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16Is Explainable AI Responsible AI?AI and Society. forthcoming.When artificial intelligence (AI) is used to make high-stakes decisions, some worry that this will create a morally troubling responsibility gap—that is, a situation in which nobody is morally responsible for the actions and outcomes that result. Since the responsibility gap might be thought to result from individuals lacking knowledge of the future behavior of AI systems, it can be and has been suggested that deploying explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques will help us to avoid i…Read more
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21Collective Responsibility and Artificial IntelligencePhilosophy and Technology 37 (1): 1-18. 2024.The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make high-stakes decisions is sometimes thought to create a troubling responsibility gap – that is, a situation where nobody can be held morally responsible for the outcomes that are brought about. However, philosophers and practitioners have recently claimed that, even though no individual can be held morally responsible, groups of individuals might be. Consequently, they think, we have less to fear from the use of AI than might appear to be the case. …Read more
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64Justice by Algorithm: The Limits of AI in Criminal SentencingCriminal Justice Ethics 42 (3): 193-213. 2023.Criminal justice systems have traditionally relied heavily on human decision-making, but new technologies are increasingly supplementing the human role in this sector. This paper considers what general limits need to be placed on the use of algorithms in sentencing decisions. It argues that, even once we can build algorithms that equal human decision-making capacities, strict constraints need to be placed on how they are designed and developed. The act of condemnation is a valuable element of cr…Read more
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10Practices, Institutions, and Global Public Good RegimesRaisons Politiques 3 (51): 121-135. 2013.A practice-dependent conception of justice holds that principles of justice depend, in their content, on the nature of the practice that they are intended to regulate. Institutionalism, one variety of practice-dependency, claims that it is institutional form which determines principles of justice. Specifically, principles of justice should enable the effective pursuit of the point and purpose of the institution they regulate. One consequence of this view is that it cannot be a duty of justice to…Read more
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105The Responsibility to Protect from Terror: The Ethics of Foreign Counter-terrorist InterventionsGlobal Responsibility to Protect 14 (2): 155-177. 2022.The use of military force abroad is a significant part of some states’ counter-terrorist efforts. Can these operations be ethically justified? This paper considers whether the underlying principles that philosophers have put forward to justify humanitarian interventions (which may underlie the international norm of the responsibility to protect (R2P)) can also give support for foreign counter-terrorist interventions of this sort. While it finds that the limits to international action that are im…Read more
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12Asking the Fox to Guard the Chicken Coop: In Defense of Minimalism in the Ethics of War and PeaceJournal of International Political Theory 18 (1): 191-109. 2022.Dominant normative theories of armed conflict orientate themselves around the ultimate goal of peace. Yet the deployment of these theories in the international sphere appears to have failed in advancing toward this goal. In this paper, we argue that one major reason for this failure is these theories’ use of essentially contested concepts—that is, concepts whose internally complex character results in no principled way of adjudicating between rival interpretations of them. This renders the theor…Read more
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7Communication, Efficiency, and Fairness in the European UnionPublic Affairs Quarterly 30 (2): 129-147. 2016.Political integration in the European Union creates the need for a common means of communication among the various linguistic communities in Europe. One way of meeting this need is unilingualism: the use of a single language as a "lingua franca". While this option has been thought to be efficient, this does not mean that we should necessarily choose it. This paper argues that a unilinual Europe will inevitably be unfair despite recent attempts to show otherwise, since non-native speakers of the …Read more
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Distributive Justice and Global Public GoodsDissertation, Oxford University. 2015.Public goods are goods that are non-rival and non-excludable. One person enjoying the benefits of a public good will not reduce the value of the good for others. And nobody within a particular population can be excluded from enjoying those benefits. While we often think of the relevant population being co-citizens of a state - national defence is taken to be the archetypal public good - in recent years the importance of public goods that benefit individuals across different countries has increas…Read more
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8State responsibility and counterterrorismEthics and Global Politics 9 (1): 32542. 2016.It is widely thought that the international community, taken as a whole, is required to take action to prevent terrorism. Yet, what each state is required to do in this project is unclear and contested. This article examines a number of bases on which we might assign responsibilities to conduct counterterrorist operations to states. I argue that the ways in which other sorts of responsibilities have been assigned to states by political philosophers will face significant limitations when used to …Read more
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12Just War Theory and the Military Response to TerrorismSocial Theory and Practice 43 (4): 717-740. 2017.This paper considers whether just war theory needs to be modified to assess the use of military force against terrorist groups. It rejects two existing arguments for doing this (“the contractualist justification” and “the policing model”), and outlines and defends a third (“the consequentialist justification”). Just war theory, it is claimed, is partially designed to bring about certain desirable consequences, and when empirical circumstances change in ways that mean following its principles is …Read more
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16Privatising war: assessing the decision to hire private military contractorsCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21 (2): 148-168. 2018.There has been a huge growth in the size and number of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) in the last decade or so. In this context, the question of when, if ever, states should hire PMSCs to carry out military operations has gained particular urgency. In this paper, I defend the answer that states should do so whenever PMSCs will be the most effective agents available against a number of recent objections. All of these objections claim that considerations aside from the relative ef…Read more
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7Robust HarmsMoral Philosophy and Politics 5 (1): 69-85. 2018.Philip Pettit has argued that more robust harms are worse than less robust ones, other things equal, and thinks that appealing to this presumption can help us rationalise the appeal of a number of widely-held moral principles. In this paper, I challenge this view. I argue against the presumption and suggest that, even if it were correct, it could not give much support to the moral principles that Pettit discusses. I also claim, however, that Pettit has the resources at his disposal to explain th…Read more
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9Language as a Global Public GoodRes Publica 20 (4): 377-394. 2014.Language use is a public good. Those using a common language receive benefits that are non-excludable and non-rival. And as more people speak the same language, the greater these benefits are. Sometimes individuals make a conscious decision to learn a language other than their native language in order to receive these benefits, and thereby incur costs. This paper is an attempt to determine how we should share the costs among all beneficiaries. I argue against Van Parijs’s proposal for this, and …Read more
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16Political Obligations and Public GoodsRes Publica 27 (4): 559-575. 2021.The principle of fairness is a moral principle which states that individuals are under an obligation to contribute towards beneficial cooperative projects. It has been appealed to in arguing that citizens are obligated to pay for public goods that their government supplies. Yet the principle has faced a number of powerful objections, most notably those of Robert Nozick. In responding to some of these objections, proponents of the principle have placed a number of conditions on its application. H…Read more
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34Who Is Responsible for Killer Robots? Autonomous Weapons, Group Agency, and the Military‐Industrial ComplexJournal of Applied Philosophy 38 (2): 320-334. 2021.There has recently been increasing interest in the possibility and ethics of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), which would combine sophisticated AI with machinery capable of deadly force. One objection to LAWS is that their use will create a troubling responsibility gap, where no human agent can properly be held accountable for the outcomes that they create. While some authors have attempted to show that individual agents can, in fact, be responsible for the behaviour of LAWS in various …Read more
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15Data collection, counterterrorism and the right to privacyPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 16 (3): 326-346. 2017.Governments around the world collect huge amounts of personal data from their citizens for counterterrorist purposes. While mining this data has arguably increased the security of populations, the practices through which these data are currently collected in many countries have been criticised for violating individuals’ rights to privacy. Yet it is not clear what a permissible data collection regime would look like and thus also how we could reform existing regimes to make them morally acceptabl…Read more
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21Making Peace with the Devil: The Problem of Ending Just WarsJournal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (2): 121-137. 2023.In this paper, we draw attention to an unintended but severe side effect of just war thinking: the fact that it can impose barriers to making peace. Investigating historical material concerning a series of conflicts in China during the early twentieth century, we suggest that operating in a just war framework might change actors' identities and interests in a way that makes peacemaking an unavailable action. But since just war theory places significant normative constraints on how long wars can …Read more
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9The Ethics of CounterterrorismRoutledge. 2018.States across the globe spend billions of dollars fighting terrorism annually. As well as strategic questions about the way in which the money should be spent, we are also confronted with a host of moral issues here, many of which are poorly understood. The Ethics of Counterterrorism offers the first systematic normative theory for guiding, assessing, and criticising counterterrorist policy. Many commentators claim that state actors combating terrorism should set aside ordinary moral and legal f…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence |
War |