•  17
    There is a difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to who is harmed, and worsening someone’s prospect. This difference is relevant to debates about the ethics of offsetting, since it means that showing that emitting-and-offsetting has the first feature is not a way of showing that it has the second feature. In an earlier paper, we illustrate this difference with an example of a lottery in which you shake the bag from which a ball will be drawn to determine the identit…Read more
  •  102
    Moral Judgment and the Duties of Innocent Beneficiaries of Injustice
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3): 671-686. 2017.
    The view that innocent beneficiaries of injustice bear special duties to victims of injustice has recently come under attack. Luck egalitarian theorists have argued that thought experiments focusing on the way innocent beneficiaries should distribute the benefits they’ve received provide evidence against this view. The apparent special duties of innocent beneficiaries, they hold, are wholly reducible to general duties to compensate people for bad brute luck. In this paper we provide empirical ev…Read more
  • Part 4. Economic justice. International trade
    In Darrel Moellendorf & Heather Widdows (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics, Routledge. 2014.
  •  323
    Do We Impose Undue Risk When We Emit and Offset? A Reply to Stefansson
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 25 (3): 242-248. 2022.
    ABSTRACT We have previously argued that there are forms of greenhouse gas offsetting for which, when one emits and offsets, one imposes no risk. Orri Stefansson objects that our argument fails to distinguish properly between the people who stand to be harmed by one’s emissions and the people who stand to be benefited by one’s offsetting. We reply by emphasizing the difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to the distribution of harm and acting in a way that worsen’s so…Read more
  •  111
    Supererogation and Optimisation
    with Seth Lazar
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1-16. forthcoming.
  •  58
    A Puzzle of Enforceability: Why do Moral Duties Differ in their Enforceability?
    with Emily McTernan
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (3): 1-25. 2021.
    When someone is poised to fail to fulfil a moral duty, we can respond in a variety of ways. We might remind them of their duty, or seek to persuade them through argument. Or we might intervene forcibly to ensure that they act in accordance with their duty. Some duties appear to be such that the duty-bearer can be liable to forcible interference when this is necessary to ensure that they comply with them. We’ll call duties that carry such liabilities enforcement-apt. Not all duties seem to be enf…Read more
  •  224
    A Critical Notice of Economic Statecraft: Human Rights, Sanctions, and Conditionality, by Cécile Fabre
  •  125
    Responsibility for structural injustice: A third thought
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 20 (4): 339-356. 2021.
    Some of the most invidious injustices are seemingly the results of impersonal workings of rigged social structures. Who bears responsibility for the injustices perpetrated through them? Iris Marion...
  •  820
    Benefiting from Wrongdoing and Sustaining Wrongful Harm
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 13 (5): 530-552. 2016.
    Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoin…Read more
  •  23
    Reconsidering a Human Right to Democracy
    Journal of Global Ethics 16 (3): 305-315. 2020.
    In this brief article, I will raise some challenges to each of Pablo Gilabert’s arguments for a human right to democracy (HRD). First, I will question whether the instrumental case for affirming a HRD is as strong as Gilabert and others have suggested. I will then call into question the argument from moral risk, arguing that, for any particular country, we should not operate with a strong presumption that they should pursue further democratization as a high-priority goal. Finally, I will conside…Read more
  •  2
    Immigration and Global Justice
    Global Justice : Theory Practice Rhetoric 4. 2014.
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  •  134
    Offsetting and Risk Imposition
    Ethics 132 (2): 352-381. 2022.
    Suppose you perform two actions. The first imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but the second reduces the risk of harm by a corresponding amount. By pairing the two actions together to form a set of actions that is risk-neutral, can you thereby make your overall course of conduct permissible? This question is theoretically interesting, because the answer is apparently: sometimes Yes, sometimes No. It is also practically important, because it bears on the moral status of …Read more
  •  683
    Justifying Lockdown
    with Seth Lazar
    Ethics and International Affairs 2020. 2020.
    Our aim in this brief essay is not to defend a particular policy or attitude toward lockdown measures in the United States or elsewhere, but to consider the scope and limits of different types of arguments that can be offered for them. Understanding the complexity of these issues will, we hope, go some way to helping us understand each other and our attitudes toward state responses to the pandemic.
  •  9
    Moral Uncertainty and the Criminal Law
    In Larry Alexander & Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, Springer Verlag. pp. 445-467. 2019.
    In this chapter we introduce the nascent literature on Moral Uncertainty Theory and explore its application to the criminal law. Moral Uncertainty Theory seeks to address the question of what we ought to do when we are uncertain about what to do because we are torn between rival moral theories. For instance, we may have some credence in one theory that tells us to do A but also in another that tells us to do B. We examine how we might decide whether or not to criminalize some conduct when we are…Read more
  •  49
    Recently, Gerhard Øverland and Alec Walen have developed novel and interesting theories of nonconsequentialism. Unlike other nonconsequentialist theories such as the Doctrine of Double Effect, each of their theories denies that an agent’s mental states are relevant for determining how stringent their moral reasons are against harming others. Instead, Øverland and Walen seek to distinguish morally between instances of harming in terms of the circumstances of the people who will be harmed, rather …Read more
  • Book Review (review)
    Ethics and International Affairs 16 (1). 2002.
  •  496
    On Satisfying Duties to Assist
    In Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues, Oxford University Press. 2019.
    In this paper, we take up the question of whether there comes a point at which one is no longer morally obliged to do further good, even at very low cost to oneself. More specifically, they ask: under precisely what conditions is it plausible to say that that “point” has been reached? A crude account might focus only on, say, the amount of good the agent has already done, but a moment’s reflection shows that this is indeed too crude. We develop and defend a nuanced account according to which con…Read more
  •  574
    Moral Uncertainty and the Criminal Law
    In Kimberly Ferzan & Larry Alexander (eds.), Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, Palgrave. 2019.
    In this paper we introduce the nascent literature on Moral Uncertainty Theory and explore its application to the criminal law. Moral Uncertainty Theory seeks to address the question of what we ought to do when we are uncertain about what to do because we are torn between rival moral theories. For instance, we may have some credence in one theory that tells us to do A but also in another that tells us to do B. We examine how we might decide whether or not to criminalize some conduct when we are u…Read more
  •  41
    Harm, responsibility, and enforceability
    Ethics and Global Politics 12 (1): 76-97. 2019.
    In this article I respond to the eight critical essays in this issue that evaluate the claims in my book with Gerhard Øverland, Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency.
  •  23
    Précis of Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency
    Ethics and Global Politics 12 (1): 5-7. 2019.
    In this article I respond to the eight critical essays in this issue that evaluate the claims in my book with Gerhard Øverland, Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency.
  •  149
  •  13
    Health and Global Justice
    with Mira Johri and Christian Barry
    Ethics and International Affairs 16 (2): 33-34. 2002.
    In a recent global survey commissioned for the Millennium Summit of the United Nations, people around the world consistently mentioned good health as what they most desired
  •  32
    The Bounds of Justice, Onora O'Neill , 226 pp., $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper (review)
    Ethics and International Affairs 15 (1): 197-200. 2001.
  •  20
    Boundaries and Allegiances, Samuel Scheffler , 221 pp., $29.95 cloth (review)
    Ethics and International Affairs 16 (1): 167-172. 2002.
  •  478
    International Political Theory Meets International Public Policy
    In Chris Brown & Robyn Eckersley (eds.), Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 480-494. 2018.
    How should International Political Theory (IPT) relate to public policy? Should theorists aspire for their work to be policy- relevant and, if so, in what sense? When can we legitimately criticize a theory for failing to be relevant to practice? To develop a response to these questions, I will consider two issues: (1) the extent to which international political theorists should be concerned that the norms they articulate are precise enough to entail clear practical advice under different empiric…Read more
  •  614
    Material Contribution, Responsibility, and Liability
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (6): 637-650. 2018.
    In her inventive and tightly argued book Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe defends the view that bystanders—those who do not pose threats to others—cannot be liable to being harmed in self-defence or in defence of others. On her account, harming bystanders always infringes their rights against being harmed, since they have not acted in any way to forfeit them. According to Frowe, harming bystanders can be justified only when it constitutes a lesser evil. In this brief essay, I make the case that so…Read more