publications

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• The Demands of Necessity. (Ethics, June 2023)

It is widely believed that there is both a "proportionality" and "necessity" constraint on self-defense. You shouldn't kill someone in self-defense who is only trying to pinch you on the arm; that would be disproportionate. But even when an attacker poses a lethal threat, you shouldn't kill them in self-defense if you can just as well stop their attack with less-than-lethal force; killing them would then be unnecessary. This paper develops an explanation, precisification, and unification of the proportionality and necessity constraints. Unjust attackers would be required to bear a certain amount of cost to avert their own attack were they able. This in turn determines what others may do to them: an attacker can only be made to bear as much cost to avert their attack as they would be required to take upon themselves. The proportionality and necessity constraints, I argue, both express this fundamental principle, only at different levels of generality.
 

• Refusing Protection. (Philosophy & Public Affairs, Dec. 2022)

You're under attack. I offer my protection. You refuse it. It seems that such refusal can sometimes make it wrong for me to protect you. Why? This paper defends an unorthodox answer to this question, and explores the implications for the ethics of humanitarian interventions. By refusing my protection --- I argue --- you remove me from the class of people with respect to whom your attacker is liable, thereby making it so that your attacker is not liable to suffer defensive harm at my hands.

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under review​​​

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• Defense Without Threat. 

​At the heart of the ethics of war and self-defense is the project of developing a theory of liability: a theory of when and why attackers forfeit their right not to be harmed. Many theories that have been proposed are variations on the idea that an attacker is liable to be harmed when harming them would prevent them from harming someone else. This idea faces a problem, however. Suppose a sloppy hitman attempts to kill you, but unbeknownst to you their gun is jammed. Or suppose a bank robber "bluffs" that he will kill you if you don't open the vault. You don’t need to harm the hitman or the bank robber to defend yourself. And yet it sure seems they are liable to be harmed, ignorant as you are that they pose no actual threat. In this paper, I argue that our standard conception of forfeiture is too coarse-grained to make sense of such cases, and that we need to distinguish between the forfeiture of one’s rights against harm and the forfeiture of the non-constitutive, contingent “perks” of those rights. Appreciating this distinction helps us better understand the moral status of “merely apparent attackers” --- and to answer a number of important challenges for the theory of liability.​​

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• The Price of Duty. 

State officials regularly impose harm on the citizens they are supposed to serve, some of it wrongful. Who should bear the burden of paying compensation for
these wrongs? Should it be the agents themselves, or should the burden be spread across the citizenry via taxation? This essay develops a theory of limited official immunity, according to which citizens have a moral duty to assume the costs of (only) certain official wrongs. I argue that limited official immunity is an upshot of a general principle of distributive justice, according to which those who are morally required to participate in some project are required to share certain costs of that project. Understanding official immunity as derivative of this principle helps us to identify, not just the grounds, but also the limits of official immunity: it helps us to sort between the kinds of official wrongs for which the burdens should fall on the individual agents themselves and the kinds of wrongs for which those burdens should be assumed by the citizenry.

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• Fixing Aggregation.

Who should we save when we can only save some? Many theorists want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to claim that some, but only some less serious harms can trade off against more serious harms. They want to claim, for example, that there is no number of people we could save from a papercut that would justify letting one person die, but that there is some number of people we could save from losing one leg that would justify letting one person lose both his legs. Standard attempts to deliver this result appeal to differences in degree of harm. I argue that this approach is untenable, and that we'd do better to appeal to difference in kind.

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• Proportionality & Uncertainty (Discussion Note)

A military commander knows it is wrong to use disproportionate force in war. But she is uncertain whether a proposed bombing mission would be disproportionate. How should she proceed? More generally: how should considerations of proportionality enter into our decision-making about the use of force under conditions of uncertainty? Patrick Tomlin has recently developed what is, to date, the most careful and sophisticated answer to this question. In this note I argue that Tomlin's account, however, fails to do justice to the moral considerations underlying our concern that harm be proportionate, before proposing what I take to be a better answer.

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• Finding the Missing Moorean Infelicity. (Discussion Note)

It's plainly infelicitous to say, "It's raining, but I don't believe it's raining." Some metaethicists have argued that if Metaethical Expressivism is true, then we should get a similar infelicity when we conjoin moral statements with the denial of being in some non-cognitive state (for example: "Murder is wrong but I don't disapprove of murder"). But this isn't plainly infelicitous. Enter Nils Franzen, who has argued that the non-cognitive state Expressivism needs is the state picked out by the 'finds that...' locution. This note argues that Franzen's argument does not succeed.

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under construction​

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• Beyond Desert. "Desert" takes center stage in many non-consequentialist theories of punishment. Where some theorists have objected to the very idea that a person can deserve punishment, this paper contributes to the ethics of punishment by arguing that even if we grant that criminal offenders deserve punishment, desert still won't do the theoretical work for which it is typically invoked. At the bottom of this objection is my argument that the fact that X deserves punishment cannot ground the fact that X has forfeited their rights against punishment --- no matter how we unpack the concept of desert. This paper suggests a more limited role desert might play in the theory of punishment, but the main lesson of the paper is that a theory of forfeiture must be at the center of the theory of punishment and that non-consequentialists need to look beyond desert for a theory of forfeiture. 

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• Punishment as Service.

This paper attempts to develop just such a theory --- an account of when and why criminal offenders forfeit rights against punishment, and of exactly which rights they forfeit. The account I develop shares some foundational elements with Victor Tadros’s theory of punishment (The Ends of Harm, 2012). We both endorse what I call the ``Service Model'' of punishment: we both agree that a criminal offender forfeits rights against punishment only when (i) his wrongdoing has put him under a duty to serve some goal, and (ii) the punishment in question serves that goal. (It's a model where there is real cash value to the idea that justified punishment is about ``paying ones debts'' to society.) But Tadros and I disagree about the kinds of duties that ground punishment. Where Tadros appeals only to a kind of duty of compensation, my own view is pluralistic: I make the case that there are different duties that are incurred by different offenses and that in turn ground liabilities to different forms of punishment.​

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• The Justifier Pays Principle. 

Do we ever owe compensation for harms we neither caused nor are responsible for? Many theorists have thought that we do, on the grounds that a person may owe compensation for some harm simply by benefitting from that harm. I agree that beneficiaries sometimes owe compensation. But this isn't because they receive benefit. Rather, it is typically because it is their interests that justify that harm. We should reject the so-called "Beneficiary Pays Principle" and endorse what I call the "Justifier Pays Principle".

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• When Border Defense is Indefensible. (co-authored with Thomas Crisp)

Nations control their borders but such means as fences, detention, deportation, and threats of violence. Many of these practices impose harm: would-be migrants are harmed in an alleged effort to protect the interests of the "authorized" residents of receiving nations. Such treatment calls out for justification. The most plausible justifications (we claim) are those that draw parallels with cases of ordinary self-defense. Applying our best theories of the moral limits of defensive harm to the case of immigration, we develop a sorting between immigration restrictions that wrong would-be migrants and those that don't.​​

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• Immigration and Self-Determination.

An interesting attempt to justify non-open borders comes from Kit Wellman, who has argued that a political community's right to "freedom of association" entails a robust permission right to exclude others from that community. In this paper I argue that Wellman's argument ultimately fails, but that the failure is instructive. It points the way to a more plausible argument from freedom of association --- one that delivers a much more limited permission to exclude.

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