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12States’ culpability through timePhilosophical Studies 181 (5): 1345-1368. 2024.Some contemporary states are morally culpable for historically distant wrongs. But which states for which wrongs? The answer is not obvious, due to secessions, unions, and the formation of new states in the time since the wrongs occurred. This paper develops a framework for answering the question. The argument begins by outlining a picture of states’ agency on which states’ culpability is distinct from the culpability of states’ members. It then outlines, and rejects, a plausible-seeming answer …Read more
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22Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their State’s Wrongdoings? (review)Philosophical Review 132 (2): 316-320. 2023.
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44Climate obligations and social normsPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 22 (2): 103-125. 2023.Many governments are failing to act sufficiently strongly on climate change. Given this, what should motivated affluent individuals in high-consumption societies do? This paper argues that social norms are a particularly valuable target for individual climate action. Within norm-promotion, the paper makes the case for a focus on anti-fossil fuel norms specifically. Section 1 outlines gaps in the existing literature on individuals’ climate change obligations. Section 2 characterises social norms.…Read more
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26Group blameworthiness and group rightsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.The following pair of claims is standardly endorsed by philosophers working on group agency: (1) groups are capable of irreducible moral agency and, therefore, can be blameworthy; (2) groups are not capable of irreducible moral patiency, and, therefore, lack moral rights. This paper argues that the best case for (1) brings (2) into question. Section 2 paints the standard picture, on which groups’ blameworthiness derives from their functionalist or interpretivist moral agency, while their lack of…Read more
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25Organizations as Wrongdoers: From Ontology to MoralityOxford University Press. 2023.Organizations do moral wrong. States pursue unjust wars, businesses avoid tax, charities misdirect funds. Our social, political, and legal responses require guidance. We need to know what we’re responding to and how we should respond to it. We need a metaphysical and moral theory of wrongful organizations. This book provides a new such theory, paying particular attention to questions that have been underexplored in existing debates. These questions include: where are organizations located as mat…Read more
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287Group Responsibility and HistoricismPhilosophical Quarterly 74 (3): 754-776. 2024.In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. W…Read more
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10808Care Ethics: The Four Key ClaimsIn David R. Morrow (ed.), Moral Reasoning, Oxford University Press. 2017.This short article provides an overview of "care ethics" for students who are new to moral theory.
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3355The Core of Care EthicsPalgrave-Macmillan. 2015.The ethics of care has flourished in recent decades yet we remain without a succinct statement of its core theoretical commitment. This book uses the methods of analytic philosophy to argue for a simple care ethical slogan: dependency relationships generate responsibilities. It uses this slogan to unify, specify and justify the wide range of views found within the care ethical literature.
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44Distributing States' DutiesJournal of Political Philosophy 24 (3): 344-366. 2015.In order for states to fulfil their moral duties, costs must be passed to individual citizens. This paper asks how these costs should be distributed. I advocate the common-sense answer: the distribution of costs should, insofar as possible, track the reasons behind the state’s duty. This answer faces a number of problems, which I attempt to solve.
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Who Does Wrong When an Organisation Does Wrong?In Kendy Hess, Violetta Igneski & Tracy Lynn Isaacs (eds.), Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2018.When an organisation does wrong, each of the members is part of the entity that authored that wrong—or so I shall assume. But it does not follow that each of the members has herself done wrong. Doing wrong, I will assume, results from the combination of two conditions: first, authoring (or being part of the entity that authored) a harm; and second, lacking an excuse for that (part-) authorship. To answer my title question, then, we have to know which members of an organisation have excuses for t…Read more
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The Government Should Be Ashamed: On the Possibility of Organisations' Emotional DutiesPolitical Studies 4 (66): 813-829. 2018.When we say that ‘the government should be ashamed’, can we be taken literally? I argue that we can: organisations have duties over their emotions. Emotions have both functional and felt components. Often, emotions’ moral value derives from their functional components: from what they cause and what causes them. In these cases, organisations can have emotional duties in the same way that they can have duties to act. However, emotions’ value partly derives from their felt components. Organisations…Read more
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Are Organisations’ Religious Exemptions Democratically Defensible?Daedalus 3 (149): 105-118. 2020.Theorists of democratic multiculturalism have long-defended individuals’ religious exemptions from generally-applicable laws. Examples include Sikhs being exempt from motorcycle helmet laws, or Jews and Muslims being exempt from humane animal slaughter laws. This paper investigates religious exemptions for organisations. Should organisations ever be granted exemptions from generally-applicable laws in democratic societies, where those exemptions are justified by the organisation’s religion? The …Read more
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1In this chapter, Stephanie Collins examines the idea that individuals can acquire ‘membership duties’ as a result of being members of a group that itself bears duties. In particular, powerful and wealthy states are duty-bearing groups, and their citizens have derivative membership duties (for example, to contribute to putting right wrongs that have been done in the past by the group in question, and to increase the extent to which the group fulfils its duties). In addition, she argues, individua…Read more
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Corporations’ Duties in a Changing ClimateIn Jeremy Moss & Lachlan Umbers (eds.), Climate Justice and Non-State Actors: Corporations, Regions, Cities, and Individuals, Routledge. 1920.The urgency of the problem of climate change calls upon us to investigate the climate duties of agents beyond the state. Individuals are the most salient candidate in this respect. In section I, I argue that the idea that individuals might have duties to reduce their emissions raises difficult issues about individual difference-making. The rest of the chapter, then, focuses on what I take to be the third most-salient duty-bearer: large for-profit corporations. These entities have largely been o…Read more
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30Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms, by Kimberley BrownleeMind 131 (522): 700-716. 2022.
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636Distributing States' DutiesJournal of Political Philosophy 23 (3): 344-366. 2015.In order for states to fulfil (many of) their moral obligations, costs must be passed to individuals. This paper asks how these costs should be distributed. I advocate the common-sense answer: the distribution of costs should, insofar as possible, track the reasons behind the state’s duty. This answer faces a number of problems, which I attempt to solve.
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23Introduction: methodology and non-ideal theory in Christine Hobden’s Citizenship in a Globalised WorldCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26 (7): 1163-1167. 2023.Mainstream political philosophy traditionally follows Jean-Jacque’s Rousseau’s lead, ‘taking men as they are and laws as they can be made’ (Rousseau, 1998, p. 3). The non-enforceable responsibiliti...
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A Human Right to Relationships?In Kimberley Brownlee, Adam Neal & David Jenkins (eds.), Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights, Oxford University Press. 2022.This chapter asks whether there is a human right to close personal relationships. It begins by providing a prima facie argument in favour of such a right: humans’ interests in close personal relationships are important, universal, and fundamental. It then explains that there are problems with the distribution, demandingness, and motivation of the correlative duties. The result is that each individual bears a human right only to ‘intimacy consideration’, not to close personal relationships themse…Read more
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29Abilities and Obligations: Lessons from Non-agentive GroupsErkenntnis 88 (8): 3375-3396. 2022.Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusio…Read more
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64Abilities and Obligations: Lessons from Non-agentive GroupsErkenntnis 88 (8): 3375-3396. 2023.Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusio…Read more
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Duties and PovertyIn Gottfried Schweiger & Clemens Sedmak (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty, Routledge. 2023.This chapter focuses on the question of who has duties regarding poverty and what those duties demand, from within the perspective of contemporary analytic normative philosophy. The chapter is structured in three sections. Section 1 considers the duties of those living in poverty, which might be either self-regarding or other-regarding duties, and which must be tempered by concerns of overdemandingness. Section 2 considers the duties of affluent individuals. These are imperfect duties grounded i…Read more
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22Introduction: methodology and non-ideal theory in Christine Hobden’s Citizenship in a Globalised World (review)Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26 (7): 1163-1167. 2023.Mainstream political philosophy traditionally follows Jean-Jacque’s Rousseau’s lead, ‘taking men as they are and laws as they can be made’ (Rousseau, 1998, p. 3). The non-enforceable responsibiliti...
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310Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for IndividualsOxford University Press. 2019.Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. Does this make conceptual sense or is this merely political rhetoric? And what are the implications for these individuals within groups? Collins outlines a Tripartite Model of group duties that can target political demands at the right entities, in the right way and for the right reasons.
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33Care for a Profit?Perspectives on Politics 21 (2): 625-639. 2023.We vindicate the widespread intuition that there is something morally problematic with for-profit corporations providing care to young children and elders. But instead of putting forward an empirical argument showing that for-profit corporations score worse than not-for-profits when it comes to meeting the basic needs of these vulnerable groups, we develop a philosophical argument about the nature of the relationship between a care organisation, its role-occupants, and care recipients. We argue …Read more
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Role Obligations to Alter Role ObligationsIn Alex Barber & Sean Cordell (eds.), The Ethics of Social Roles, Oxford University Press. 2023.
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32Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms, by KimberleyBrownlee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 256.
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63I, VolkswagenPhilosophical Quarterly 72 (2): 283-304. 2022.Philosophers increasingly argue that collective agents can be blameworthy for wrongdoing. Advocates tend to endorse functionalism, on which collectives are analogous to complicated robots. This is puzzling: we don’t hold robots blameworthy. I argue we don’t hold robots blameworthy because blameworthiness presupposes the capacity for a mental state I call ‘moral self-awareness’. This raises a new problem for collective blameworthiness: collectives seem to lack the capacity for moral self-awarenes…Read more
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476Interconnected BlameworthinessThe Monist 104 (2): 195-209. 2021.This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthines…Read more
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544We the People: Is the Polity the State?Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (1): 78-97. 2021.When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for differen…Read more
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Monash UniversityAssociate Professor
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Collective Action |
Social Ontology |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Feminist Philosophy |