-
559Accommodating OptionsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1): 233-255. 2018.Many of us think we have agent-centred options to act suboptimally. Some of these involve favouring our own interests. Others involve sacrificing them. In this paper, I explore three different ways to accommodate agent-centred options in a criterion of objective permissibility. I argue against satisficing and rational pluralism, and in favour of a principle built around sensitivity to personal cost.
-
851Debate: Do Associative Duties Really Not Matter? 1Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (1): 90-101. 2009.Associative duties are non-contractual duties owed in virtue of a valuable relationship. They hold between lovers, family members, friends, and perhaps compatriots. General duties, by contrast, are owed to people simply in virtue of their humanity: they are grounded in each person’s great and equal moral worth. In this paper, I ask what should be done when we can perform either an associative duty or a general duty, but not both.
-
587The nature and disvalue of injuryRes Publica 15 (3): 289-304. 2009.This paper explicates a conception of injury as right-violation, which allows us to distinguish between setbacks to interests that should, and should not, be the concern of theories of justice. It begins by introducing a hybrid theory of rights, grounded in (a) the mobilisation of our moral equality to (b) protect our most important interests, and shows how violations of rights are the concern of justice, while setbacks where one of the twin grounds of rights is defeated are not. It then looks m…Read more
-
683A Liberal Defence of (Some) Duties to CompatriotsJournal of Applied Philosophy 27 (3): 246-257. 2010.This paper asks whether we can defend associative duties to our compatriots that are grounded solely in the relationship of liberal co-citizenship. The sort of duties that are especially salient to this relationship are duties of justice, duties to protect and improve the institutions that constitute that relationship, and a duty to favour the interests of compatriots over those of foreigners. Critics have argued that the liberal conception of citizenship is too insubstantial to sustain these du…Read more
-
508Corrective Justice and the Possibility of RectificationEthical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (4): 355-368. 2008.In this paper, I ask how – and whether – the rectification of injury at which corrective justice aims is possible, and by whom it must be performed. I split the injury up into components of harm and wrong, and consider their rectification separately. First, I show that pecuniary compensation for the harm is practically plausible, because money acts as a mediator between the damaged interest and other interests. I then argue that this is also a morally plausible approach, because it does not clai…Read more
-
1279The responsibility dilemma for killing in war: A review essayPhilosophy and Public Affairs 38 (2): 180-213. 2010.Killing in War presents the Moral Equality of Combatants with serious, and in my view insurmountable problems. Absent some novel defense, this thesis is now very difficult to sustain. But this success is counterbalanced by the strikingly revisionist implications of McMahan’s account of the underlying morality of killing in war, which forces us into one of two unattractive positions, contingent pacifism, or near-total war. In this article, I have argued that his efforts to mitigate these controve…Read more
-
2123Necessity in Self-Defense and WarPhilosophy and Public Affairs 40 (1): 3-44. 2012.It is generally agreed that using lethal or otherwise serious force in self-defense is justified only when three conditions are satisfied: first, there are some grounds for the defender to give priority to his own interests over those of the attacker (whether because the attacker has lost the protection of his right to life, for example, or because of the defender’s prerogative to prefer himself to others); second, the harm used is proportionate to the threat thereby averted; third, the harm is …Read more
-
168Authority, Oaths, Contracts, and Uncertainty in WarThought: A Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 52-58. 2015.Soldiers sign contracts to obey lawful orders; they also swear oaths to this end. The enlistment contract for the Armed Forces of the United States combines both elements: '9a. My enlistment is more than an employment agreement. As a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, I will be: (1) Required to obey all lawful orders and perform all assigned duties … (4) Required upon order to serve in combat or other hazardous situations.' We standardly think that these oaths and contracts give so…Read more
-
100Risky Killing and the Ethics of WarEthics 126 (1): 91-117. 2015.Killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. Although this principle is widely affirmed, recent military practice and contemporary just war theory have undermined it. This article argues that killing an innocent person is worse the likelier it was, when you acted, that he would be innocent: riskier killings are worse than less risky killings. In war, killing innocent civilians is almost always riskier than killing innocent soldiers. So killing innocent civilians is worse than killing innoce…Read more
-
76Authorization and The Morality of WarAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2): 211-226. 2016.Why does it matter that those who fight wars be authorized by the communities on whose behalf they claim to fight? I argue that lacking authorization generates a moral cost, which counts against a war's proportionality, and that having authorization allows the transfer of reasons from the members of the community to those who fight, which makes the war more likely to be proportionate. If democratic states are better able than non-democratic states and sub-state groups to gain their community's a…Read more
-
90Complicity, Collectives, and Killing in WarLaw and Philosophy 35 (4): 365-389. 2016.Recent work on the ethics of war has struggled to simultaneously justify two central tenets of international law: the Permission to kill enemy combatants, and the Prohibition on targeting enemy noncombatants. Recently, just war theorists have turned to collectivist considerations as a way out of this problem. In this paper, I reject the argument that all and only unjust combatants are liable to be killed in virtue of their complicity in the wrongful war fought by their side, and that noncombatan…Read more
-
60Anton's Game: Deontological Decision Theory for an Iterated Decision ProblemUtilitas 29 (1): 88-109. 2017.How should deontologists approach decision-making under uncertainty, for an iterated decision problem? In this paper I explore the shortcomings of a simple expected value approach, using a novel example to raise questions about attitudes to risk, the moral significance of tiny probabilities, the independent moral reasons against imposing risks, the morality of sunk costs, and the role of agent-relativity in iterated decision problems.
-
1706Evaluating the Revisionist Critique of Just War TheoryDaedalus 146 (1): 113-124. 2017.Modern analytical just war theory starts with Michael Walzer's defense of key tenets of the laws of war in his Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer advocates noncombatant immunity, proportionality, and combatant equality: combatants in war must target only combatants; unintentional harms that they inflict on noncombatants must be proportionate to the military objective secured; and combatants who abide by these principles fight permissibly, regardless of their aims. In recent years, the revisionist scho…Read more
-
2021Just War Theory: Revisionists Vs TraditionalistsAnnual Review of Political Science 20 37-54. 2017.Contemporary just war theory is divided into two broad camps: revisionists and traditionalists. Traditionalists seek to provide moral foundations for something close to current international law, and in particular the laws of armed conflict. Although they propose improvements, they do so cautiously. Revisionists argue that international law is at best a pragmatic fiction—it lacks deeper moral foundations. In this article, I present the contemporary history of analytical just war theory, from the…Read more
-
46Response: Limiting Defensive RightsJournal of Applied Philosophy 34 (1): 19-23. 2017.Arthur Ripstein’s article draws on more resources than I can deploy in this response to it. I will restate what I take to be the central claims of the article, then present a reply. Ripstein does not strictly argue for his view of proportionality in defensive force. Instead he paints a picture of a moral system that one might adopt, and indicates the role of the proportionality constraint therein. So after outlining how I understand that picture, I will draw an alternative one. I’ll then suggest…Read more
-
860Proxy Battles in Just War Theory: Jus in Bello, the Site of Justice, and Feasibility ConstraintsIn David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne & Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 166-193. 2017.Interest in just war theory has boomed in recent years, as a revisionist school of thought has challenged the orthodoxy of international law, most famously defended by Michael Walzer [1977]. These revisionist critics have targeted the two central principles governing the conduct of war (jus in bello): combatant equality and noncombatant immunity. The first states that combatants face the same permissions and constraints whether their cause is just or unjust. The second protects noncombatants fro…Read more
-
1190Limited Aggregation and RiskPhilosophy and Public Affairs 46 (2): 117-159. 2018.Many of us believe (1) Saving a life is more important than averting any number of headaches. But what about risky cases? Surely: (2) In a single choice, if the risk of death is low enough, and the number of headaches at stake high enough, one should avert the headaches rather than avert the risk of death. And yet, if we will face enough iterations of cases like that in (2), in the long run some of those small risks of serious harms will surely eventuate. And yet: (3) Isn't it still permissible …Read more
-
711Moral Sunk CostsThe Philosophical Quarterly 68 (273). 2018.Suppose that you are trying to pursue a morally worthy goal, but cannot do so without incurring some moral costs. At the outset, you believed that achieving your goal was worth no more than a given moral cost. And suppose that, time having passed, you have wrought only harm and injustice, without advancing your cause. You can now reflect on whether to continue. Your goal is within reach. What's more, you believe you can achieve it by incurring—from this point forward—no more cost than it warrant…Read more
-
915The Morality and Law of WarIn Andrei Marmor (ed.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, Routledge. pp. 364-379. 2012.The revisionist critique of conventional just war theory has undoubtedly scored some important victories. Walzer’s elegantly unified defense of combatant legal equality and noncombatant immunity has been seriously undermined. This critical success has not, however, been matched by positive arguments, which when applied to the messy reality of war would deprive states and soldiers of the permission to fight wars that are plausibly thought to be justified. The appeal to law that is sought to resol…Read more
-
853Associative Duties and the Ethics of Killing in WarJournal of Practical Ethics 1 (1): 3-48. 2013.this paper advances a novel account of part of what justifies killing in war, grounded in the duties we owe to our loved ones to protect them from the severe harms with which war threatens them. It discusses the foundations of associative duties, then identifies the sorts of relationships, and the specific duties that they ground, which can be relevant to the ethics of war. It explains how those associa- tive duties can justify killing in theory—in particular how they can justify overrid- ing th…Read more
-
1279Necessity and Non-Combatant ImmunityReview of International Studies (Firstview Online) 40 (1): 53-76. 2014.The principle of non-combatant immunity protects non-combatants against intentional attacks in war. It is the most widely endorsed and deeply held moral constraint on the conduct of war. And yet it is difficult to justify. Recent developments in just war theory have undermined the canonical argument in its favour – Michael Walzer's, in Just and Unjust Wars. Some now deny that non-combatant immunity has principled foundations, arguing instead that it is entirely explained by a different principle…Read more
-
2119Skepticism about Jus Post BellumIn Larry May & Andrew Forcehimes (eds.), Morality, Jus Post Bellum, and International Law, Cambridge University Press. pp. 204-222. 2012.The burgeoning literature on jus post bellum has repeatedly reaffirmed three positions that strike me as deeply implausible: that in the aftermath of wars, compensation should be a priority; that we should likewise prioritize punishing political leaders and war criminals even in the absence of legitimate multilateral institutions; and that when states justifiably launch armed humanitarian interventions, they become responsible for reconstructing the states into which they have intervened – the s…Read more
University of Oxford
DPhil, 2009
Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Applied Ethics |
Areas of Interest
1 more
Normative Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Probability |
Epistemology |
Decision Theory |