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46Why the Military Needs Confucian VirtuesJournal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 40 181-202. 2023.There are few institutions that talk about virtues as much as military organizations. These military virtues are not, however, possessed by individuals in isolation; they are inculcated and influenced by the countless ways in which values are shared, both among military members and between individuals and the military itself. Unfortunately, a normative framework that is extremely well-suited to capture this significant link between individual virtue and shared valuing, namely Confucian virtue th…Read more
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7Crying Havok and (Re)claiming RightsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25 (1). 2023.In the last decade, there has been a seismic shift in debates about the ethics of war, a shift that challenges the foundational assumptions of the just war tradition. In the revisionist project responsible for this shift, the key question becomes whether an agent, through their actions, is liable to the use of deadly force. More recently, this revisionist project has been modestly expanded, from considering how killing others could make an agent liable to the use of defensive force to considerin…Read more
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62Duties and Demandingness, Individual and CollectiveJournal of Value Inquiry 56 (4): 563-585. 2022.Concern regarding overly demanding duties has been a prominent feature of moral debate ever since the possibility was famously sounded out by Bernard Williams nearly fifty years ago. More recently, some theorists have attempted to resolve the issue by reconsidering its underlying structure, drawing attention to the possibility that the duties to respond to large-scale moral issues like global poverty, systemic racism, and climate change may be fundamentally collective duties rather than indi- vi…Read more
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71Coping with Climate Change: What Justice Demands of Surfers, Mormons, and the Rest of usEthics, Policy and Environment 16 (3): 273-296. 2013.Henry Shue has led the charge among moral philosophers in arguing that harms stemming from anthropogenic climate change constitute violations of basic rights and are therefore prohibited by duties of justice. Because frameworks such as Shue’s argue that duties of justice are at stake, one could object that the special urgency of those duties threatens to overrun the normatively protected space in which an agent makes her life her own. We argue that an alternative conception of how moral reasons …Read more
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187Climate Change is Unjust War: Geoengineering and the Rising Tides of WarSouthern Journal of Philosophy 57 (3): 378-401. 2019.Climate change is undeniably a global problem, but the situation is especially dire for countries whose territory is comprised entirely or primarily of low-lying land. While geoengineering might offer an opportunity to protect these states, international consensus on the particulars of any geoengineering proposal seems unlikely. To consider the moral complexities created by unilateral deploy- ment of geoengineering technologies, we turn to a moral convention with a rich history of assessing inte…Read more
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51A fair shake for the fair-weather fanJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 48 (2): 262-274. 2021.ABSTRACT After initially pitting partisans against purists, the literature on the ethics of fandom has coalesced around a pluralist position: purists and partisans each have their own merits, and there is no ideal form of fandom. In this literature, however, the fair-weather fan continues to be viewed with dismissal and derision. While some fair-weather fans may earn this contempt, many fair-weather fans, we argue, are not only acceptable, they have important advantages over partisans and purist…Read more
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52The Significance of a Duty's DirectionJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7 (3): 1-29. 2013.Agents do not merely have duties – they often have directed duties to others. This paper first reveals problems with traditional attempts to equate these directed duties with claims and claim rights. It then defends a novel account of directionality that locates the unifying element of directed duties in a counterparty’s prioritization of the duties owed to her. If one agent has a directed duty to another, then the degree to which fulfilling the duty matters to the agent to whom it is owed itsel…Read more
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56Sharing ValuesSouthern Journal of Philosophy 56 (2): 240-272. 2018.In this paper, we consider one of the ways in which shared valuing is normatively significant. More specifically, we analyze the processes that can reliably provide normative grounding for the standing to rebuke others for their failures to treat something as valuable. Yet problems with grounding this normative standing quickly arise, as it is not immediately clear why shared valuing binds group members together in ways that can sustain the collective pursuit of shared ends. Responding to this d…Read more
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15The Collective FallacyPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3): 283-300. 2013.The common assumption is that if a group comprising moral agents can act intentionally, as a group, then the group itself can also be properly regarded as a moral agent with respect to that action. I argue, however, that this common assumption is the result of a problematic line of reasoning I refer to as “the collective fallacy.” Recognizing the collective fallacy as a fallacy allows us to see that if there are, in fact, irreducibly joint actors, then some of them will lack the full-fledged mor…Read more
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205The Collective Fallacy: The Possibility of Irreducibly Collective Action Without Corresponding Collective Moral ResponsibilityPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3): 283-300. 2013.The common assumption is that if a group comprising moral agents can act intentionally, as a group, then the group itself can also be properly regarded as a moral agent with respect to that action. I argue, however, that this common assumption is the result of a problematic line of reasoning I refer to as “the collective fallacy.” Recognizing the collective fallacy as a fallacy allows us to see that if there are, in fact, irreducibly joint actors, then some of them will lack the full-fledged mor…Read more
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25Unaccountable: The Current State of Private Military and Security CompaniesCriminal Justice Ethics 31 (3): 175-192. 2012.Abstract The current accountability system for private military and security contractors (PMSCs) is woefully inadequate, and mere enhancements in oversight cannot hope to remedy that failing. I contend that once we recognize the kind of accountability required of PMSCs, we will realize that radical changes in the foundational relationship between PMSCs and the state are required. More specifically, in order to be appropriately accountable, members of PMSCs must become a part of or, at the very l…Read more
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27Collective Directionality: A New Possibility for Collectives as Objects of Normative ConsiderationJournal of Value Inquiry 51 (2): 233-250. 2017.
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26Blood and Blackwaters: A Call to Arms for the Profession of ArmsJournal of Military Ethics 8 (1): 19-33. 2009.No abstract
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19Darrel Moellendorf, The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and PolicySocial Theory and Practice 41 (4): 764-769. 2015.