•  16
    Idealizations and ideal policing
    Philosophers' Imprint 22 (n/a). 2022.
    Political philosophy often focuses on “major institutions” that make up the “basic structure” of society. These include political, economic, and social institutions. In this paper I argue first that policing plays a substantial role in generating the kinds of inequalities and problems that are concerns of social or structural justice, and therefore that police agencies qualify as a major institution. When we abandon full compliance or similar idealizations, it is clear that policing is not a con…Read more
  •  7
    Introduction to Symposium on Policing and Political Philosophy
    with Stephen R. Galoob
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 17 (3): 545-551. 2023.
    This introduction summarizes a broad divide within philosophical scholarship on policing, then summarizes the papers in this symposium in light of that divide.
  •  13
    Policing Disobedient Demonstrations
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 17 (3): 653-668. 2023.
    This article sketches a case for the importance of allowing and protecting civil disobedience in a democratic society. There are weighty reasons for non-enforcement of certain laws under certain circumstances, which undermines the legalistic claim that justice requires police to faithfully (try to) enforce all laws at all times. Furthermore, questions about how the police should respond to disobedient demonstrations are not settled by popular theoretical treatments of civil disobedience. Police …Read more
  •  11
    Just Policing
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justif…Read more
  •  10
    E-Cigarettes, the FDA’s Strategic Orientation, and Lessons from the Opioid Crisis
    with Brandon del Pozo
    American Journal of Bioethics 22 (10): 23-25. 2022.
    While providing people with the same nicotine that forms the basis of their physical addiction, there is no available evidence that electronic nicotine delivery systems have carcinogenic eff...
  •  11
    The Limits of Instrumental Proceduralism
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (1). 2022.
    According to instrumental proceduralism, political power is justified when it is the output of a reliable procedure. In this paper, I examine how procedures are supposed to confer normative properties. Based on this assessment, I conclude that many proceduralists set the reliability bar too low. Next, I motivate two additional requirements for instrumental procedures. I introduce the notion of “predictable” procedural failure and argue that in order for a procedure to confer legitimacy or other …Read more
  •  6
    Broken Windows, Naloxone, and Experiments in Policing
    Social Theory and Practice 48 (2): 309-330. 2022.
    The practice of equipping police officers with naloxone has generated controversy within the profession. I adjudicate the disagreement in this article. I diagnose the dispute as rooted in a philosophical account of professional, role-based obligations. Parties to the debate appear to agree that what the police are permitted to do is determined in part by the essential goal of the police profession. Instead, I argue that we should make room for “experiments in working.” Finally, I argue that nalo…Read more
  •  72
    Boundary Policing
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 49 (1): 26-50. 2020.
    The structure of police agencies, especially how the boundaries of their authority are drawn, is a crucial element of their legitimacy. Poorly drawn boundaries encourage unjustified police power and illegitimate police agencies. Claiming that realized political entities in developed democracies are illegitimate is fraught, in part because the difference between legitimate and illegitimate political power can be subtle in practice. To overcome this difficulty, I propose thinking in terms of “legi…Read more
  •  34
    Biological Ties and Biological Accounts of Moral Status
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 44 (3): 355-377. 2019.
    Speciesist or biological accounts of moral status can be defended by showing that all members of Homo sapiens have a moral status conferring property. In this article, I argue that the most promising defense locates the moral status conferring property in the relational property of being biologically tied to other humans. This requires that biological ties ground moral obligations. I consider and reject the best defenses of that premise. Thus, we are left with compelling evidence that biological…Read more
  •  59
    On Enforcing Unjust Laws in a Just Society
    Philosophical Quarterly 68 (273): 758-778. 2018.
    Legitimate political institutions sometimes produce clearly unjust laws. It is widely recognized, especially in the context of war, that agents of the state may not enforce political decisions that are very seriously unjust or are the decisions of illegitimate governments. But may agents of legitimate states enforce unjust, but not massively unjust, laws? In this paper, I respond to three defences of the view that it is permissible to enforce these unjust laws. Analogues of the Walzerian argumen…Read more
  •  36
    Killing in Self-Defence and the Case for Biocentric Individualism
    Environmental Values 27 (2): 119-136. 2018.
    The primary method for defending biocentric individualism—a prominent theory of the moral value of organisms—is to appeal to the fact that certain things are good for or bad for living creatures, even if they are not sentient. This defense is typically and frequently met with the objection that we can determine what is good for some living creature without thereby having any moral reason or obligation to promote or avoid undermining it. In this paper I show how a theory of the morality of defe…Read more
  •  115
    The Special Moral Obligations of Law Enforcement
    Journal of Political Philosophy 25 (2): 218-237. 2017.
    Recent controversial cases of killings by police have generated competing Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. Blue Lives Matter proponents claim that the focus on and protests in light of police killings of unarmed black persons is unwarranted. Part of this dispute turns on the moral evaluation of the killing of citizens by law enforcement. To address the dispute, I develop an account of the special moral obligations of law enforcement and show how it can be applied. I argue that…Read more
  •  617
    We report the results of four empirical studies designed to investigate the extent to which an epistemic closure principle for knowledge is reflected in folk epistemology. Previous work by Turri (2015a) suggested that our shared epistemic practices may only include a source-relative closure principle—one that applies to perceptual beliefs but not to inferential beliefs. We argue that the results of our studies provide reason for thinking that individuals are making a performance error when their…Read more