David J.
Clark
I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. With Mark Timmons, I organize the annual Workshop in Normative Ethics and edit the associated Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.
I am a moral, legal, and political philosopher. My work focuses on the nature of moral rights: how they can be forfeited, waived, or otherwise modified; how they arise; and how they interact and conflict. I explore the implications of these questions for war, public and private law, artificial intelligence, and other social phenomena.
When does benefiting from another’s unrequested sacrifice give rise to a duty to compensate them? I argue that a mere beneficiary owes compensation for a benefactor’s losses when and because her interests “morally pressured” the benefactor to bear them, and only up to the degree of that pressure, which is the fair price of a moral system in which our interests can constrain what others may do.
In which I interrogate the idea, recently developed by Jonathan Quong, that a person makes himself liable to defensive force when and because he acts as if other people lack moral rights they in fact possess.
In which I argue that standard accounts of forfeiture are too coarse-grained to make sense of a range of cases involving “merely apparent attackers.” Making sense of these cases requires that we distinguish between the forfeiture of rights and the forfeiture of the contingent, moral “perks” of those rights.
In which I develop a theory of when and why the citizenry should shoulder the costs of the mistakes of state officials. I argue that the scope of official immunity is an upshot of a general principle of compensatory morality according to which those who are morally required to participate together in some project are for that reason required to share the compensatory costs of that project.
In which I precisify, explain, and unify the proportionality and necessity constraints on defensive harm. I argue that they express the very same moral demand, only at different levels of generality—specifically, the demand that an attacker not be made to bear more cost to avert their attack than they would be required to take on themselves.
In which I explain why a person may typically protect the target of an attack only if the target does not competently refuse protection.
Deontologists have long sought a middle ground between unrestricted aggregation, which allows sufficiently many minor harms to outweigh a grave harm to one person, and anti-aggregation, which gives no weight to numbers. This paper examines the dominant approach to this problem, which restricts aggregation according to the closeness in severity of the harms at stake, and argues that it faces serious challenges both to its implications and to its underlying rationale. Assessing three leading explanations in terms of respect, appropriateness, and counterfactual duties, I argue that none adequately explains why aggregation should be restricted in this way.
In which I explain why an offender’s deserving punishment cannot explain his lacking a right against punishment. Because of our inviolability, we never lose rights merely because harming us would be valuable. We lose rights only when keeping them would undermine someone else’s rights. Desert can make harming an offender valuable, but it cannot make that harm necessary to protect another’s rights.
In which we develop a novel version of the idea that the justification for contract law is grounded in promissory morality. We agree with Charles Fried that the enforcement of promises is one of contract law’s justifying aims, but argue that this goal captures only a narrow part of the buttressing relationship between contract and promise. Contract law does not merely protect the rights of promisees. It also protects the rights of promisors, expands access to the practice of promising, and enriches and extends our promissory powers.
In which we defend Judith Thomson’s claim that a person forfeits rights against defensive harm just in case harming him is necessary to prevent him from violating someone else’s rights. No additional agency is required for liability over and above the agency required to violate a right. And neither culpability nor foreseeability is required to violate a right.
Moral rights are boundaries. They constrain what others may do with and to our body and property. But sometimes we may want others to interact with our body or property in ways our rights generally prohibit: we may want to be intimate with another, or to have someone into our home for dinner, or to let a friend borrow our copy of Reasons and Persons. In such cases we may consent to those interactions, and in so doing suspend or “waive” the rights that otherwise prohibit those interactions. In this way we exercise a form of control over our moral boundaries and make possible relationships that would otherwise be unavailable.
But we can also act in ways that suspend rights despite having no desire or intention to suspend our rights. If Al batters Bob without justification, Bob may defend himself—with physical force if necessary. By harming Al in self-defense, Bob does not violate Al’s rights. This is because, although Al’s rights normally protect him from physical harm and although he does not consent to harm, Al “forfeits” some of those rights by his act of aggression.
This seminar explores the nature of these ways of modifying our own moral boundaries, and what this means for a handful of applied issues (defensive harm, punishment, sex, medicine).
Among the questions we will explore: How should we understand the phenomenon of a moral right? What must be true for a person to forfeit rights? What determines exactly which rights are forfeited in a given case? It is often said that a person who becomes subject to defensive harm or punitive harm is only subject to harm that is “necessary” and “proportionate”—but how should we understand these limits? What are the implications of the nature of forfeiture for the ethics of defensive harm? For the ethics of criminal punishment? What is consent? What is consent for? What are the values that explain our having the power of consent and its contours? What are the conditions for consent to be “valid”? What determines the “scope” or “content” of consent? How to distinguish between the kinds of mistakes that invalidate consent and the kinds that do not? In what ways can power differences or other inequalities undermine valid consent? What is hypothetical consent, and what good is it? What are the implications of answers to the above for the ethics of sex? For the ethics of medicine?
This course critically explores a number of philosophical questions concerning the law. Our focus this semester will be on three main subjects: (1) legal determination and adjudication, (2) legal evidence, and (3) responsibility. Questions covered under these umbrellas will include: What is law? What determines the content of a law? Is it a product of the meaning of a statutory text? Of legislative intent? Of something else? How should judges apply the content of a law to a case? What is evidence? What sorts of evidence should be admissible at trial? How best to understand the law’s standards of evidence (such as “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”)? Where should the evidential bar be set? Do we have the freedom of will required to be held responsible for our actions? What does it mean for the law if we don’t? What is the insanity defense and when and why should it be an acceptable defense?
Morality and law are distinct, but deeply interconnected, normative systems. This course explores their relationship. Among the questions we will investigate: To what extent does morality shape the law? Is there a duty to obey the law? Should the law enforce morality? What moral grounds does the state have for punishing someone? What limits does morality set on what may be criminalized? What makes the difference between valid and invalid consent? What is the relationship between contracts and the morality of promising? Should there be legal limits on freedom of contract? What is the moral foundation of the law of torts? How should we understand and measure the moral notion of harm? What is the relationship between causation and the duty to compensate? When may we harm others in self-defense?
This course is an introduction to moral philosophy. We will critically explore answers to the following two questions: What makes for a good life? And what makes an action right or wrong? We will also engage with theories of morality while thinking about specific moral issues: Is there anything wrong with participating in the practice of killing animals for food? Is it morally permissible to have or administer an abortion? What justifies the state in instituting a system of criminal punishment, and what limits does morality impose on such a system? What is the moral importance of consent, and what does it take to give one’s consent?
We’ll think a lot about money in this course. What is it, and what is its place in the well-lived life? What does ethical investing look like? Should we gamble with our money? Must we give to charity? What are the moral risks and benefits of cryptocurrencies? What sorts of lending practices are morally acceptable?
Money is one piece of a much larger market system, and there are lots of interesting philosophical questions to ask about markets themselves. What sorts of things should, or should not, be for sale? What sorts of markets are best? To what extent should the government control the marketplace? What is the best measure of economic health? Do nations have an obligation to trade with one another?
We use our money in the marketplace to obtain resources—to come to own things. But what is ownership? Is there a limit to how much anyone should own? What things should be publicly owned, and what things should be privately owned? How should we rectify historical theft?
(Co-taught with Andrew Stewart.) In this course we will apply traditional methods of philosophical inquiry and critical thinking to some of the most pressing moral questions of life in the 21st century. Among the questions this course will explore: What do businesses morally owe their employees, customers, and competitors? Are corporations agents, and what sorts of rights should they have? Are there moral limits to capitalism? How should we respond to globalization? Is democracy the best form of government? What do doctors owe their patients? How does social media alter our relationships with one another? Should self-driving cars be programmed to make decisions based on a particular moral theory? Is there such a thing as too much technology? How much of the work that has normally been done by humans should be done by machines or artificial intelligence? What duties do we have to future generations?