•  1538
    From self-defense to violent protest
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26 (7): 1094-1118. 2023.
    It is an orthodoxy of modern political thought that violence is morally incompatible with politics, with the important exception of the permissible violence carried out by the state. The “commonsense argument” for permissible political violence denies this by extending the principles of defensive ethics to the context of state-subject interaction. This article has two aims: First, I critically investigate the commonsense argument and its limits. I argue that the scope of permissions it licenses …Read more
  •  1304
    Do We Have Reasons to Obey the Law?
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 17 (2): 159-197. 2020.
    Instead of the question, ‘do we have an obligation to obey the law?,’ we should first ask the more modest question, ‘do we have reasons to obey the law?’ This paper offers a new account of the notion of the content-independence of legal reasons in terms of the grounding relation. That account is then used to mount a defense of the claim that we do indeed have content-independent moral reasons to obey the law (because it is the law), and that these reasons, very plausibly, often amount to an obli…Read more
  •  96
    Futile Resistance as Protest
    Mind 132 (527): 631-658. 2023.
    Acts of futile resistance—harms against an aggressor which could not reasonably hope to avert the threat the aggressor poses—give rise to a puzzle: on the one hand, many such acts are intuitively permissible, yet on the other, these acts fail to meet the justificatory standards of defensive action. The most widely accepted solution to this puzzle is that victims in such cases permissibly defend against a secondary threat to their honour, dignity, or moral standing. I argue that this solution fai…Read more
  •  56
    The small improvement argument, epistemicism and incomparability
    Economics and Philosophy 34 (2): 199-219. 2018.
    :The Small Improvement Argument is the leading argument for value incomparability. All vagueness-based accounts of the SIA have hitherto assumed the truth of supervaluationism, but supervaluationism has some well-known problems. This paper explores the implications of epistemicism, a leading rival theory. We argue that if epistemicism is true, then options are comparable in small improvement cases. Moreover, even if SIAs do not exploit vagueness, if epistemicism is true, then options cannot be o…Read more