•  9
  •  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
  •  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
  •  16
    The ethics of hacking. Ross W. Bellaby
    Ethics and Information Technology 25 (3): 1-4. 2023.
  •  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
  • Finishing the Reparative Job: Victims' Duties to Wrongdoers
    In Private Law and Practical Reason - Essays on John Gardner's Private Law Theory, Oxford University Press. 2023.
  •  132
    The Duty to Accept Apologies
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 1-24. forthcoming.
    The literature on reparative justice focuses for the most part on the grounds and limits of wrongdoers' duties to their victims. An interesting but relatively neglected question is that of what - if anything - victims owe to wrongdoers. In this paper, I argue that victims are under a duty to accept wrongdoers' apologies. To accept an apology is to form the belief that the wrongdoer's apologetic utterance or gesture has the requisite verdictive, commissive and expressive dimensions; to communicat…Read more
  •  66
    The Morality of Gossip: A Kantian Account
    Ethics 134 (1): 32-56. 2023.
    Gossip is pervasive and complex. It lubricates and wrecks social relationships. Many people openly confess to loving “a good gossip” yet acknowledge that gossiping, while often gratifying, is sometimes morally problematic. Surprisingly, gossip has not received much attention in moral philosophy. In this article, I argue that, notwithstanding its valuable relational and social functions, it is wrongful, at least in some of its forms, when and to the extent that it amounts to a particular kind of …Read more
  •  111
    Military Intervention in Interstate Armed Conflicts
    Social Philosophy and Policy. forthcoming.
    Suppose that state A attacks state D without warrant. The ensuing military conflict threatens international peace and security. State D (I assume) has a justification for defending itself by means of military force. But do third parties have a justification for intervening in that conflict by such means? To international public lawyers, the well-rehearsed and obvious answer is ‘yes’: threats to international peace and security provide one of two exceptions to the legal and moral prohibition (as …Read more
  •  4
    Reviews: Reviews (review)
    Philosophy 84 (1): 158-163. 2009.
  •  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...
  •  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.
  •  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
  •  97
    III—Doxastic Wrongs, Non-Spurious Generalizations and Particularized Beliefs
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 122 (1): 47-69. 2022.
    According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes based on race and gender and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does not turn on the truth-value or valence of bel…Read more
  •  524
    What are the obligations of pharmaceutical companies in a global health emergency?
    with Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Allen Buchanan, Shuk Ying Chan, Cécile Fabre, Daniel Halliday, Joseph Heath, Lisa Herzog, R. J. Leland, Matthew S. McCoy, Ole F. Norheim, Carla Saenz, G. Owen Schaefer, Kok-Chor Tan, Christopher Heath Wellman, Jonathan Wolff, and Govind Persad
    Lancet 398 (10304): 1015. 2021.
    All parties involved in researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing COVID-19 vaccines need guidance on their ethical obligations. We focus on pharmaceutical companies' obligations because their capacities to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute vaccines make them uniquely placed for stemming the pandemic. We argue that an ethical approach to COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution should satisfy four uncontroversial principles: optimising vaccine production, including…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
  •  36
    COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be scarce for years to come. Many countries, from India to the U.K., have demonstrated vaccine nationalism. What are the ethical limits to this vaccine nationalism? Neither extreme nationalism nor extreme cosmopolitanism is ethically justifiable. Instead, we propose the fair priority for residents framework, in which governments can retain COVID-19 vaccine doses for their residents only to the extent that they are needed to maintain a noncrisis level of mortality …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
  •  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
  •  13
    Mandatory Rescue Killings
    Journal of Political Philosophy 15 (4): 363-384. 2007.
  •  33
    Territorial sovereignty and humankind's common heritage☆
    Journal of Social Philosophy 52 (1): 17-23. 2021.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  114
    Do we have the right to deny others access to our body? What if this would harm those who need personal services or body parts from us? Ccile Fabre examines the impact that arguments for distributive justice have on the rights we have over ourselves, and on such contentious issues as organ sales, prostitution, and surrogate motherhood
  •  14
    The Case for Foreign Electoral Subversion
    Ethics and International Affairs 32 (3): 283-292. 2018.
  •  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
  •  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.
  •  120
    In his recent Rescuing Justice and Equality, G. A. Cohen mounts a sustained critique of coerced labour, against the background of a radical egalitarian conception of distributive justice. In this article, I argue that Cohenian egalitarians are committed to holding the talented under a moral duty to choose socially useful work for the sake of the less fortunate. As I also show, Cohen's arguments against coerced labour fail, particularly in the light of his commitment to coercive taxation. In the …Read more
  •  67
    Good samaritanism : A matter of justice
    In Jonathan Seglow (ed.), Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, F. Cass Publishers. pp. 128-144. 2002.
    Liberal theorists of justice hardly ever study duties of Good Samaritanism. This is not to say that they regard a failure to be a Good Samaritan as morally acceptable: indeed, most of them think that it is morally wrong. But they tend not to think that it is morally wrong on the grounds that it constitutes a violation of a duty of justice. Rather, they condemn it as a failure to perform a duty of charity, or as a failure to be appropriately altruistic. By contrast, they condemn as a violation of…Read more
  •  1738
    In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, s…Read more
  •  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