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18.1 The concept of agent responsibilityIn Carl Knight & Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), Responsibility and distributive justice, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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223Partial Compliance TheoryIn David Copp, Tina Rulli & Connie Rosati (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Normative Ethics, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.People often fail to comply with the demands of morality. Partial compliance theory takes this noncompliance or its possibility into account in the formulation of moral requirements for people to comply with, or in the evaluation of people’s actions against those requirements. This chapter critically engages with recent work on partial compliance theory. It examines the relationship between noncompliance and injustice, assesses different ways of doing partial compliance theory, sketches the rela…Read more
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1Responsibility and RespectIn Carl Knight & Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), Responsibility and distributive justice, Oxford University Press. pp. 115--35. 2011.
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34Political philosophy, here and now: essays in honour of David Miller (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2022.This book honours David Miller's remarkable contribution to political philosophy. Over the last fifty years, Miller has published an extraordinary range of work that has shaped the discipline in many different areas, including social justice, democracy, citizenship, nationality, global justice, and the history of political thought. His work is characterised by its commitment to a kind of theorising that makes sense to the people who have to put its principles into practice. This entails paying c…Read more
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34Non‐ideal TheoryIn Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.The two main questions addressed in the chapter are “What is the point of (good) nonideal theory?” and “Can (good) nonideal theory be done in isolation from ideal theory?” To address them, I distinguish between different types of nonideal theory and locate nonideal theory vis‐à‐vis ideal theory as well as realism and applied philosophy. I argue that nonideal theory is useful but some of its versions need to concede that they are defeatist. I also argue that nonideal theory builds on ideal theory…Read more
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29Rawls on Ideal and Nonideal TheoryIn Jon Mandle & David A. Reidy (eds.), A Companion to Rawls, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.John Rawls tells at the start of A Theory of Justice that his theory is intentionally constrained in two ways: it is ideal and focuses on the justice of the basic structure of society. This chapter begins by evaluating Rawls's claim that ideal theory sets the target of reform for nonideal theory, whose task it is to work out what to do “under less happy conditions.” It states that it is unclear just when ideal theory can inform the priorities of nonideal theory. The chapter also presents discuss…Read more
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12Substantive Responsibility and the Causal ThesisIn Markus Stepanians & Michael Frauchiger (eds.), Reason, Justification, and Contractualism: Themes from Scanlon, De Gruyter. pp. 119-130. 2021.
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1Can moral desert qualify or justify human rights?In Rowan Cruft, S. Matthew Liao & Massimo Renzo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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44‘Go Tell the Spartans, Passerby’: Whom to Remember Ahead of Whom?Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (5): 825-840. 2022.The dead are among us. We are reminded of their names through the books we read, the hoovers we buy, the sandwiches we consume, the tarmac we travel on, the wellingtons we wear, or, frequently, the buildings we visit. Even if we settled on the criteria for being worthy of commemoration, what should we do about the fact that there seem to be so many people who would likely meet them? Commemoration is a form of attention giving, and attention is a scarce resource. It is scarce even if it could be …Read more
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31Citizens with BenefitsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 96 (1): 41-58. 2022.Can states permissibly enforce mandatory participation in the provision of public goods? Usual justifications of state action here appeal to the fact that such goods are very good for people. Arthur Ripstein argues that states can compel provision of public goods, but that the best explanation of this is grounded, not in the costs and benefits of the provision to the compelled parties, but in the parties’ moral status as independent agents. I argue that Ripstein’s alternative account poses more …Read more
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32Is Humanity under a Duty to Deliver Socioeconomic Human Rights?Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (2): 202-211. 2021.What’s special about human rights? For Rowan Cruft human rights are special because they capture the importance of the good of the right-holder. But his account struggles with explaining the existence of global socioeconomic human rights. I argue that such rights exist and show how we should revise Cruft’s account to accommodate this.
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243Responsibility and distributive justice (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equal…Read more
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55The incentives account of feasibilityPhilosophical Studies 178 (7): 2385-2401. 2020.In Utopophobia Estlund offers a prominent version of a conditional account of feasibility. I think the account is too permissive. I defend an alternative incentives account of feasibility. The incentives account preserves the spirit of the conditional account but qualifies fewer actions as feasible. Simplified, the account holds that an action is feasible if there is an incentive such that, given the incentive, the agent is likely to perform the action successfully. If we accept that ought impli…Read more
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33Coercing Compliers to Do More Than One’s Fair ShareZeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 2 (1): 147-160. 2019.Is there a duty to do more than one’s fair share of solving collective problems? If there is, can those who do less than their fair share coerce others to do more? These questions arise urgently in relation to the problem of refugee protection. The fact that various states host refugees to a dramatically different extent is due to a range of factors but the most prominent one is that, on the whole, states devote their differential capabilities to the aim of not hosting them. When some states fai…Read more
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1Responsibility and Respect: Reconciling Two Egalitarian VisionsIn Carl Knight & Zofia Stemplowska (eds.), Responsibility and distributive justice, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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44Remembering War: Fabre on RemembranceJournal of Applied Philosophy 36 (3): 382-390. 2018.Following wars, what requirements, if any, of remembrance do we – those who live in peacetime – have? On whom do they fall? Who must be remembered? How should they be remembered? Fabre offers us an account of remembrance that answers some of those questions and provides a helpful framework for working through the others. It is philosophically nuanced as well as attuned to the complexity of war and informed by actual commemorative practices. In this article, however, I expand Fabre's list of desi…Read more
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55How generous should egalitarians be?Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 22 (3): 269-283. 2019.
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154Holding people responsible for what they do not controlPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 7 (4): 355-377. 2008.A crucial question for egalitarians, and theorists of distributive justice in general, is whether people can be held responsible for disadvantages they bring upon themselves. One response to this question states that it would be inegalitarian to hold people responsible on the basis of their actions if their actions are not ultimately under their control and reflect instead the good or bad luck the agent had in being the type of person who happens to act in a given way. I argue that even if we ac…Read more
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163On the real world duties imposed on us by human rightsJournal of Social Philosophy 40 (4): 466-487. 2009.
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88The Asymmetry Objection Rides Again: On the Nature and Significance of Justificatory DisagreementJournal of Applied Philosophy 32 (2): 133-146. 2014.Political liberalism offers perhaps the most developed and dominant account of justice and legitimacy in the face of disagreement among citizens. A prominent objection states that the view arbitrarily treats differently disagreement about the good, such as on what makes for a good life, and disagreement about justice. In the presence of reasonable disagreement about the good, political liberals argue that the state must be neutral, but they do not suggest a similar response given reasonable disa…Read more
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104Doing more than one’s fair shareCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19 (5): 591-608. 2016.What duties do people have in the face of noncompliance of others with their duties? The paper defends the duty to take up the slack when slack taking is necessary to assist those in dire need. This duty has been criticized by J. L. Cohen, Liam Murphy and, more recently, David Miller. The duty is defended against arguments that appeal to the structure of the duty to aid, fair shares, responsibility, counterintuitiveness, and perverse consequences. The paper considers the implications of the duty…Read more
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179Harmful Choices: Scanlon and Voorhoeve on Substantive ResponsibilityJournal of Moral Philosophy 10 (4): 1-488. 2013.How should the fact that a given policy offers people choice bear on policy selection? Should we favour choice-granting policies even if choices lead to harmful outcomes, and even if the causal thesis is true and people are not fully in control of how they choose? T.M. Scanlon and Alex Voorhoeve have tried to locate the significance of choice in the value or potential value that it has for choice-bearers. I show that this leaves them vulnerable to a general dilemma: either they can explain the s…Read more
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University of WarwickRegular Faculty
Areas of Interest
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Aesthetics |
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |