•  211
    Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?
    Cambridge University Press. 2005.
    The central question in political philosophy is whether political states have the right to coerce their constituents and whether citizens have a moral duty to obey the commands of their state. In this 2005 book, Christopher Heath Wellman and A. John Simmons defend opposing answers to this question. Wellman bases his argument on samaritan obligations to perform easy rescues, arguing that each of us has a moral duty to obey the law as his or her fair share of the communal samaritan chore of rescui…Read more
  •  18
    Tadros on Non-Responsible Threats
    Mind 132 (528): 959-964. 2023.
    One of the many interesting features of Victor Tadros’s excellent book, To Do, To Die, To Reason Why, is his change of heart on the vexing question of whether p.
  •  146
    Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2005.
    Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics features pairs of newly commissioned essays by some of the leading theorists working in the field today. Brings together fresh debates on eleven of the most controversial issues in applied ethics Topics addressed include abortion, affirmative action, animals, capital punishment, cloning, euthanasia, immigration, pornography, privacy in civil society, values in nature, and world hunger. Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, and paves the way for f…Read more
  •  5
    Nationalism and Secession
    In R. G. Frey & Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics, Blackwell. 2005.
    This chapter contains sections titled: What is a Nation? Nations and Personal Identity Nations and Associative Obligations Nations and State‐breaking Conclusion.
  •  9
    Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (edited book, 2nd ed.)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2014.
  •  23
    The Space between Justice and Legitimacy
    Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (1): 3-23. 2021.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  45
    The Space between Justice and Legitimacy
    Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (1): 3-23. 2021.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  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, 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
  •  78
    The Space between Justice and Legitimacy
    Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (1): 3-23. 2021.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  32
    Do Legitimate States Have a Right to Do Wrong?
    Ethics and International Affairs 35 (4): 515-525. 2021.
    This essay critically assesses Anna Stilz's argument in Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration that legitimate states have a right to do wrong. I concede that individuals enjoy a claim against external interference when they commit suberogatory acts, but I deny that the right to do wrong extends to acts that would violate the rights of others. If this is correct, then one must do more than merely invoke an individual's right to do wrong if one hopes to vindicate a legitimate state'…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
  •  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
  •  23
    Clarifying Forfeiture Theory in Response to Dempsey and Lang
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 14 (2): 215-222. 2020.
    This paper clarifies and defends my account of the rights forfeiture theory of punishment in response to analyses by Michelle Madden Dempsey and Gerald Lang.
  •  59
    A liberal theory of international justice
    Oxford University Press. 2009.
    This book advances a novel theory of international justice that combines the orthodox liberal notion that the lives of individuals are what ultimately matter morally with the putatively antiliberal idea of an irreducibly collective right of self-governance. The individual and her rights are placed at center stage insofar as political states are judged legitimate if they adequately protect the human rights of their constituents and respect the rights of all others. Yet, the book argues that legit…Read more
  •  48
    Cosmopolitanism, Occupancy and Political Self‐Determination
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (3): 375-381. 2018.
    The brand of cosmopolitanism that Cécile Fabre develops in her excellent book, Cosmopolitan Peace, leaves room for qualifying groups to exercise political self‐determination. Important questions thus emerge regarding who is entitled to have a say in the group's self‐determination, questions that take on a heightened practical urgency in the wake of wars that cause massive migration. In this article, I call into question Fabre's contention that the descendants of unjust occupants necessarily acqu…Read more
  •  31
    Immigration restrictions in the real world
    Philosophical Studies 169 (1): 119-122. 2014.
  •  16
    Rights Forfeiture and Punishment
    Oxford University Press. 2016.
    In Rights Forfeiture and Punishment, Christopher Heath Wellman argues that those who seek to defend the moral permissibility of punishment should shift their focus from general justifying aims to moral side constraints. On Wellman's view, punishment is permissible just in case the wrongdoer has forfeited her right against punishment.
  •  10
    Liberalism, Communitarianism, and Group Rights
    Law and Philosophy 18 (1): 13-40. 1999.
  •  91
    The Deontological Defense of Democracy: An Argument From Group Rights
    with Andrew Altman
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (3): 279-293. 2008.
    Abstract: Democracy is regularly heralded as the only form of government that treats political subjects as free and equal citizens. On closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that democracy unavoidably restricts individual freedom, and it is not the only way to treat all citizens equally. In light of these observations, we argue that the non-instrumental reasons to support democratic governance stem, not from considerations of individual freedom or equality, but instead from the importa…Read more
  •  32
    Introduction
    Ethics 116 (1): 5-8. 2005.
  •  27
    Introduction
    Ethics 114 (4): 647-649. 2004.
  •  109
    Debate: Taking Human Rights Seriously
    Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (1): 119-130. 2012.
  •  100
    Associative Allegiances and Political Obligations
    Social Theory and Practice 23 (2): 181-204. 1997.
  •  1
    The Blackwell Companion to Applied Ethics (edited book)
    Blackwell. 2005.
  •  5
    Introduction: Symposium on Justice & Foreign Policy
    Law and Philosophy 35 (3): 249-250. 2016.
  •  182
    Gratitude as a virtue
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (3). 1999.
    In my view, gratitude is better understood as a virtue than as a source of duties. In addition to showing how virtue theory provides a better match for our moral phenomenology of gratitude, I argue that recent work in the area of the suberogatory, our considered judgments concerning the role of third parties, our reluctance to posit claim‐rights to gratitude, and the observations of preceding studies of the subject all lend support to my contention that the language of duties is ill‐suited to de…Read more
  •  50
    A Defense of Stiffer Penalties for Hate Crimes
    Hypatia 21 (2): 62-80. 2006.
    After defining a hate crime as an offense in which the criminal selects the victim at least in part because of an animus toward members of the group to which the victim belongs, this essay surveys the standard justifications for state punishment en route to defending the permissibility of imposing stiffer penalties for hate crimes. It also argues that many standard instances of rape and domestic battery are hate crimes and may be punished as such.