This essay highlights an argument for the moral impermissibility of physician-assisted death based on the prohibition of killing innocents that unfolds in four phases. First, I identify the operative moral principle and then develop a moral argument based upon it. Second, I raise challenges to such an argument designed to mitigate the force of the conclusion. Third, I sketch out a potential defense of the argument in light of these counter-responses for those who want to maintain moral opposition to physician-assisted (...) death based upon the prohibition of killing innocents. Finally, I conclude with a brief postscript that highlights the limits of the philosophical approach taken in this essay in conversation with the role of moral psychology in moral judgment. (shrink)

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change.

Questions about dirty hands have often focused on legitimate, secure leaders deciding whether to violate important deontological principles or the rules of interpersonal morality. The purpose of this paper is to show that revolutionaries have dirty hands; revolutionaries do wrong by engaging in unilateral usurpation of the existing system with the hope that latter benefits will justify their actions. Yet, once the revolution securely generates improvements for the common good, the initial usurpation becomes increasingly irrelevant to judgments of the new (...) government’s legitimacy. The paper argues that only retroactive justification—where later success forces opponents and advocates to reinterpret the wrongness of the initial action—can fully capture the complex moral dynamics of revolutions. (shrink)

Since cyberattacks are nonphysical, standard theories of casus belli — which typically rely on the violent and forceful nature of military means — appear inapplicable. Yet, some theorists have argued that cyberattacks nonetheless can constitute just causes for war — generating a unilateral right to defensive military action — when they cause significant physical damage through the disruption of the target's computer systems. I show that this view suffers from a serious drawback: it is too permissive concerning the types of (...) actions that generate casus belli since many essentially peaceful and non-violent mechanisms can nonetheless cause physical damage. I resolve this difficulty by developing a sovereignty-based account of casus belli and applying it to cyberwarfare. I argue that legitimate states have a constrained right to unilaterally respond with military force to unfriendly actions that bypass or overwhelm the political deliberations of the target state in order to force a change in behaviour contrary to the determinations of the people of the target state. This new account of casus belli avoids the problems of the consequence-based view by plausibly restricting the types of unfriendly action that give rise to casus belli and yet offers an attractive explanation for why some cyberattacks nonetheless do generate a potential right to a unilateral defensive response. (shrink)

Torbjörn Tännsjö has argued that the practice of palliative, or terminal, sedation can be distinguished from the practice of euthanasia in a morally relevant way. He seeks to develop a coherent conceptual model for those who accept the sanctity-of-life doctrine, affirm the ethical permissibility of palliative/terminal sedation, and reject various forms of euthanasia. The author argues that Tännsjö has not sufficiently distinguished the practices of palliative/terminal sedation and euthanasia in a morally relevant way for those who accept sanctity-of-life values in (...) end-of-life health care. His argument is a philosophical critique of the soundness of Tännsjö’s conceptual model. With respect to moral theology, the author claims that, in Tännsjö’s attempt to make his case, he uses the wrong conceptual tools, and the tools he does use, he uses wrongly. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 15.2 : 287–301. (shrink)

Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World presents, with admirable clarity, a new, hybrid conception of global justice that builds on insights from both cosmopolitans and statists, especially their relational variants. Relational cosmopolitans generally argue that substantial economic cooperation and interdependence (i.e., the relevant economic relations) trigger robust obligations of distributive justice. They then argue that, as a matter of fact, these relations obtain globally in virtue of intensifying global trade, capital flows, and labor migration. Thus, relational cosmopolitans conclude that (...) obligations of distributive justice directly apply to the global economic order. Relational statists, by contrast, argue that obligations of distributive justice are trigged by coercive, political relations. Furthermore, these coercive relations only obtain—and can only be justified—within a state. As a consequence, the global order is a ‘secondary site’ of justice that ought to be con. (shrink)