If I decide to disclose information about myself, this act can undermine other people’s ability to effectively conceal information about themselves. One case in point involves genetic information: if I share ‘my’ genetic information with others, I thereby also reveal genetic information about my biological relatives. Such dependencies are well-known in the privacy literature and are often referred to as ‘privacy dependencies’. Some take the existence of privacy dependencies to generate a moral duty to sometimes avoid sharing information about oneself. (...) If true, we argue, then it is sometimes justified for others to impose harm on the person sharing the information to prevent them from doing so. This is a highly revisionary implication. Hence, one must either endorse a highly revisionary view on what one may do to protect one’s privacy, or one must reject the view that privacy dependencies can be used to justify a moral duty that constrains choices about sharing information about oneself. (shrink)

Why does it matter that those who fight wars be authorized by the communities on whose behalf they claim to fight? I argue that lacking authorization generates a moral cost, which counts against a war's proportionality, and that having authorization allows the transfer of reasons from the members of the community to those who fight, which makes the war more likely to be proportionate. If democratic states are better able than non-democratic states and sub-state groups to gain their community's authorization, (...) this means that some wars will be proportionate if fought by democracies, disproportionate if not. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, there has been a huge amount of work on which things you can kill in self‐defense and why. This paper surveys that work.

We all have agent-relative permissions to give extra weight to our own well-being. If you and two strangers are drowning, and you can save either yourself or two strangers, you have an agent-relative permission to save yourself. But is it possible for you to ‘vest’ your agent-relative permissions in a third party – a ‘proxy’ – who can enact your agent-centered permissions on your behalf, thereby permitting her to do what would otherwise be impermissible? Some might think that the answer (...) is ‘no’; it is definitive of agent-centered permissions that they apply only to the individuals ineliminably referenced in the content of that reason, which means that they lack reason-giving force for any ostensible proxy. The purpose of this paper is to show that vesting agent-relative permissions is indeed possible, provide an account of how agent-relative permissions are vested by considering the structure of rights more generally, and show that we have a right to vest such permission in this way. (shrink)

War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities. Thus, fisticuffs between individual persons do not count as a war, nor does a gang fight, nor does a feud on the order of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. War is a phenomenon which occurs only between political communities, defined as those entities which either are states or intend to become states (in order to allow for civil war). Classical war is international war, a war (...) between different states, like the two World Wars. But just as frequent is war within a state between rival groups or communities, like the American Civil War. Certain political pressure groups, like terrorist organizations, might also be considered “political communities,” in that they are associations of people with a political purpose and, indeed, many of them aspire to statehood or to influence the development of statehood in certain lands. (shrink)