•  85
    Hoping for Peace
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2): 211-221. 2020.
    When the odds of achieving world peace seem so long, do hopes for peace amount to anything more than wishful thinking? In this paper, I introduce the idea of meaningful hope, which can help us to u...
  •  32
    Pacific Resistance: A Moral Alternative to Defensive War
    Social Theory & Practice 44 (1): 1-20. 2018.
    It is widely believed that some wars are just, and that the paradigm case of a just war is a defensive war. A familiar strategy used to justify defensive war is to infer its permissibility from the case of self-defensive killing. I show, however, that the permission to defend oneself does not justify killing, but instead calls for nonviolent resistance. I conclude that on the account of self-defense I develop, the appropriate way to respond to a war of aggression is not by prosecuting a defensiv…Read more
  •  21
    Trust and Contingency Plans
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (7): 689-699. 2022.
    Trusting relationships are both valuable and risky. Where the risks are high and the fears of betrayal are also high, it might seem rational to try to mitigate the risks, while still enjoying the benefits of the trusting relationship, by forming a contingency plan. A contingency plan—in the sense I am interested in—involves contingent punishments for defection, which are primarily meant to encourage the trusted partner to act trustworthily. I argue, however, that such contingency plans suffer fr…Read more
  •  16
    Talking to Children About War
    Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence 1 52-64. 2023.
    How should we talk to children about war? The basic story we tell them is that the world is split into good guys and bad guys, and that sometimes we have to kill the bad guys for the sake of justice. These stories of heroic killing teach children to train their attention on violence, and to interpret that violence as just or good. I show how this basic story – which also motivates much of our philosophical thinking about the morality of war and killing, mostly notably just war theory – makes it …Read more
  •  15
    The Problem with Preparing to Kill in Self‐Defense
    Journal of Applied Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In a society marked by liberal gun ownership laws, and an increasingly militarized police force, how should we think about cases where a homeowner shoots a person who has mistakenly knocked on the wrong door, or where a police officer shoots someone who is unarmed? The general tendency – by shooters, courts, and many observers – is to use the framework of self-defense. However, as I will argue, relying on the framework of self-defense is inappropriate in these cases, because theories of self-def…Read more
  •  7