-
468A Review of “Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships” (review)American Journal of Bioethics 21 (1). 2021.Brian Earp’s and Julian Savulescu’s provocatively titled “Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships” is a philosophically rigorous, scientifically informed, and yet wholly accessible study o...
-
434Autonomy and the Moral Symmetry Principle: Reply to Frowe and TooleyRes Publica 24 (4): 531-541. 2018.Helen Frowe has recently objected to Michael Tooley’s famous Moral Symmetry Principle, which is meant to show that in themselves killing and letting die are morally equivalent. I argue that her objection is not compelling but a more compelling objection is available. Specifically, Tooley’s rebuttal of a proposed counter-example to his Moral Symmetry Principle has two problematic implications. First, it undercuts the very principle itself. If we reject the proposed counter-example, then any insta…Read more
-
431The Evil of Refraining to Save: Liu on the Doctrine of Doing and AllowingDiametros 52 127-137. 2017.In a recent article, Xiaofei Liu seeks to defend, from the standpoint of consequentialism, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing: DDA. While there are various conceptions of DDA, Liu understands it as the view that it is more difficult to justify doing harm than allowing harm. Liu argues that a typical harm doing involves the production of one more evil and one less good than a typical harm allowing. Thus, prima facie, it takes a greater amount of good to justify doing a certain harm than it does t…Read more
-
425Fiona Woollard, Doing and Allowing Harm: Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015, ISBN: 978-0-19-968364-2, $70, HC (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 50 (3): 673-681. 2016.
-
317Defending A Rodinian Account of Self-DefenseReview Journal of Political Philosophy 9 7-47. 2012.There’s a widespread intuition that if the only way an innocent person can stop her villainous attacker from killing her is to kill him instead, then she is morally permitted to do so. But why is it that she is permitted to employ lethal force on an aggressor if that is what is required to save her life? My primary goal in this paper is to defend David Rodin's fairly recent and under-recognized account of self-defense that answers this question. There are roughly two kinds of non-consequentialis…Read more
-
442Tensions in a certain conception of just war as law enforcementRes Publica 14 (4): 303-311. 2008.Many just war theorists (call them traditionalists) claim that just as people have a right to personal self-defense, so nations have a right to national-defense against an aggressive military invasion. David Rodin claims that the traditionalist is unable to justify most defensive wars against aggression. For most aggressive states only commit conditional aggression in that they threaten to kill or maim the citizens of the nation they are invading only if those citizens resist the occupation. Mos…Read more
-
614Traditional just war theory maintains that the two types of rules that govern justice in times of war, jus ad bellum (justice of war) and jus in bello (justice in war), are logically independent of one another. Call this the independence thesis. According to this thesis, a war that satisfies the ad bellum rules does not guarantee that the in bello rules will be satisfied; and a war that violates the ad bellum rules does not guarantee that the in bello rules will be violated. A controversial impl…Read more
-
870Self-Defense, Proportionality, and Defensive War against Mitigated AggressionInternational Journal of Applied Philosophy 27 (2): 207-224. 2013.A nation commits mitigated aggression by threatening to kill the citizens of a victim nation if and only if they do not submit to being ruled in a non-egregiously oppressive way. Such aggression primarily threatens a nation’s common way of life . According to David Rodin, a war against mitigated aggression is automatically disproportionate, as the right of lethal self-defense only extends to protecting against being killed or enslaved. Two strategies have been adopted in response to Rodin. The f…Read more
-
California State University, HaywardDepartment of Philosophy & Religious StudiesLecturer (Part-time)
University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara
PhD, 2009
Sorenson, California, United States of America