Seth Lazar, Philosopher and Photographer

This paper grew out of a working paper I  wrote in summer 2010. It attempts an analysis of the concept of necessity as it applies in self-defence and war–too often philosophers assume that necessity is either unimportant or immediately perspicuous; but it is neither. Read on for the introduction. This paper has just been accepted by Philosophy & Public Affairs, for their Winter 2012 edition, and is part of a broader project on Necessity and Noncombatant Immunity. Continue reading »

Paper for the new Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law, edited by Andrei Marmor. Publication scheduled for March 2012.

Extract from the conclusion:

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Argument for the principle of noncombatant immunity that draws on multiple overlapping arguments, including a high threshold for liability, the distinctive vulnerability of noncombatants, the institutional dimensions of the combatant/noncombatant distinction, and rule-consequentialist and contractarian arguments. Still writing this one, but it grew out of this working paper from 2010.

3500 word entry on the state of contemporary just war theory, used in two recent Oxford Companions. Due out this year I think.

Like this paper on necessity in self-defence and war, this essay on the necessity-based argument for noncombatant immunity grew out of an earlier project. It’s currently under review. Introduction follows.

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My working paper on the aftermath of war has led to a publication in a volume edited by Larry May with Andrew Forcehimes, to be published in June 2012, by Cambridge University Press. The book is called Morality, Jus Post Bellum and International Law, you can read about it here.

Here’s the introduction:

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6000 word entry focusing on the discussion of war in contemporary analytical philosophy. Distinguishes that approach from historical just war theory because of the former’s overriding emphasis on the importance of individual human rights to the ethics of war. Characterises Walzer’s principal contributions to jus ad bellum and jus in bello as his orientation of those questions around human rights: we may fight to protect fundamental rights, but in doing so we must not violate others’ rights. Identifies the principal criticisms of Walzer’s elaboration of these themes, but notes that few critics question whether it is really possible to render the ethics of war consistent with individual rights in this way. Indicates the possible direction of travel for those who think that a rights-respecting war is an unattainable ideal. Invited submission for the Wiley Blackwell International Encyclopaedia of Ethics. Publication has been delayed, but there is some promise of the 9 volume megalith hitting the shelves in 2012 (see here for more).

Review of Larry May’s edited volume. http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/120/479/895.short?rss=1

Introduction to Symposium, which I edited, on Jeff McMahan’s Killing in War. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662618

Great news from Wanderlust this month: my picture ‘Old Man Blues’ came runner up in their competition. You can read about it here. Apparently I win a Nikon DSLR, but I’ve not heard anything about it yet! The picture, as well as my other finalist picture of a mother and baby in Burkina Faso, will be in this month’s Wanderlust magazine, on newsstands from today.

Just got the exciting news that one of my pictures has made the final shortlist for the Wanderlust travel photo of the year competition. This is something I’ve wanted to achieve ever since I started travel photography, so I’m thrilled! Another picture got through to the penultimate round–I feel bad for that one that it didn’t make it but pleased that ‘Old Man Blues’ will be at the exhibition. You can read about the competition here: http://www.wanderlust.co.uk/magazine/awards/wanderlust-travel-photo-of-the-year/wanderlust-travel-photo-of-the-year-2010 And the picture is this one:

***UPDATE***

Turns out Mother and Baby did get through! So I’ll have two pictures at the exhibition, and in the March edition of Wanderlust. It’s the Destinations Holiday & Travel Show (3-6 February 2011) at Earls Court, and then at Birmingham NEC from March 4-6. Here’s the picture

The 2010 Oxford War Group addressed a number of topics all related to the issue of just causes for war. In this volume, we propose to revisit, and focus on, wars of national defence. Whilst defence of national sovereignty is standardly, and often unthinkingly, regarded as the paradigmatic just cause for war, it needs closer scrutiny than it has received recently, particularly (though not only) in the light of two important theoretical developments in the field: the rise of an individualist account of war on the one hand, and strong defences of cosmopolitan theories of justice on the other – neither of which seems a particularly appropriate framework for thinking about such wars. In fact, one might argue that David Rodin’s challenge in War and Self-Defense has yet to be met: 8 years later, we still neither have a plausible reductive individualist argument for national defence, nor a viable alternative to the individualist approach.

Cecile Fabre is co-editing the collection with me, and we have a very exciting roster of contributors, offering a range of different perspectives on the justification of national defence. The basic problem will be set up by papers by myself (derived from this one) and Patrick Emerton and Toby Handfield, while David Rodin will explore the legacy of and response to War and Self-Defense. Defences of the individualist view will come from Jeff McMahan and Cecile Fabre. Alternative approaches will be represented by Chris Kutz (looking at democracy and just cause), Yitzhak Benbaji (offering a contractarian alternative), Annie Stilz (focusing on national defence through the lens of territorial rights), and Margaret Moore (writing from a liberal nationalist perspective). This is an extremely exciting project, and we’re very much looking forward to taking it to fruition. We anticipate submitting a manuscript for consideration in mid-February 2012.

2010′s Oxford War Group saw us double in numbers, but retain the same collaborative, collegial atmosphere we enjoyed in 2009. Our focus was on the purposes of military force, with original papers written by myself, Yitzhak Benbaji, Patrick Emerton and Toby Handfield, Cecile Fabre, Chris Kutz, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Jeff McMahan, and Gerhard Øverland. Respondents included Cheyney Ryan, Nancy Sherman, Victor Tadros, Laura Valentini, and James Pattison. The meeting proved the inspiration for an edited volume on national defence (see here for further details).

My contribution for Cecile Fabre and my co-edited volume on Justifying National Defence, which we’re hoping to publish in 2012. Read on for the introduction:

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This paper asks whether we can defend associative duties to our compatriots that are grounded solely in the relationship of liberal co-citizenship.The sort of duties that are specially salient to this relationship are duties of justice, duties to protect and improve the institutions that constitute that relationship, and a duty to favour the interests of compatriots over those of foreigners. Critics have argued that the liberal conception of citizenship is too insubstantial to sustain these duties — indeed, that it gives us little reason to treat compatriots any differently from how we treat foreigners, with all the practical consequences that this would entail. I suggest that on a specific conception of liberal citizenship we can, in fact, defend associative duties, but that these extend only to the duty to protect and improve the institutions that constitute that relationship. Duties of justice and favouritism, I maintain, cannot be particularised to one’s compatriots.

You can see the paper here: A Liberal Defence of (Some) Duties to Compatriots.

Jeff McMahan’s theory of permissible killing in war, developed over the last 15 years and most recently developed in his Killing in War (OUP, 2009), faces two objections. The contingent pacifist objection asserts that his restrictive conception of the basis for individual liability to lethal attack—moral responsibility for an objectively unjustified threat—renders it impossible to fight even the most justified wars justly, since we cannot distinguish between those who are, and are not liable. The total war objection argues that, by making responsibility the basis of liability, rather than the fact one poses a threat, his account threatens to make too many noncombatants permissible targets of lethal force. Killing in War seeks to address both of these objections, but I argue that McMahan’s response to each contradicts the other. The contingent pacifist objection is rebutted by expanding the scope of liability, so no combatants on the unjust side will escape. But expanding liability only gives the total war objection greater purchase. This paper defends this core objection, which I call the ‘responsibility dilemma’ both for McMahan, and for any philosopher who wants to ground liability to be killed in war in responsibility for unjustified threats.

You can read the paper here: The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War.

Combatants in war kill and maim perfect strangers, committing acts that would be, in almost any other context, paradigmatically unjust. Conventional just war theory holds that they can avoid injustice, provided they only kill those who threaten their lives. This permissive standard has been much criticised. In particular, some argue that combatants can only justly kill enemies who are responsible for an unjustified threat to their lives. Initially, it was thought that responsibility should rise to the level of culpability; this standard has proved too restrictive, however, as even unjustified combatants are often blameless for the threat they pose. Responding to this concern, Jeff McMahan, David Rodin, and others have proposed that mere agent responsibility is sufficient to establish liability—if combatants meet the minimum standards of responsible agency, and they acted voluntarily in creating the unjustified threat, then they can be liable to be killed, even if they are wholly blameless. McMahan in particular has developed a detailed defence of this position, arguing that where A’s voluntary conduct—however blameless—imposes risks on B, A should lose his right not to bear the costs when those risks eventuate in B being forced to choose between their lives. In this paper, I set out and criticise McMahan’s position, arguing in particular that agent responsibility for the imposition of risks does not adequately differentiate between A and B, since B will also be agent-responsible for imposing risks on A. In the absence of any asymmetry between A and B, there are no grounds for either becoming liable to be killed in self-defence. This relaxation of the standard of liability is, in my view, a retrograde step: potential combatants should not imagine that they can main and kill without injustice.

This paper was published in the July 2009 edition of Ethics, and can be viewed here: Responsibility, Risk, and Killing in Self-Defense.

Associative duties are non-contractual duties owed in virtue of a valuable relationship. General duties are owed to people simply in virtue of their humanity. In this paper, I ask what should be done when we can perform either an associative duty or a general duty, but not both. There are two types of solutions to this question, which will be called compatibilist and incompatibilist. Compatibilist responses deny any real tension between associative and general duties, in two ways. The first, compossibilist, variant rejects the terms of the question, arguing that tradeoffs cannot occur, because each set of duties can be fully discharged without compromising the other. The second, generalist, variant of compatibilism concedes that sometimes tradeoffs may be necessary. However, it contends that these tradeoffs are always easily resolvable, because there is a clear priority ordering between the two sets of duties: general duties always trump their associative counterparts. Incompatibilist responses hold that associative and general duties are genuinely in tension with one another: that is, (1) contra the compossibilist, there will indeed be tradeoffs between associative and general duties, and (2) contra the generalist, sometimes the associative duty will win out. My aim, in this paper, is first to pinpoint the terrain on which the debate between these three positions should be held, and then to show that, once on that terrain, incompatibilism looks more plausible than the alternatives.

This paper was published, January 2009, in Journal of Political Philosophy. You can view it here: Do Associative Duties Really Not Matter?.

This paper, drawn from my M.Phil. thesis on corrective justice, explicates a concept of injury as right-violation, which can be used as a foundation for distinguishing between setbacks to interests that should, and should not, be the concern of justice, and as the object of a theory of corrective justice. It begins by introducing a hybrid theory of rights, grounded in (a) the mobilisation of our moral equality to (b) protect our most important interests, and shows how violations of rights are the concern of justice, while setbacks where one of the twin grounds of rights is defeated are not. It then looks more closely at the substantive moral components of injury, namely harm and wrong. It argues that, on the hybrid conception, harm and wrong are individually necessary and jointly sufficient components of injury, and that the disvalue of neither is reducible to the other—in particular, it is a mistake to make the disrespect identified by wrong into another damaged interest. Finally, it distinguishes between the public and private dimensions of injury, and makes some preliminary suggestions as to whether the probable remedy for these different dimensions should lie in criminal, distributive, or corrective justice.

This paper won Res Publica’s 2008 postgraduate essay prize, and was published in their Autumn 2009 edition. You can view it here: The Nature and Disvalue of Injury.

In this paper, drawn from my M.Phil. thesis on corrective justice, I ask how – and whether – the rectification of injury at which corrective justice aims is possible, and by whom it must be performed. I split the injury up into components of harm and wrong, and consider their rectification separately. First, I show that pecuniary compensation for the harm is practically plausible, because money acts as a mediator between the damaged interest and other interests. I then argue that this is also a morally plausible approach, because it does not claim too much for compensation: neither can all harms be compensated, nor can it be said when compensation is paid that the status quo ante has been restored. I argue that there is no conceptual reason for any particular agent paying this compensation. I then turn to the wrong, and reject three proposed methods of rectification. The first aims to rectify the wrong by rectifying the harm; the second deploys punitive damages; the third, punishment. After undermining each proposal, I argue that the wrong can only be rectified by a full apology, which I disaggregate into the admission of causal and moral responsibility, repudiation of the act, reform, and, in some cases, disgorgement and reparations, which I define as a good faith effort to share the burden of the victim’s harm. I argue, further, that only the injurer herself can make a full apology, and it is not something that can be coerced by other members of society. As such, whether rectification of the wrong can be a matter of corrective justice is left an open question.

This paper was published in the August 2008 edition of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, a philosophy journal published by Springer-Kluwer. You can see it here: Corrective Justice and the Possibility of Rectification.

Although the principle of noncombatant immunity has achieved widespread support across cultures and epochs, it has proved embarrassingly difficult for contemporary philosophers to justify. Both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist arguments in its favour have come up short. In recent and forthcoming work, a number of scholars occupying otherwise diverse positions in the debate have settled on the view that noncombatant immunity can be grounded in the principle of necessity. Because killing noncombatants is so rarely military necessary, it is almost always impermissible. This view has been advocated by Jeff McMahan and Henry Shue, as well as Yitzhak Benbaji, Helen Frowe, and Judith Lichtenberg. I think it is a mistake to think that necessity can play a significant role in justifying noncombatant immunity. In this paper I look in particular at the strategic nature of asymmetric conflicts, arguing that there are numerous instances when it is at least reasonable to believe that attacking noncombatants is militarily necessary. I then present an alternative argument for noncombatant immunity, grounded in the distinctive vulnerability and defencelessness of noncombatants. Continue reading »

Short paper focusing on how to characterise bystanders, obstructors and threats in the ethics of self-defense; primarily a response to ideas on this topic from Helen Frowe.

The thesis is in three chapters, each corresponding to a component of the core concept of corrective justice: the first analyses the nature of injury; the second, the method of rectification; and finally, chapter three examines the argument for correlative rectification. The first chapter begins by restricting injuries to violations of rights. It offers an account of the substantive moral content of injury that focuses on the independent disvalues of harm and wrong, before arguing that, when we assign a right, we use the relationship between rights and respect to provide a valued interest with substantive protection. It emphasises that corrective justice is concerned with the private, not the public dimensions of harm and wrong, before defending this analysis against some alternatives, as developed by Ernest Weinrib and Jules Coleman. Continue reading »

Theorists of both war and self-defence share a concern to justify harming those who pose a threat, while retaining a firm prohibition on harming those who do not. Just war theorists would thereby reinforce the principle of noncombatant immunity, a cross-cultural linchpin of permissible conduct in wars which is embarrassingly difficult for philosophers to sustain; theorists of self-defence would be able to explain the permissibility of killing innocent threats, without condoning obviously objectionable acts of murderous self-preservation. Unfortunately for both sets of theorists, however, if they adopt a certain view of permissible killing, it is difficult to explain just why it is permissible to kill threats, without by the same token bringing bystanders and noncombatants within the scope of permissible harm. The view in question states that, unless in order to avert a catastrophe, another person can be killed without his consent only if he has something to render himself liable to that killing—that is, to make it so that killing him does not also wrong him. Since becoming liable to be killed is a serious matter indeed, one should only become liable for very good reasons. Many think that responsibility for an unjustified threat is the only reason weighty enough—if you are responsible for an unjustified threat to my life, then I may kill you in self-defence without wronging you. But if it’s responsibility for a threat that matters, then on the one hand, individuals who are responsible for a threat without posing it will be liable to be killed; while on the other hand, individuals whose pose a threat for which they are not responsible (innocent threats), will not be liable. Continue reading »

Combatants in war lay waste the environment, destroy cultural heritage, wound, maim and kill. Most importantly, they kill. Such acts would in any other context be abhorrent. If warfare is to be permissible, these deeds must first be justified. A potential combatant might reason like this: People have general duties to one another, owed in virtue of their shared humanity. Among these, some are duties of justice, linked to rights held by the duty’s beneficiary. The general duty not to kill is a duty of justice, correlative with the right to life. Breaching the duty, so violating the right, is normally the gravest injustice one can commit. If warfare is to be justified, therefore, either the relevant duties of justice must not apply, or they must be overridden by stronger countervailing reasons. In the first instance warfare is just; in the second it is justified, though unjust.

Most philosophers believe warfare must be just to be justified. This includes Michael Walzer, whose Just and Unjust Wars was the fulcrum of debate in the late twentieth century, and the numerous analytical philosophers who have exposed flaws in Walzer’s arguments—most notable among them, Jeff McMahan. In War and Associative Duties, I argue that this consensus view is mistaken. Wars cannot be fought without breaching grave duties of justice. Part I defends this assertion; part II explores one way in which fighting may nevertheless be justified. Continue reading »

Kima has been drugged and abandoned at the bottom of a well. She wakes up to see Niko hurtling to-wards her. He was walking alongside the (concealed) well when a powerful gust of wind blew him down it. If Kima does nothing Niko’s body will crush her, but he will survive. Or, she can save herself, using her trusty ray gun to disintegrate his body. Most people think Kima is justified in killing Niko to save herself, even though Niko is quite innocent of the threat he poses. But why? One answer is that killing Niko is an example of eliminative agency—Kima is not benefiting from Niko’s presence, but merely eliminating the threat that he poses. This is easier to justify than manipulative agency, which would involve using Niko’s body to secure a benefit she could not enjoy in his absence. This workshop brought together some of the UK’s leading philosophers of self-defence to discuss the eliminative/manipulative agency distinction, and assess its contribution to the ethics of self-defence.

Participants: myself, Victor Tadros, Helen Frowe, & Gerald Lang. Respondents: postgraduate students & David Rodin & Jon Quong.

This was the first meeting of the Oxford War Group, which I hope will continue to meet annually under the auspices of ELAC and the University of Oxford. Our focus was on Jeff McMahan’s groundbreaking monograph, Killing in War, with new papers written by Yitzhak Benbaji, Tony Coady, Cecile Fabre, John Gardner, Larry May, David Rodin, Cheyney Ryan, and Henry Shue and Janina Dill. Responses were given by postgraduate students and early career academics. The workshop was a great success, and the proceedings are currently under review with a major journal. Besides conceiving of and convening the workshop, my own role was as respondent to Shue and Dill’s paper, and as editor of the subsequent proceedings.