•  5926
    The Ethics of Government Whistleblowing
    Social Theory and Practice 41 (1): 77-105. 2015.
    What is wrong with government whistleblowing and when can it be justified? In my view, ‘government whistleblowing’, i.e., the unauthorized acquisition and disclosure of classified information about the state or government, is a form of ‘political vigilantism’, which involves transgressing the boundaries around state secrets, for the purpose of challenging the allocation or use of power. It may nonetheless be justified when it is suitably constrained and exposes some information that the public o…Read more
  •  3527
    Is hacktivism the new civil disobedience?
    Raisons Politiques 69 (1): 63-81. 2018.
    Is hactivism the new civil disobedience? I argue that most recent hacktivism isn't, and shouldn't be shoehorned into the category of civil disobedience. I sketch instead a broad matrix of electronic resistance, attentive to the many shapes and goals of hacktivism and I locate five clusters on it, briefly sketching possible dimensions of normative assessment for each: vigilantism, whistleblowing, guerrilla communication, electronic humanitarianism, and electronic civil disobedience.
  •  2043
    Three Conceptions of Practical Authority
    Jurisprudence 2 (1): 143-160. 2011.
    Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second- personal conception of practical authority.1 We believe that the best place to start understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relati…Read more
  •  908
  •  888
    False Convictions and True Conscience
    Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 35 (2): 403-425. 2015.
    Society typically shows conscientious objectors more deference than civil disobedients, on the grounds that they appear more conscientious and less strategically minded than the latter. Kimberley Brownlee challenges this standard picture in Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, where she claims that civil disobedience is more conscientious than conscientious objection, in virtue of its communicativeness. Brownlee conceives of conscientious conviction as necessarily communic…Read more
  •  480
    The Civic Duty to Report Crime and Corruption
    Les ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 9 (1): 50-64. 2014.
    Is the civic duty to report crime and corruption a genuine moral duty? After clarifying the nature of the duty, I consider a couple of negative answers to the question, and turn to an attractive and commonly held view, according to which this civic duty is a genuine moral duty. On this view, crime and corruption threaten political stability, and citizens have a moral duty to report crime and corruption to the government in order to help the government’s law enforcement efforts. The resulting dut…Read more
  •  309
    Civil Disobedience
    Philosophy Compass 11 (11): 681-691. 2016.
    Many historical and recent forms of protest usually referred to as civil disobedience do not fit the standard philosophical definition of “civil disobedience”. The moral and political importance of this point is explained in section 1, and two theoretical lessons are drawn: one, we should broaden the concept of civil disobedience, and two, we should start thinking about uncivil disobedience. Section 2 is devoted to the main objections against, and theorists' defenses of, civil disobedience.
  •  212
    The Right to Hunger Strike
    American Political Science Review. 2023.
    Hunger strikes are commonly repressed in prison and seen as disruptive, coercive, and violent. Hunger strikers and their advocates insist that incarcerated persons have a right to hunger strike, which protects them against repression and force-feeding. Physicians and medical ethicists generally ground this right in the right to refuse medical treatment; lawyers and legal scholars derive it from incarcerated persons’ free speech rights. Neither account adequately grounds the right to hunger strik…Read more
  •  203
    Disobedience, Civil and Otherwise
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (1): 195-211. 2017.
    While philosophers usually agree that there is room for civil disobedience in democratic societies, they disagree as to the proper justification and role of civil disobedience. The field has so far been divided into two camps—the liberal approach on the one hand, which associates the justification and role of civil disobedience with the good of justice, and the democratic approach on the other, which connects them with the value and good of democracy. William Smith’s Civil Disobedience and Delib…Read more
  •  177
    Theorizing the Politics of Protest: Contemporary Debates on Civil Disobedience
    with Çiğdem Çıdam, William E. Scheuerman, Erin R. Pineda, Robin Celikates, and Alexander Livingston
    Contemporary Political Theory 19 (3): 513-546. 2020.
  •  165
    What are our responsibilities in the face of injustice? How far should we go to fight it? Many would argue that as long as a state is nearly just, citizens have a moral duty to obey the law. Proponents of civil disobedience generally hold that, given this moral duty, a person needs a solid justification to break the law. But activists from Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi to the Movement for Black Lives have long recognized that there are times when, rather than having a duty to obey the …Read more
  •  146
    Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
    Res Publica 20 (3): 295-313. 2014.
    In this paper, I defend the existence of a moral duty to disobey the law and engage in civil disobedience on the basis of one of the grounds of political obligation—the Samaritan duty. Christopher H. Wellman has recently offered a ‘Samaritan account’ of state legitimacy and political obligation, according to which the state is justified in coercing each citizen in order to rescue all from the perilous circumstances of the state of nature; and each of us is bound to obey the law, as the state dem…Read more
  •  138
    Political Resistance: A Matter of Fairness
    Law and Philosophy 33 (4): 465-488. 2014.
    In this paper, I argue that the principle of fairness can license both a duty of fair play, which is used to ground a moral duty to obey the law in just or nearly just societies, and a duty of resistance to unfair and unjust social schemes. The first part of the paper analyzes fairness’ demands on participants in mutually beneficial schemes of coordination, and its implications in the face of injustice. Not only fairness does not require complying with unfair and unjust social schemes, but it al…Read more
  •  99
    Samaritanism and political legitimacy
    Analysis 74 (2): 254-262. 2014.
    On Christopher H. Wellman’s Samaritan account of political legitimacy, the state is justified in coercing its subjects because doing so is necessary to rescue them from the perils of the state of nature. Samaritanism – the principle that we are morally permitted to do what is necessary to rescue someone from serious peril if in doing so we do not impose unreasonable costs on others – only justifies a minimal state, in Wellman’s view. I argue contra Wellman that Samaritanism justifies an extensiv…Read more
  •  80
    Sexual Reorientation in Ideal and Non‐Ideal Theory
    with Sean Aas
    Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (4): 463-485. 2018.
  •  64
    Civil Disobedience, Punishment, and Injustice
    In Larry Alexander & Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, Springer Verlag. pp. 167-188. 2019.
    This chapter examines the tension between the justification and the punishment of civil disobedience, and theorists’ common solutions to it, by focusing on two central questions: first, should the state punish civil disobedience? Second, should the civil disobedient accept punishment? It presents the theoretical lay of the land on each of these questions, with particular attention to American jurisprudence on civil disobedience. The third part takes a step back to ask anew, how should we think a…Read more
  •  58
    The ethics of sexual reorientation: what should clinicians and researchers do?
    with Sean Aas
    Journal of Medical Ethics 42 (6): 340-347. 2016.
    Technological measures meant to change sexual orientation are, we have argued elsewhere, deeply alarming, even and indeed especially if they are safe and effective. Here we point out that this in part because they produce a distinctive kind of ‘clinical collective action problem’, a sort of dilemma for individual clinicians and researchers: a treatment which evidently relieves the suffering of particular patients, but in the process contributes to a practice that substantially worsens the condit…Read more
  •  19
    Three Reasons to Ban Advertising for Health Care Services
    American Journal of Bioethics 14 (3): 51-52. 2014.
    No abstract
  • Quelles sont nos responsabilités face à l’injustice ? Les philosophes considèrent généralement que les citoyens d’un État globalement juste doivent obéir à la loi, même lorsqu’elle est injuste, quitte à employer exceptionnellement la désobéissance civile pour protester. Les militants quant à eux, qu’ils luttent pour les droits civiques, contre les violences faites aux femmes ou pour le climat, jugent souvent que l’obligation première est résister à l’injustice.