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189Marx's political universalismTopoi 15 (2): 235-245. 1996.My main aim in this paper is to arrive at a defensible form of Marxian or socialist political universalism through a critical examination of Marx's own political universalism. In the next section, I will outline several moral errors that Walzer ascribes to political universalism, including Marx's, and show that Walzer largely misdirects his criticisms because what primarily accounts for Marx committing the errors is his Hegelian metaphysical conception of history, not his political universalism …Read more
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100Drone Warfare and Just War TheoryIn Marjorie Cohn (ed.), Drones and Targeted Killing, Olive Branch Press, Interlink Books. pp. 169-194. 2015.This book chapter addresses two questions. First, can targeted killing by drones in non-battlefield zones be justified on basis of just war theory? Second, will the proliferation and expansion of combat drones in warfare, including the introduction of autonomous drones, be an obstacle to initiating or executing wars in a just manner in the future? The first question is answered by applying traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles to the American targeted killing campaign in Pakistan…Read more
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102Is Global Poverty a Moral Problem for Citizens of Affluent Societies?The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 1 229-234. 2007.The gap between the affluent and the global poor has increased during the past few decades, whether it is measured in terms of private consumption, income, or wealth. One would expect that severe poverty in a world of abundance would constitute a moral challenge to the affluent, but in fact it hardly seems a serious ethical concern. Affluent citizens seem so little morally concerned with global poverty. However, the most promising approach seems to be to explore and divulge factually and concept…Read more
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10Rethinking the Just War Tradition (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2007.The just war tradition is an evolving body of tenets for determining when resorting to war is just and how war may be justly executed. Rethinking the Just War Tradition provides a timely exploration in light of new security threats that have emerged since the end of the Cold War, including ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, threats of terror attacks, and genocidal conflicts within states. The contributors are philosophers, political scientists, a U.S. Army officer, and a senior analyst at the…Read more
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64On the Violence of Systemic ViolenceRadical Philosophy Review 15 (1): 33-51. 2012.This paper questions the extension of the common notion of violence, i.e., “subjective violence,” involving the intentional use of force to inflict injury or damage, towards social injustice as “systemic violence.” Systemic violence is altogether unlike subjective violence and the work of Slavoj Žižek illustrates that conceptual obfuscation in this regard may lead to an overly broad and facile justification of revolutionary violence as counter-violence to systemic violence, appealing to the ethi…Read more
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31Beyond the liberal peace project: Toward peace with justiceJournal of Social Philosophy 32 (3). 2001.Many contemporary liberals adhere to the "liberal peace project" -- that is, the idea that world peace can be realized through the spread of political liberalism, or capitalist democracy. The LPP is based on projecting toward the future the well-documented fact that secure modern democracies have never fought wars with one another. A spirit of optimism prevails among LPP proponents, bolstered by the recent uprise in democracies, and they argue that their cause can be advanced by a liberal foreig…Read more
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102Arguments against Drone Warfare with a Focus on the Immorality of Remote Control Killing and "Deadly Surveillance"Radical Philosophy Review 19 (2): 331-358. 2016.Drone warfare, particularly in the form of targeted killing, has serious legal, moral, and political costs so that a case can be made for an international treaty prohibiting this type of warfare. However, the case would be stronger if it could be shown that killing by drones is inherently immoral. From this angle I explore the moral significance of two features of this technology of killing: the killing is done by remote control with the operators geographically far away from the target zone and…Read more
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13Kantian Ethics and SocialismHackett Publishing Company. 1988.This study argues for three main theses: (1) Immanuel Kant’s ethics is a social ethics; (2) the basic premises of his social ethics point to a socialist ethics; and (3) this socialist ethics constitutes a suitable platform for criticizing and improving Karl Marx’s view of morality. Some crucial aspects of Kant’s social ethics are that we must promote the “realm of ends” as a moral society of co-legislators who assist each other in the pursuit of their individual ends, which requires in turn that…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
War and Violence |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
War and Violence |