•  572
    The bureaucratization of war: moral challenges exemplified by the covert lethal drone
    with Chris Barrie
    Ethics and Global Politics 6 (4): 245-260. 2013.
    This article interrogates the bureaucratization of war, incarnate in the covert lethal drone. Bureaucracies are criticized typically for their complexity, inefficiency, and inflexibility. This article is concerned with their moral indifference. It explores killing, which is so highly administered, so morally remote, and of such scale, that we acknowledge a covert lethal program. This is a bureaucratized program of assassination in contravention of critical human rights. In this article, this pro…Read more
    War
  •  370
    Moral autonomy in Australian legislation and military doctrine
    Ethics and Global Politics 6 (3): 135-154. 2013.
    "Australian legislation and military doctrine stipulate that soldiers ‘subjugate their will’ to" "government, and fight in any war the government declares. Neither legislation nor doctrine enables the conscience of soldiers. Together, provisions of legislation and doctrine seem to take soldiers for granted. And, rather than strengthening the military instrument, the convention of legislation and doctrine seems to weaken the democratic foundations upo…Read more
  •  20
    That Same Old Line: The Doctrine of Legitimate Authority
    Philosophical Forum 46 (1): 71-89. 2015.
    The jus ad bellum doctrine of legitimate authority, conceived by St. Augustine and evolved by St. Thomas Aquinas, that a sovereign might identify a just cause and declare war without reference to the nation’s soldiers or citizens, continues to inform thinking about just war. Contesting this claim, the present paper reasons that without the moral confidence of the soldiers who serve, no conflict can be justified. The paper claims that soldiers have relevant and important ideas about the justice o…Read more