Publications

Books

– Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Honorable Mention, 2022 International Studies Association International Ethics Book Award

Abstract: This book develops ethical standards to govern attempts to promote justice in foreign societies. It engages with prominent thinking on topics such as toleration, legitimacy, collective self-determination, and the perils of activism in a non-ideal world to produce a more complete, nuanced ethics of foreign political influence than others currently on offer. In so doing, it seeks to help us better understand the proper place of cross-border political contestation in global politics. Available for purchase via Oxford University Press.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

– “Not Just War by Other Means: Cross-Border Engagement as Political Struggle,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory (2023), doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12719

Abstract: Cross-border political engagements often include both elements of kinetic warfare and other, non-kinetic, forms of political contestation. Some adopt the “war paradigm” and theorize the non-kinetic elements of such engagements (along with their kinetic elements) as “warfare.” But doing so undermines the potential for cross-border politics to become and be recognized as genuinely democratic politics. This risk can be mitigated by adopting an alternative theoretical paradigm (the “political struggle paradigm”), which casts the agents of cross-border politics as co-participants in a political struggle, not enemies in a war. I make explicit the implicit assumptions behind these alternative paradigms and illustrate how the choice of paradigm can affect theorists’, observers’, and participants’ understandings of the ethical questions they face and how they should behave. I expose the war paradigm’s democratic costs and present the political struggle paradigm as an alternative frame for theorizing cross-border politics without decimating its democratic potential.

– “Justice, Injustice, and Artificial Intelligence: Lessons from Political Theory and Philosophy (Commentary),” Big Data and Society 9, 1 (2022): 1-5, doi: 10.1177/20539517221080676

Abstract: Some recent uses of artificial intelligence (AI) for, e.g., facial recognition, evaluating resumes, and sorting photographs by subject matter have revealed troubling disparities in performance or impact based on the demographic traits (like race and gender) of subject populations. These disparities raise pressing questions about how using AI can work to promote justice or entrench injustice. Political theorists and philosophers have developed nuanced vocabularies and theoretical frameworks for understanding and adjudicating disputes about what justice requires and what constitutes injustice. The interdisciplinary community committed to understanding and conscientiously using Big Data could benefit from this work. Thus, in the spirit of encouraging cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration, this piece examines contemporary scholarship in political theory and philosophy to illustrate some of the vocabularies and frameworks political theorists and philosophers have developed for thinking about justice and injustice. It then draws on these frameworks to illuminate how the use of AI can implicate questions of justice, with a focus on institutional discrimination, structural injustice, and epistemic injustice. Ultimately, the piece argues that the use of AI—far from representing a decision to take power out of human hands—represents a novel way of harnessing human power, making questions of justice central to its conscientious undertaking.

– “Promoting Justice Across Borders,” Political Studies 69, 2 (2021): 237-56, doi: 10.1177/0032321719875402

Abstract: Political theorists have written a great deal about the ethics of “intervention,” defined as states using coercion or force to interfere in foreign societies’ politics. But this work leaves much of global politics un-analyzed—both because non-state actors play an increasingly significant role in it and because its practitioners use many tactics besides force and coercion.We need an ethics of foreign influence to help us navigate the global political arena in all its complexity. Here, I begin to develop a unified theory of the ethics of deliberate attempts to promote justice in foreign societies, whether undertaken by state or non-state actors, and whatever tactics they employ. I identify two important but under-appreciated dimensions along which instances of foreign influence can differ and argue that, once we appreciate the full range of forms foreign influence can take, we’ll see it’s often immune to the common moral objections against intervention.

– “A Defense of Individualism in the Age of Corporate Rights,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 25, 3 (2017): 281-302, doi: 10.1111/jopp.12112

Abstract: Views that say corporations can be agents in their own right, metaphysically distinct from their individual members, are increasingly popular. Given the moral significance usually attributed to agency, this raises the question of whether corporate agents have moral rights comparable with those of individual agents. In this article, I argue that, even if we accept corporations can be agents, we must conclude that their moral rights are more limited than, because they are derivative of, the rights of their individual members. In so doing, I offer a version of normative individualism even those who reject methodological individualism should accept. I then apply my findings to criticize the US Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

Invited Contributions & Book Reviews

– Review of Josh Simons, Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), forthcoming, Critical AI

– “Political Craft as Moral Innovation,” Philosophy and Global Affairs (2024): 189-94, doi: 10.5840/pga2024416

Contribution to a book forum on Inés Valdez’s Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

– “Citizen Responsibility and Group Agency,” European Journal of Political Theory 23, 2 (2024): 267-76, doi: 10.1177/14748851221105946

Review essay on Holly Lawford-Smith’s Not in Their Name: Are Citizens Culpable for Their States’ Actions? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) and Avia Pasternak’s Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their State’s Wrondgoings? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)

– “Reflections on Reform Intervention: A Reply to Critics,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2023), doi: 10.1080/13698230.2023.2295760

Response to critics as part of a book forum on my Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2021)

– “Toleration and Political Change,” in Mitja Sardoč ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Toleration (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-03227-2_57-1

– “Toward an Individualist Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, 3 (2020): 360-71, doi: 10.1177/0305829820935520

Contribution to a book forum on Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019)

– Review of C.A.J. Coady, Ned Dobos, and Sagar Sanyal eds., Challenges for Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical Demand & Political Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Journal of Moral Philosophy, 17, 2 (2020): 229-32, doi: 10.1163/17455243-01702005