (5): 667-685. 2012.A range of developing countries and international advocacy organizations have argued that wealthy countries, as a result of their greater historical contribution to human-induced climate change, owe a ?climate debt? to poor countries. Critics of this argument have claimed that it is incoherent or morally objectionable. In this essay we clarify the concept of climate debt and assess its value for conceptualizing responsibilities associated with global climate change and for guiding international …Read more
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605What Second-Best Scenarios Reveal about Ideals of Global JusticeIn Thom Brooks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice, Oxford University Press. 2020.While there need be no conflict in theory between addressing global inequality (inequalities between people worldwide) and addressing domestic inequality (inequalities between people within a political community), there may be instances in which the feasible mechanism for reducing global inequality risks aggravating domestic inequality. The burgeoning literature on global justice has tended to overlook this type of scenario, and theorists espousing global egalitarianism have consequently not eng…Read more
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929The Implications of Failing to AssistSocial Theory and Practice 40 (4): 570-590. 2014.In this essay we argue that an agent’s failure to assist someone in need at one time can change the cost she can be morally required to take on to assist that same person at a later time. In particular, we show that the cost the agent can subsequently be required to take on to help the person in need can increase quite significantly, and can be enforced through the proportionate use of force. We explore the implications of this argument for the duties of the affluent to address global poverty
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883Dealing Fairly with the Costs to the Poor of the Global Financial CrisisIn Iain G. MacNeil & Justin O'Brien (eds.), The Future of Financial Regulation, Hart. 2010.
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249Redistribution (substantive revision)Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distribut…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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2544Benefiting from the Wrongdoing of OthersJournal of Applied Philosophy 31 (2): 363-376. 2014.Bracket out the wrong of committing a wrong, or conspiring or colluding or conniving with others in their committing one. Suppose you have done none of those things, and you find yourself merely benefiting from a wrong committed wholly by someone else. What, if anything, is wrong with that? What, if any, duties follow from it? If straightforward restitution were possible — if you could just ‘give back’ what you received as a result of the wrongdoing to its rightful owner — then matters are moral…Read more
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2198Scepticism about Beneficiary Pays: A CritiqueJournal of Applied Philosophy 32 (4): 285-300. 2015.Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their cri…Read more
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58Scepticism about Beneficiary Pays: A CritiqueJournal of Applied Philosophy 34 (3): 282-300. 2017.Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their cri…Read more
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1127Individual responsibility for carbon emissions: Is there anything wrong with overdetermining harm?In Jeremy Moss (ed.), Climate Change and Justice, Cambridge University Press. 2015.Climate change and other harmful large-scale processes challenge our understandings of individual responsibility. People throughout the world suffer harms—severe shortfalls in health, civic status, or standard of living relative to the vital needs of human beings—as a result of physical processes to which many people appear to contribute. Climate change, polluted air and water, and the erosion of grasslands, for example, occur because a great many people emit carbon and pollutants, build excessi…Read more
Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Justice |