•  14
    Heritage and War: Ethical Issues (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    The destruction of cultural heritage in war is currently attracting considerable attention. ISIS’s campaign of deliberate destruction across the Middle East was met with widespread horror and calls for some kind of international response. The United States attracted criticism for both its accidental damaging of Ancient Babylon in 2015 and its failure to protect the Mosul Museum from looters in 2003. In 2016, the International Criminal Court prosecuted its first case of the destruction of heritag…Read more
  •  40
    Assisting the Assisters: The Comparative Claims of Afghan Refugees
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 51 (3): 294-326. 2023.
    Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 3, Page 294-326, Summer 2023.
  •  7
    Collectivism and Reductivism in the Ethics of War
    In Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.
    This chapter explores the ongoing debate in the ethics of war between the traditional collectivist accounts of war, and revisionist reductive individualist accounts. I begin by reflecting on the ethics of war as a domain of applied philosophy. I then outline the origins of the Western just war tradition, and set out the central tenets of the collectivist view: that war is an irreducibly collective enterprise that must be morally judged on its own terms. I then explain how this traditional view h…Read more
  •  18
    Introduction: Symposium on Causation in War
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (3): 341-345. 2020.
    This article links to the Symposium on Causation in War by Carolina Sartorio, Helen Beebee and Alex Kaiserman, and Lars Christie.
  •  17
    Introduction: Symposium on Causation in War
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (3): 341-345. 2020.
    This article links to the Symposium on Causation in War by Carolina Sartorio, Helen Beebee and Alex Kaiserman, and Lars Christie.
  • War and legitimate targets
    In David Edmonds (ed.), Ethics and the Contemporary World, Routledge. 2019.
  •  40
    The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (edited book)
    with Seth Lazar
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest, among both philosophers, legal scholars, and military experts, on the ethics of war. Due in part due to post 9/11 events, this resurgence is also due to a growing theoretical sophistication among scholars in this area. Recently there has been very influential work published on the justificaton of killing in self-defense and war, and the topic of the ethics of war is now more important than ever as a discrete field. The 28 commissioned chapters in …Read more
  •  1
    The Just War Framework
    In Helen Frowe & Seth Lazar (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Ethics in War. pp. 41-58. 2017.
    Much work in the ethics of war is structured around the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. This distinction has two key roles. It distinguishes two evaluative objects—the war ‘as a whole’, and the conduct of combatants during the war—and identifies different moral principles as relevant to each. I argue that we should be sceptical of this framework. I suggest that a single set of principles determines the justness of actions that cause nonconsensual harm. If so, there are no dis…Read more
  • Legitimate Targets in War
    In David Edmonds (ed.), Ethics and the Contemporary World, Routledge. pp. 69-82. 2019.
    This chapter discusses outlines key debates about the range of legitimate targets in war
  • In the third issue of the J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy series, authors Helen Frowe and Derek Matravers pivot from the earlier tone of the series in discussing the appropriate response to attacks on cultural heritage with their paper, “Conflict and Cultural Heritage: A Moral Analysis of the Challenges of Heritage Protection.” While Frowe and Matravers acknowledge the importance of cultural heritage, they assert that we must more carefully consider the complex …Read more
  •  1
    Can Reductive Individualists Allow Defence Against Political Aggression?
    In Peter Vallentyne, Stephen Wall & David Sobel (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Vol. 1. pp. 173-193. 2015.
    Collectivist accounts of the ethics of war have traditionally dominated just war theory (Kutz 2005; Walzer 1977; Zohar 1993). These state-based accounts have also heavily influenced the parts of international law pertaining to armed conflict. But over the past ten years, reductive individualism has emerged as a powerful rival to this dominant account of the ethics of war. Reductivists believe that the morality of war is reducible to the morality of ordinary life. War is not a special moral spher…Read more
  •  43
    The Limited Use View of the Duty to Save
    In David Sobel, Steven Wall & Peter Vallentyne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 7, Oxford University Press. pp. 66-99. 2021.
    This paper defends the Limited Use View of our duties to save. The Limited Use View holds that the duty to save is a duty to treat oneself, and perhaps one’s resources, as a means for preventing harm to others. But the duty to treat oneself as a means for the sake of others is limited. One need not treat oneself as a means when doing so is either very costly, or conflicts with one’s more stringent duties to others. This provides an agent-neutral account of the duty to save. When the cost of savi…Read more
  •  31
    Risk Imposition and Liability to Defensive Harm
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (3): 511-524. 2022.
    According to Jonathan Quong’s _moral status account_ of liability to defensive harm, an agent is liable to defensive harm only when she mistakenly treats others as if their moral status is diminished (for example, as if they lack a right that they in fact possess). Quong argues that, by the lights of the moral status account, a conscientious driver (Driver) who faultlessly threatens to kill Pedestrian is not liable to defensive harm. Quong argues that Driver’s action is evidence-relative permiss…Read more
  •  76
    Self-Defense
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2021. 2021.
  •  30
    The moral irrelevance of moral coercion
    Philosophical Studies 178 (11): 3465-3482. 2021.
    An agent A morally coerces another agent, B, when A manipulates non-epistemological facts in order that B’s moral commitments enjoin B to do what A wants B to do, and B is motivated by these commitments. It is widely argued that forced choices arising from moral coercion are morally distinct from forced choices arising from moral duress or happenstance. On these accounts, the fact of being coerced bears on what an agent may do, the voluntariness of her actions, and/or her accountability for any …Read more
  •  28
    Intervening Agency and Civilian Liability
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (1): 181-191. 2022.
    Adam Hosein has recently proposed that a sufficient degree of intervening agency between a person’s contribution to an unjust lethal threat and the posing of that threat can exempt the contributor from liability to defensive killing. Hosein suggests that this will exempt most civilians from liability to lethal defence even if they contribute to unjust killings. I argue that intervening agency does not bear on a person’s responsibility for a threat, and does not exempt her from liability to defen…Read more
  •  13
    Several states, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, have recently engaged in the high-profile supporting of foreign rebel fighters, providing them with training, weapons, and financial resources. Justifications for providing this assistance usually invoke, at least in part, our obligations to prevent harm to the citizens of oppressive and violent regimes. Providing such assistance is often presented as a morally safe ‘middle ground’ between doing nothing and putting one’…Read more
  •  35
  •  1519
    The Duty to Remove Statues of Wrongdoers
    Journal of Practical Ethics 7 (3): 1-31. 2019.
    This paper argues that public statues of persons typically express a positive evaluative attitude towards the subject. It also argues that states have duties to repudiate their own historical wrongdoing, and to condemn other people’s serious wrongdoing. Both duties are incompatible with retaining public statues of people who perpetrated serious rights violations. Hence, a person’s being a serious rights violator is a sufficient condition for a state’s having a duty to remove a public statue of t…Read more
  •  43
    Bystanders, risks, and consent
    Bioethics 34 (9): 906-911. 2019.
    This paper considers the moral status of bystanders affected by medical research trials. Recent proposals advocate a very low threshold of permissible risk imposition upon bystanders that is insensitive to the prospective benefits of the trial, in part because we typically lack bystanders' consent. I argue that the correct threshold of permissible risk will be sensitive to the prospective gains of the trial. I further argue that one does not always need a person's consent to expose her to signif…Read more
  •  347
    Wrongful Observation
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 47 (1): 104-137. 2019.
    According to common-sense morality, agents can become morally connected to the wrongdoing of others, such that they incur special obligations to prevent or rectify the wrongs committed by the primary wrongdoer. We argue that, under certain conditions, voluntary and unjustified observation of another agent’s degrading wrongdoing, or of the ‘product’ of their wrongdoing, can render an agent morally liable to bear costs for the sake of the victim of the primary wrong. We develop our account with pa…Read more
  •  44
    Civilian Liability
    Ethics 129 (4): 625-650. 2019.
    Adil Ahmad Haque argues that civilians who contribute to unjust lethal threats in war, but who do not directly participate in the war, are not liable to defensive killing. His argument rests on two central claims: first, that the extent of a person’s liability to defensive harm in virtue of contributing to an unjust threat is limited to the cost that she is initially required to bear in order to avoid contributing, and, second, that civilians need not bear lethal costs in order to avoid indirec…Read more
  •  25
    This article responds to objections to the account of permissible harming developed in Defensive Killing, as raised by Christian Barry, Jeff McMahan, Kimberly Ferzan, Massimo Renzo and Adil Haque. Each paper deserves much more attention than I can give it here. I focus on Barry’s important observations regarding the liability to defensive harm of those who fail to rescue. In response to McMahan, I grant some of McMahan’s objections to my rejection of the moral equivalence of threats and bystande…Read more
  •  61
    This article explores how agreements to preferentially save can ground an exception to the duty to minimize harm when saving. A rescuer preferentially saves if she knowingly fails to minimize harm among prospective victims, even though minimizing harm would not have imposed greater costs on the rescuer herself. Allowing rescuers to act on agreements to preferentially save is justified by the reasons we have to respect the agreements that agents form as a means of pursuing their own ends.