History is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.Edward Gibbon,The Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireI argue that there are duties that can be called ‘Moral duties due to history’ or, in short, ‘Duties to History’ (DTH). My claim is not the familiar thought that we need to learn from history on how to live better in the present and going forward, but that history itself creates moral duties. In addition to those (...) obligations we currently recognise in response to the present and the future, there also exist special obligations in response to the past. If convincing, this means that our lives ought to be guided, in part, not only by our obligations to the living but by our DTH. This is a surprising result, with significant and sometimes perplexing implications. My focus is on the obligations of individuals in the light of history rather than on collective duties.I argue that there are duties that can be called ‘Moral duties due to history’ or, in short, ‘Duties to History’ (DTH). My claim is not the familiar thought that we need to learn from history on how to live better in the present and going forward, but that history itself creates moral duties. In addition to those obligations we currently recognise in response to the present and the future, there also exist special obligations in response to the past; such as obligations to good people in the past, but going beyond them. If convincing, this means that our lives ought to be guided, in part, not only by our obligations to the living but by our DTH. This is a surprising result, with significant and sometimes perplexing implications. My focus is on the obligations of individuals in the light of history rather than on collective duties. (shrink)

There is widely thought to be a proportionality constraint on harming others in self-defense, such that an act of defensive force can be impermissible because the harm it would inflict on an attacker is too great relative to the harm to the victim it would prevent. But little attention has been given to whether a corresponding constraint exists in the ethics of compensation, and, if so, what the nature of that constraint is. This article explores the issue of proportionality as (...) it applies to the liability to compensate. The view that some perpetrators are not liable to pay full compensation because doing so would be disproportionately burdensome is clarified and defended, and it is asked what view we should adopt instead. A key step in that inquiry is an argument that someone is liable to bear the cost of compensating for an injury if and only if she would have been liable to bear that same cost in defense against that same injury ex ante. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen presented a powerful argument against the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which I henceforth abbreviate as ‘PSR’. For decades, the consensus was that this argument successfully refuted PSR. However, now a growing consensus holds that van Inwagen’s argument is fatally flawed, at least when ‘sufficient reason’ is understood in terms of ground, for on this understanding, an ineliminable premiss of van Inwagen’s argument is demonstrably false and cannot be repaired. I will argue that this growing consensus is mistaken (...) and that a powerful argument relevantly similar to van Inwagen’s should still concern us, even when we understand ‘sufficient reason’ in terms of ground. (shrink)

It is more or less uncontroversial that when we harm someone through wrongful conduct we incur an obligation to compensate her. But sometimes compensation is impossible: when the victim is killed, for example. Other times, only partial compensation is possible. In this article, I take some initial steps towards exploring this largely ignored issue. I argue that the perpetrator of a wrongful harm incurs a duty to promote the impartial good in proportion to the amount of harm that cannot be (...) made up for by compensating her victim. (shrink)