•  5
    Military Recruitment is a Moral Minefield
    Lse British Politics and Policy Blog. 2024.
  •  303
    If states are permitted to create and maintain a military force, by what means are they permitted to do so? This paper argues that a theory of just recruitment should incorporate a concern for moral risk. Since the military is a morally risky profession for its members, recruitment policies should be evaluated in terms of how they distribute moral risk within a community. We show how common military recruitment practices exacerbate and concentrate moral risk exposure, using the UK as a case stud…Read more
  •  31
    Paternalism and Public Health: A Map of the Terrain
    Perspectives on Paternalism and Public Health. 2022.
  •  159
    Chater & Loewenstein argue that i-frame research has been coopted by private interests opposed to system-level reform, leading to ineffective interventions. They recommend that behavioural scientists refocus on system-level interventions. We suggest that the influence of private interests on research is problematic for wider normative and epistemic reasons. A system-level intervention to shield research from private influence is needed.
  •  206
    c.4,000 word critical discussion of Fabre's book. Provides an overview of the book plus comments on the themes of (i) loyalty and treason and (ii) the ethics of spying and sex.
  •  21
    What's the Point of Protest?
    Lse Philosophy Blog. 2023.
    Some thoughts on the value(s) of political protest, to mark the 20th anniversary of the 2003 anti-war demonstrations
  •  19
    An Interview with Jonathan Parry
    with Kate Farmer and Jack Grimes
    Washington University Review of Philosophy 2 136-149. 2022.
  •  182
    The Scope of the Means Principle
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (5-6): 439-460. 2023.
    This paper focuses on Quong’s account of the scope of the means principle (the range of actions over which the special constraint on using a person applies). One the key ideas underpinning Quong’s approach is that the means principle is downstream from an independent and morally prior account of our rights over the world and against one another. I raise three challenges to this ‘rights first’ approach. First, I consider Quong’s treatment of harmful omissions and argue that Quong’s view generates…Read more
  •  689
    War and Moral Consistency
    In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (5th Edition), Wiley-blackwell. pp. 692-703. 2020.
    Provides an opinionated overview of some recent debates within the ethics of war.
  •  33
  •  298
    Legitimate Authority and the Ethics of War: A Map of the Terrain
    Ethics and International Affairs 2 (31): 169-189. 2017.
    Despite a recent explosion of interest in the ethics of armed conflict, the traditional just war criterion that war be waged by a “legitimate authority” has received less attention than other components of the theory. Moreover, of those theorists who have addressed the criterion, many are deeply skeptical about its moral significance. This article aims to add some clarity and precision to the authority criterion and to debates surrounding it, and to suggest that this skepticism may be too quick.…Read more
  •  76
    Self-Defense
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2021. 2021.
  •  139
    Sparing Civilians (review)
    Philosophical Review 129 (1): 135-139. 2020.
  •  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
  •  357
    Law and Morality at War offers a broadly instrumentalist defense of the authority of the laws of war: these laws serve combatants by helping them come closer to doing what they have independent moral reason to do. We argue that this form of justification sets too low a bar. An authority’s directives are not binding, on instrumental grounds, if the subject could, within certain limits, adopt an alternative, and superior, means of conforming to morality’s demands. It emerges that Haque’s argument …Read more
  •  252
    Authority and Harm
    Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 3 252-278. 2017.
    This paper explores the connections between two central topics in moral and political philosophy: the moral legitimacy of authority and the ethics of causing harm. Each of these has been extensively discussed in isolation, but relatively little work has considered the implications of certain views about authority for theories of permissible harming, and vice versa. As I aim to show, reflection on the relationship between these two topics reveals that certain common views about, respectively, the…Read more
  •  440
    Civil War and Revolution
    In Seth Lazar & Helen Frowe (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War, . 2018.
    The vast majority of work on the ethics of war focuses on traditional wars between states. In this chapter, I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying. My strategy will be largely comparative, assessing whether certain claims often defended in discussions of interstate wars stand up in the context of civil conflicts, and whether there are principled moral differences between the two types of case. Firstly, I argue that thinking about intrastate wars can help us make progress on imp…Read more
  •  196
    Introduction: Legitimate Authority, War, and the Ethics of Rebellion
    with Christopher J. Finlay and Pål Wrange
    Ethics and International Affairs 31 (2): 167-168. 2017.
  •  92
    On War and Democracy (review)
    Ethics 127 (4): 934-938. 2017.
  •  382
    Defensive Harm, Consent, and Intervention
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 45 (4): 356-396. 2017.
    Many think that it would be wrong to defend an individual from attack if he competently and explicitly refuses defensive intervention. In this paper, I consider the extent to which the preferences of victims affect the permissibility of defending groups or aggregates. These cases are interesting and difficult because there is no straightforward sense in which a group can univocally consent to or refuse defensive intervention in the same way that an individual can. Among those who have considere…Read more
  •  1833
    Since its earliest incarnations, just war theory has included the requirement that war must be initiated and waged by a legitimate authority. However, while recent years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence in interest in just war theory, the authority criterion is largely absent from contemporary discussions. In this paper I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying, by arguing that the authority criterion plays a much more important role within just war theorising than is common…Read more
  •  409
    Liability, community, and just conduct in war
    Philosophical Studies 172 (12): 3313-3333. 2015.
    Those of us who are not pacifists face an obvious challenge. Common-sense morality contains a stringent constraint on intentional killing, yet war involves homicide on a grand scale. If wars are to be morally justified, it needs be shown how this conflict can be reconciled. A major fault line running throughout the contemporary just war literature divides two approaches to attempting this reconciliation. On a ‘reductivist’ view, defended most prominently by Jeff McMahan, the conflict is largely …Read more
  •  233
    Routledge Handbook of Ethics and War: Just War Theory in the Twenty‐first Century (review)
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 32 (2): 220-222. 2015.
  •  247
    The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 10 (6): 789-792. 2013.