Massimo Renzo

Philosophers typically argue that manipulation is wrong because it impairs our practical reasoning. Recently, Sophie Gibert has challenged this view, proposing instead a reductive account of the wrong of manipulation. Gibert’s account is reductive in that it dispenses with the idea that there is a distinctive non-moral feature of manipulation upon which its wrongness supervenes. Rather, the wrong of manipulation is nothing over and above the wrong of infringing other rights. In this paper, I raise a number of objections against Gibert’s reductive account, arguing that it is both overinclusive and underinclusive. I then propose a novel formulation of the traditional view. I argue that, in addition to avoiding the sort of problems raised by Gibert, my reformulation of the view enables us to give a more nuanced treatment of central cases of manipulation, including some that are relevant to law and policymaking, such as the morality of nudging. My reformulation comes at a price. The view I offer rests on a fairly demanding picture of the kind of practical reasoning required to exercise our practical agency well. But since this picture is independently plausible, this is a price we should be happy to pay.

Philosophers have been paying increasingly more attention to the notion of manipulation. Perhaps surprisingly, however, most of the recent literature has focused on the conceptual question of identifying the features that make certain behaviours instances of manipulation, rather than on the moral question of why manipulation is wrong. Even more surprisingly, philosophers who have addressed the moral question have rejected the traditional view that manipulation is wrong because it undermines our efforts to exercise our practical agency and respond to our reasons for action (Buss, Gibert). In this paper, I offer a defence of the traditional view. In doing so, I vindicate a further idea that is routinely invoked in discussions of manipulation but whose articulation has proved elusive: The idea that one reason manipulation is wrong is that it involves using people as means.

Legitimate authorities occasionally issue mistaken directives. Do we have a duty to obey such directives? This question is especially pressing in cases in which (1) obeying a mistaken directive would lead us to take part in the perpetration of a serious injustice and (2) the victims of the injustice are not themselves subject to the authority that issued the directive. The clearest case is when a legitimate authority, acting in good faith, orders us to fight a war that is in fact unjust. I address the question of whether we have a duty to obey such orders by responding to a number of important objections that Thomas Christiano, Christopher Kutz, and David Estlund raise against the view that I originally defended in my article “Political Authority and Unjust Wars.”

Provided that traditional jus ad bellum principles are fulfilled, military humanitarian intervention to stop large scale violations of human rights (such as genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes) is widely regarded as morally permissible. In cases of “supreme humanitarian emergency”, not only are the victims morally permitted to rebel, but other states are also permitted to militarily intervene. Things are different if the human rights violations in question fall short of supreme humanitarian emergency. Because of the importance of respecting political self‐determination, in cases of “ordinary oppression”, we normally think that rebellion might be permissible, but not military humanitarian intervention. Thus, according to the received view, the conditions for the permissibility of intervention coincide with the conditions for the permissibility of revolution in cases of supreme humanitarian emergency, but not in cases of ordinary oppression. In cases of ordinary oppression there is an asymmetry between the conditions for the permissibility of revolution and intervention (call this the Asymmetry View). Should we accept the Asymmetry View? I answer this question by outlining an account of political self‐determination and by illustrating the complex role that this notion should play in discussing the morality of revolution and intervention.

Just war theory is dominated by two positions. According to the traditional view, combatants both on the just and the unjust side have an equal right to fight, which is not affected by the justice of the cause pursued by their state. According to a recent revisionist account, only combatants fighting for a just cause have such right. David Estlund has offered a sophisticated account that aims to reconcile these two views by looking at our duty to obey the order of democratic political institutions. The article criticizes Estlund’s account and points at an important to be learned from it