Duty and liability

In his recent book, Killing in War, Jeff McMahan sets out a number of conditions for a person to be liable to attack, provided the attack is used to avert an objectively unjust threat: (1) The threat, if realized, will wrongfully harm another; (2) the person is responsible for creating the threat; (3) killing the person is necessary to avert the threat, and (4) killing the person is a proportionate response to the threat. The present article focuses on McMahan's second condition, which links liability with responsibility. McMahan's use of the responsibility criterion, the article contends, is too restrictive as an account of liability in general and an account of liability to be killed in particular. In order to defend this claim, the article disambiguates the concept of liability and explores its role in the philosophical analysis of the permission to cause harm to others

Unjust Wars Worth Fighting For

I argue that people are sometimes justified in participating in unjust wars. I consider a range of reasons why war might be unjust, including the cause which it is fought for, whether it is proportionate, and whether it wrongly uses resources that could help others in dire need. These considerations sometimes make fighting in the war unjust, but sometimes not. In developing these claims, I focus especially on the 2003 Iraq war

The moral distinction between combatants and noncombatants : vulnerable and defenceless

In Sparing Civilians, Seth Lazar claims that in war, with rare exceptions, killing noncombatants is worse than killing combatants. This paper raises some doubts about whether this is an important principle – at least, once we understand Lazar’s clarifications. It also suggests that however it is clarified, it seems false. And it suggests a related principle that more plausible. This related principle applies only to those with just aims, and it applies only to intentional killing rather than to all forms of killing

Distributing responsibility

A widespread view in moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as in public discourse, is that responsibility makes a difference to the fair allocation or distribution of things that are valuable or disvaluable independently of responsibility. For example, the fairness of punishing a person for wrongdoing varies with her responsibility for wrongdoing; the fairness of requiring a person to pay compensation varies with her responsibility for the harm that she caused; the fairness of one person being worse off than another varies with her responsibility for being worse off; the fairness of inflicting defensive harm on a person to avert a threat varies with her responsibility for causing or posing the threat; and so on

Criminalization : in and out

In this paper I explore Antony Duff’s claim that there are categorical constraints on the scope of the criminal law that are set by its internal standards. I argue against his view that such constraints are categorical, and I suggest that his account of the nature of the criminal law is partial, and narrows the focus of our enquiry into the scope of the criminal law too much. However, I suggest that the project is an important contribution to our understanding of one central element of the criminal law

Past killings and proportionality

This article builds on some arguments that I developed in the course of discussing Cécile Fabre's article, “War Exit,” on PEA Soup: http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2015/05/ethics-discussions-at-pea-soup-cecile-fabres-war-exit-with-critical-precis-by-helen-frowe.html. I am grateful to Cécile for helping me to develop my views. I am also grateful to the war discussion group at Oxford for their thoughts about an earlier draft. Thanks to Seth Lazar for sharing his unpublished work on this issue, and to Jeff McMahan and Darrell Moellendorf for discussion of the topic. I am especially grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for a Major Research Fellowship that afforded me the time to work on this article

Duress and Duty: Evaluating Erdemović

Victor Tadros, Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory, Warwick School of Law, The University of Warwick, discusses the use of duress as a justification or defence for murder. 2013 Pierre Genest Memorial Lecture

Duress and Duty: Evaluating Erdemović

Victor Tadros, Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory, Warwick School of Law, The University of Warwick, discusses the use of duress as a justification or defence for murder. 2013 Pierre Genest Memorial Lecture

Consent to sex in an unjust world

This article explores the moral significance of consent in an unjust world by developing the view that the validity of consent depends on its causes. It defends the view that the causes of consent make it valid or invalid. It then shows how this idea helps us to distinguish different ways in which consent might matter morally where it has problematic causes. Finally, it uses this analysis to explore the moral significance of a range of problematic causes of consent, including objectification, arranged marriage, and third-party threats of violence