•  33
    Nigel Biggar’s Just War: Reflections on jus ad bellum
    Studies in Christian Ethics 28 (3): 292-297. 2015.
    This paper raises some questions about Biggar’s accounts of the just cause and proportionality criteria for a just war. With respect to just cause, it argues that Biggar is committed to a broader range of justifications for war than one might think. Regarding proportionality, it claims that his account thereof invites reflection on the morality of conscription, and, more important still, given the book’s main aim—to refute Christian pacifism—in fact should lead him to embrace pacifism
  •  33
    In this article, I offer responses to five commentaries on my recently published book, Cosmopolitan Peace. Those articles address my conception of individual and collective agency, my account of self-determination (and its implication for the problem of annexation during and after the war), and my accounts of, respectively, reparations and remembrance after war. I revise or provide further defences of those accounts in the light of my commentators’ probing remarks.
  •  33
    War Exit
    Ethics 125 (3): 631-652. 2015.
    This article argues that we must sever the ethics of war termination from the ethics of war initiation: a belligerent who embarks on a just war at time t1 might be under a duty to sue for peace at t2 before it has achieved its just war aims; conversely, a belligerent who embarks on an unjust war at t1 might acquire a justification for continuing at t2. In the course of making that argument, the article evaluates the various ways in which belligerents end their wars
  •  29
    The book theoretically examines the recent and topical debates over democracy and social rights, arguing that there are four fundamental rights that should be constitutionalized; minimum income; housing; healthcare; and education. The theoretical discussion is explored within an analysis of important legal cases
  •  27
    The Morality of Treason
    Law and Philosophy 39 (4): 427-461. 2020.
    Treason is one of the most serious legal offences that there are, in most if not all jurisdictions. Laws against treason are rooted in deep-seated moral revulsion about acts which, in the political realm, are paradigmatic examples of breaches of loyalty. Yet, it is not altogether clear what treason consists in: someone’s traitor is often another’s loyalist. In this paper, my aim is twofold: to offer a plausible conceptual account of treason, and to partly rehabilitate traitors. I focus on inform…Read more
  •  24
    Caractérisation des échanges entre patients et médecins : approche outillée d'un corpus de consultations médicales
    with Ludovic Tanguy, Lydia-Mai Ho-Dac, and Josette Rebeyrolle
    Corpus 10 137-154. 2011.
    Nous présentons une étude fondée sur un corpus de transcriptions de consultations médicales, dans le cadre d’un projet interdisciplinaire qui explore la question des inégalités sociales de santé. L’objet de cet article est de montrer comment, en tant que linguistes familiers du traitement outillé des corpus, nous avons choisi d’aborder ce matériau qui fait l’objet de questionnements disciplinaires complémentaires, et quels éléments de caractérisation spécifiques nous sommes en mesure d’apporter …Read more
  •  21
    Book Review: An Introduction to Rights (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (1): 108-109. 2006.
  •  20
    Ethics of Immigration: The Issue of Convicted Criminals
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (4): 428-434. 2016.
    In this paper, I explore and probe Joseph Carens’ remarks, in his recent book The Ethics of Immigration, on the immigration status of foreign convicted criminals who have served their sentence, and who wish either to immigrate into our country or who are already here. Carens rejects deportation when it is not called for by considerations of national security, and agrees that considerations of public order can justify barring convicted foreign criminals from entering the country. I broadly agree …Read more
  •  20
    It is hard to do justice, in a short reply, to Eyal's excellent review. Accordingly, I will focus on what I take to be its central claim – namely that I fail to give proper consideration to the extent to which the forced extraction of body parts undermines individuals' opportunities for self-respect. According to Eyal, ‘body exceptionalism’ can be defended on the following grounds: ‘People usually see trespass into a person and into objects they associate with a person – especially into a person…Read more
  •  19
    In Defense of Mercenarism
    British Journal of Political Science 40 (2010): 539-559. 2010.
    The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been characterized by the deployment of large private military forces, under contract with the US administration. The use of so-called private military corporations and, more generally, of mercenaries, has long attracted criticisms. This article argues that under certain conditions, there is nothing inherently objectionable about mercenarism. It begins by exposing a weakness in the most obvious justification for mercenarism, to wit, the justification …Read more
  •  19
    Harming, Rescuing and the Necessity Constraint on Defensive Force
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (3): 525-538. 2022.
    In _The Morality of Defensive Force_, Quong defends a powerful account of the grounds and conditions under which an agent may justifiably inflict serious harm on another person. In this paper, I examine Quong's account of the necessity constraint on permissible harming—the RESCUE account. I argue that RESCUE does not succeed. Section 2 describes RESCUE. Section 3 raises some worries about Quong's conceptual construal of the right to be rescued and its attendant duties. Section 4 argues that RESC…Read more
  •  19
    Cécile Fabre draws back the curtain on the ethics of espionage and counterintelligence. In a book rich with historical examples she argues that spying is only justified to protect against ongoing violations of fundamental rights. Blackmail, bribery, mass surveillance, cyberespionage, treason, and other nefarious activities are considered.
  •  16
    The ethics of hacking. Ross W. Bellaby
    Ethics and Information Technology 25 (3): 1-4. 2023.
  •  15
    Good samaritanism: A matter of justice
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (4): 128-144. 2002.
  •  14
    Cosmopolitan Peace
    Oxford University Press UK. 2016.
    This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerents' conduct in the aftermath of war. Throughout, it relies on the fundamental principle that all human beings, wherever they reside, have rights to the freedoms and resources which they need to lead a flourishing life, and that national and political borders are largely irrelevant to the conferral of those rights. With that principle in hand, the book provides a normative defence of restitutive and re…Read more
  •  14
    At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion has been a prominent tool of foreign policy. In the modern era, sovereign states and multilateral institutions have imposed economic sanctions on dictatorial regimes or would-be nuclear powers as an alternative to waging war. They have conditioned offers of aid, loans, and debt relief on recipients’ willingness to implement market and governance reforms. Such methods interfere in freedom of trade and…Read more
  •  14
    The Case for Foreign Electoral Subversion
    Ethics and International Affairs 32 (3): 283-292. 2018.
  •  13
    Mandatory Rescue Killings
    Journal of Political Philosophy 15 (4): 363-384. 2007.
  •  13
    Political corruption in unjust regimes
    European Journal of Political Theory. forthcoming.
    A theory of political corruption must give a plausible descriptive account of what counts as politically corrupt conduct, and a plausible normative account of the reasons why (if any) such conduct is wrongful, and distinctively so. On Ceva and Ferretti's sophisticated descriptive and normative account of corruption if and only if the act is carried out by a public official acting in her capacity as officeholder, and she knowingly acts to ends which are not congruent with the terms of her mandate…Read more
  •  11
    Justice, Fairness, and World Ownership
    Law and Philosophy 21 (3): 249-273. 2002.
    It is a central tenet of most contemporarytheories of justice that the badly-off have aright to some of the resources of the well-off.In this paper, I take as my starting point twoprinciples of justice, to wit, the principle ofsufficiency, whereby individuals have a rightto the material resources they need in order tolead a decent life, and the principle ofautonomy, whereby once everybody has such alife, individuals should be allowed to pursuetheir conception of the good, and to enjoy thefruits …Read more
  •  10
    Reply to Critics
    Ethics and International Affairs 37 (2): 193-205. 2023.
    A normative defense of espionage and counterintelligence activities in the service of foreign policy goals must show at least two things. First, it must show which foreign policy goals, if any, provide a justification for such activities. Second, it must provide an account of the means that intelligence agencies are morally permitted, indeed morally obliged, to use during those activities. I first discuss Ross Bellaby's probing critique of my defense of economic espionage. I then turn to the oth…Read more
  •  9
  •  8
    Suppose that state A wages war against state D. We want to know at least three things. First, does state A have a moral and legal justification for going to war? Second, what may and must those sta...
  •  8
    War, Duties to Protect, and Military Abolitionism
    Ethics and International Affairs 35 (3): 395-406. 2021.
    Just war theorists who argue that war is morally justified under certain circumstances infer implicitly that establishing the military institutions needed to wage war is also morally justified. In this paper, I mount a case in favor of a standing military establishment: to the extent that going to war is a way to discharge duties to protect fellow citizens and distant strangers from grievous harms, we have a duty to set up the institutions that enable us to discharge that duty. I then respond to…Read more
  •  7
    Justice and Doxastic Handicaps
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (5): 753-759. 2021.
    ABSTRACT It is tempting to suppose that the reason why the world remains profoundly unjust is that not enough of us hold the correct beliefs about the demands of justice and/or are motivated to bring it about. As Allen Buchanan shows, however, this is to miss a crucially important part of the picture: agents' mistaken beliefs about what it takes to achieve justice can seriously hamper prospects for such achievements. In this article, I expand on Buchanan's taxonomy of mistaken beliefs about what…Read more
  •  4
    Reviews: Reviews (review)
    Philosophy 84 (1): 158-163. 2009.