publications

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• Mistaken Defense and the Unbundling of Rights (Ethics, forthcoming)

​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 (apparent) attackers forfeit their right not to be harmed. This essay contributes to this project by developing and defending a heterodox answer to a serious and long-standing challenge to the project --- what I call the Challenge of Merely Apparent Attackers. I argue that our standard conception of forfeiture is too coarse-grained to adequately answer this challenge, and that we need to distinguish between the forfeiture of one's rights against harm and the forfeiture of the contingent, moral "perks" of those rights. Appreciating this distinction helps us answer the challenge without undermining our ability to make sense of the so-called necessity and proportionality constraints on defensive harm, and without generating perverse incentives or paradoxical results for defenders operating under conditions of uncertainty. Appreciating this distinction, I illustrate, may also bear fruit in other domains of moral philosophy.

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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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• The Price of Duty. (Journal of Moral Philosophy, forthcoming)

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 certain official wrongs. I argue that limited official immunity is an upshot of a general principle of compensatory morality, according to which those who are morally required to participate in some project are for that reason required to share the compensatory costs of that project. Understanding official immunity as derivative of this principle helps us to identify, not just the grounds, but also some of 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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under review​​​​​

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• What's for Desert? 

The concept of desert plays a starring role in many non-consequentialist theories of punishment. Some have argued that this is a mistake, on the grounds that persons cannot deserve something like punishment on the basis of something like criminal wrongdoing. This paper makes a very different case against the centrality of desert in punishment theory. I argue that --- even if we grant that criminal offenders can deserve punishment --- desert still won't do the theoretical work for which it is typically invoked. Its fundamental limitation is that it does not help us answer what I call the Challenge of Alienation --- the challenge of explaining when and why criminal offenders lack some of their usual rights against punishment. No matter how we precisify the concept of desert, I argue, an offender's deserving punishment cannot explain why he lacks rights against punishment. We must look elsewhere for an answer to this crucial challenge. But this isn't to say that desert plays no role in the justification of punishment. There are, perhaps, more modest (but so far unheralded) roles for desert in punishment theory --- two of which I consider.​​

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• A Promising Theory of Contract (with Simone Sepe)​​

This essay develops and defends a novel version of the idea that the justification for contract law is to be found in the morality of promising. We argue that the core justification for contract law is found in the fact that it is a tool by which the state reduces inequalities in {access to the social practice of promising}. Such inequalities of access are largely due to inequalities in the resources that people have available to enforce their promissory rights. Through contract law, the state alleviates the former inequality by alleviating the latter inequality --- which it does by making itself available to all citizens as an impartial, third-party defender of their promissory rights. We call this the Equal Defense theory of contracts, and we show how it offers an elegant justification for central features of common law systems of contract, and nicely captures the ways in which contract law both converges with, and diverges from, promissory morality.

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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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• The Justifier Pays

Morality seems to grant us a curious power: the power to sometimes impose compensatory duties on a person without their consent, by way of imposing benefit on them. This seems objectionable on its face, on the grounds that it puts people under the control of others to a troubling degree. So we should wonder: Do we really have this power? If so, why? What is its extent? Can it be squared with the importance of autonomy? This essay contributes to answering these questions by articulating an important way in which a ``mere beneficiary’’ can incur a duty of compensation. I argue that someone who benefits from the trespass of another’s rights owes compensation for that trespass when, because, and to the extent that her interests contributed to justifying the trespass. That we are vulnerable to have compensatory duties imposed on us under these conditions is the fair price to pay for our enjoying the countervailing power that consists in our interests giving others reasons to trespass on someone's rights.

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• Proportionality & Uncertainty 

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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under construction​​​

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• Punishment as Service.

This paper attempts to develop 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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• Thomson on Defense: 25 Years Later (with Kit Wellman)

In her landmark 1991 article, ``Self-Defense,'' Judith Jarvis Thomson set the stage for what has become a robust literature on the morality of defensive force. Although many of her ideas have been widely embraced, there is one of her core ideas that has been rejected by most theorists working on the subject. This is her claim that, forfeiting one's rights to not be harmed requires nothing more of a person's exercise of agency beyond whatever is required to pose a threat of violating someone's rights. We argue that the objections that have been raised against this claim fail, and that, moreover, there are principled reasons to agree with Thomson on this point.

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• When Border Defense is Indefensible. (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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