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186Ignorance, Humility and ViceJournal of Practical Ethics 4 (2): 25-30. 2016.LaFollette argues that the greatest vice is not cruelty, immorality, or selfishness. Rather, it is a failure on our part to ‘engage in frequent, honest and rigorous self-reflection’. It is that failure which, on his view, explains the lion’s share of the wrongdoings we commit towards one another. In this short reply, I raise (in a sympathetic spirit) some questions about the task of identifying the greatest vice, and draw out some of the implications of LaFollette’s account of moral ignorance.
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10. Neil MacCormick, Practical Reason in Law and Morality Neil MacCormick, Practical Reason in Law and Morality (pp. 192-196)In John Hawthorne (ed.), Ethics, Wiley Periodicals. 2004.
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Private Law and Practical Reason - Essays on John Gardner's Private Law Theory (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2023.
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17Reply to CriticsEthics 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
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19Political corruption in unjust regimesEuropean 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
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25Against Body Exceptionalism: A Reply to Eyal: Cécile FabreUtilitas 21 (2): 246-248. 2009.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
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Finishing the Reparative Job: Victims' Duties to WrongdoersIn Private Law and Practical Reason - Essays on John Gardner's Private Law Theory, Oxford University Press. 2023.
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198The Duty to Accept ApologiesJournal 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
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89The Morality of Gossip: A Kantian AccountEthics 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
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183Military Intervention in Interstate Armed ConflictsSocial Philosophy and Policy 40 (2): 431-454. 2023.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. 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 set …Read more
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15The Law vs. the Sword: Arthur Ripstein’s Account of the Morality and Law of WarCriminal Justice Ethics 40 (3): 256-268. 2021.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...
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35Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-IntelligenceOxford University Press. 2022.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.
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17Introduction to the Symposium on War By Agreement by Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel StatmanLaw and Philosophy 41 (6): 663-669. 2022.
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13War, Duties to Protect, and Military AbolitionismEthics 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
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117III—Doxastic Wrongs, Non-Spurious Generalizations and Particularized BeliefsProceedings 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
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723What are the obligations of pharmaceutical companies in a global health emergency?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
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13Justice and Doxastic HandicapsJournal 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
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46On the Ethics of Vaccine Nationalism: The Case for the Fair Priority for Residents FrameworkEthics and International Affairs 35 (4): 543-562. 2021.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
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20Economic Statecraft - Human Rights, Sanctions and ConditionalityHarvard University Press. 2018.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
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26Harming, Rescuing and the Necessity Constraint on Defensive ForceCriminal 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
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44Territorial sovereignty and humankind's common heritage☆Journal of Social Philosophy 52 (1): 17-23. 2021.Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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139Whose Body is It Anyway? Justice and the Integrity of the PersonOxford University Press. 2006.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
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18The Case for Foreign Electoral SubversionEthics and International Affairs 32 (3): 283-292. 2018.
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35Social Rights Under the Constitution: Government and the Decent LifeOxford University Press. 2000.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
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44Peace, Self‐Determination and Reckoning with the Past: A Reply to Butt, Lippert‐Rasmussen, Pasternak, Wellman and StemplowskaJournal of Applied Philosophy 36 (3): 391-404. 2019.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.
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77Good samaritanism : A matter of justiceIn Jonathan Seglow (ed.), The Ethics of Altruism, F. Cass Publishers. pp. 128-144. 2004.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
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Applied Ethics |