•  1337
    The Moral Equality of Combatants
    In Lazar Seth & Frowe Helen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of War, Oxford University Press. 2017.
    The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants holds that combatants on either side of a war have equal moral status, even if one side is fighting a just war while the other is not. This chapter examines arguments that have been offered for and against this doctrine, including the collectivist position famously articulated by Walzer and McMahan’s influential individualist critique. We also explore collectivist positions that have rejected the moral equality doctrine and arguments that some ind…Read more
  •  314
    Causation and Liability to Defensive Harm
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (3): 378-392. 2020.
    An influential view in the ethics of self-defence is that causal responsibility for an unjust threat is a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. In this article, I argue against this view by providing intuitive counterexamples and by revealing weaknesses in the arguments offered in its favour. In response, adherents of the causal view have advanced the idea that although causally inefficacious agents are not liable to defensive harm, the fact that they may deserve harm can justif…Read more
  •  145
    Mortal Mistakes
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (5-6): 395-414. 2022.
    What are the justifications for and constraints on the use of force in self-defense? In his book The Morality of Defensive Force, Jonathan Quong presents the moral status account to address this and other fundamental questions. According to the moral status account, moral liability to defensive harm is triggered by treating others with less respect than they are due. At the same time, Quong rejects the relevance of culpability to the morality of defensive harming. In this article I argue that th…Read more
  •  113
    Distributing Death in Humanitarian Interventions
    In Ryan Jenkins & Bradley Strawser (eds.), Who Should Die? The Ethics of Killing in War, Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Armed military interventions often inflict large amounts of collateral harm on innocent civilians. Ought intervening soldiers, when possible, to direct collateral harm to one innocent population group rather than the other? Recently several authors have proposed that expected beneficiaries of a military intervention ought to carry greater risk of collateral harm than neutral bystanders who are not subject to the threat the military forces are intervening to avert. According to this view, interve…Read more
  •  5
    The Role of Moral Experts in Secret Policy
    Res Publica 30 (1): 107-123. 2023.
    Is it morally permissible to spy on allied countries? What type of otherwise criminal acts may covert intelligence agents commit in order to keep their cover? Is it permissible to subject children of high-value targets to covert surveillance? In this article, I ask whether democratically elected politicians ought to rely on advice from ethics committees in answering moral choices in secret policy. I argue that ethics committees should not advise politicians on how they ought to conclude secret m…Read more
  •  4
    Espionage and The Harming of Innocents
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 1-11. forthcoming.
    In her latest book _Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence_, Cécile Fabre suggests that the deception of third parties during an infiltration operation can be justified as a foreseen but unintended side effect. In this essay, I criticize this view. Such deception, I argue, is better justified paternalistically as a means of preventing third parties from becoming wrongful threats. In the second part of the article, I show that Fabre ignores an important mo…Read more