Welcome

Thanks for visiting my site. I've set this up to offer an introduction to my work, as both a photographer and a philosopher.

I'm a political philosopher, trained in analytical political theory, with a special interest in the international dimensions of politics. My D.Phil., which was examined and passed by David Rodin and Jeff McMahan in February 2009, was on the ethics of war. I'm now under contract with OUP (philosophy) to turn it into a book, provisionally titled: Justifying War: Battlefield Ethics. You can read about the thesis and my current writing projects by clicking the 'research' panel above, and you can read about my published writing in the 'Publications' panel. The thesis has just been awarded the biennial American Philosophical Association 2011 Frank Chapman Sharp Memorial Prize for the best unpublished monograph on the philosophy of war and peace. Previous winners include Jeff McMahan, Larry May, Brian Orend, and David Rodin. I'm now a research associate at the institute for ethics, law and armed conflict at Oxford. You can read about it here. My CV is available on the fourth tab, and will tell you anything else you need to know about my career. I have also made some of my teaching materials available.

I love political philosophy, it's an incredibly creative, collaborative, rewarding experience, especially at Oxford. It's not all that I do, however, I'm also a keen photographer. I started out with travel photography, and am always looking to expand my portfolio. I also have a business, selling my panoramic pictures of Oxford (and some other places), which I started in April 2008. From March to September 2009, I travelled around Africa with my wife, Lu, on public transport from Agadir in Morocco to Zagazig in Egypt, stopping at a town beginning with every letter of the alphabet on the way (we crossed the contintent from north to south, down the western side). You can read about our trip at www.alphabettravel.com. You can see a collection of all my photography at www.sethlazar.com. I recently won the Saturday Telegraph 'Big Picture' travel photography competition, you can see my winning entry here. And another competition winner, this one at Ephotozine, is here. I've also done some amateur wedding photography for family and friends, and am going to be going pro some time soon.

Research

Justifying War: Battlefield Ethics (Monograph under contract with OUP Philosophy)

I am now revising my D.Phil. thesis (see below) to form a monograph on the ethics of war, to be published by OUP in 2012. The core structure of the thesis is retained: part I focuses on undermining attempts to ground war in self-defence, and in particular to show that wars can be fought consistently with individual rights (the basic assumption of contemporary just war theory, from Walzer to McMahan). Part II concentrates on establishing alternative grounds for justifying war, even if rights-violations are unavoidable. It focuses in particular on showing how the duty to protect can override duties not to kill, and, like the thesis, gives a prominent role to associative duties. It also fills gaps in the thesis, looking at the justification of humanitarian interventions, and at alternative foundations for the principle of noncombatant immunity. The book will also introduce two important theoretical distinctions. First, between what I'm presently calling Combatant and Command Ethics—which distinguishes between accounts of the ethics of war that address combatants, and those that address political leaders. Second, institutional and interpersonal accounts of the morality of war. Institutional accounts focus, obviously, on the moral reasons that derive from the institutions engaged in warfare, in particular states and armed forces. Interpersonal accounts focus on the moral reasons that apply directly to individuals, in virtue of their relations with the individuals they confront on the battlefield. Contemporary philosophical analysis of the ethics of war is primarily focused on Combatant Ethics, and mostly ignores institutional reasons, focusing on interpersonal reasons. My first book will follow this lead, and ask whether warfare can be justified, despite the widespread violations of rights that occur, at the level of interpersonal Combatant Ethics. My second book will concentrate on institutional reasons, and look at Command Ethics in greater depth.

On the Moral Importance of Winning (working paper)

Contemporary advocates of the rights-based account of war (RBAW) have inadequately theorised the moral importance of winning (MIW). Their focus on the liabilities of states and individuals has led them away from properly assessing the purposes of using military force. But this neglect is unsustainable—both advocates and critics of RBAW depend on a well-developed understanding of MIW, both for their internal coherence, and to ensure they are broadly consonant with common sense. And yet, adherents to RBAW are ill-equipped to elucidate MIW, especially in defensive wars against a less-than murderous enemy. In particular, their commitment to impartiality and ethical individualism prevents them from accommodating collectivist dimensions of MIW, while their restrictive focus on interpersonal morality obscures the moral importance of the institutions which structure war, and to which war is such a threat. In tihs paper, I defend this analysis. First, I explain what I mean by RBAW. I then illustrate RBAW's indifference to MIW, before explaining why MIW should matter—both to RBAW itself, and to those who reject it. I then show how RBAW struggles to explain why winning matters, especially in wars of national defence. I consider its individualism and impartiality first, then its restrictive focus on interpersonal morality, in contrast with institutional morality. I conclude by illustrating how both RBAW's advocates and its critics should emerge from this problem. This paper will be presented at the 2010 Oxford War Group meeting, and will be published in the resulting edited volume, provisionally titled Why We Fight: The Purposes of Military Force.

Necessity, Vulnerability and Noncombatant Immunity (working paper)

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. My thought is that the more defenceless one’s target is, the more presumptively wrongful the attack, other things equal. I ground this thought in arguments that focus on both the attacker and the victim. Cowardice and cruelty mar attacks on the defenceless; they are a betrayal of the duty of care that the strong owe the weak. As a victim, to be attacked when defenceless is qualitatively worse than when you can defend yourself—both because you will suffer more, and because you are utterly disempowered by these attacks. At least when you can defend yourself, you have some control over your destiny. Undoubtedly noncombatant immunity has many sources, of which this is just one. And undoubtedly necessity can play a role therein, sometimes. But if we don't want noncombatant immunity to be vulnerable to the contingent calculations of necessity, we must seek more intrinsic arguments against attacking civilians. I presented this paper in Belgrade, July 2010. It will form part of my book, and I will be submitting it to journals for independent publication in the Autumn.

War (entry for International Encyclopaedia of Ethics)

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 impossible. Invited submission for the Wiley Blackwell International Encyclopaedia of Ethics.

Bystanders, Obstructors and Threats (working paper)

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.

Scepticism About the Eliminative/Manipulative Agency Distinction (working paper)

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.

One solution insists that one becomes liable to be killed in virtue of posing a threat (or perhaps an unjustified threat). Responsibility is irrelevant. This does not strike me as plausible, but I do not try to refute it here. I focus instead on a different move, according to which we should not aim to show that the threat is liable to attack, but instead to argue that—though still wrong—it is less wrong to kill him than to kill a bystander, and therefore he may permissibly be killed in the pursuit of some other good, even when that good is much less than the aversion of a catastrophe. Influenced by a celebrated paper by Warren Quinn, a number of philosophers have recently pursued this line of argument.

Quinn thought we should recognise a difference between harmful agency that makes use of its victim, and agency that eliminates a threat that he poses. To see another person as an object of use, a tool that I can deploy for ends to which he does not consent, is on Quinn's view to exploit his presence, and so manifest a special sort of disrespect for him. The agent of exploitative harm 'has something in mind for his victims—he proposes to involve them in some circumstance that will be useful to him precisely because it involves them. He sees them as material to be strategically shaped or framed by his agency'. The victims of harmful eliminative agency, by contrast, are not plausibly viewed as being used in this way. When I defend myself against an innocent threat—made so, for example, by temporary psychosis—I do not harm him in order to make use of him, instead I aim simply to avert the threat that he poses to me.

We should distinguish, then, between eliminative and manipulative harm: eliminative harm treats the victim as a threat or an obstacle to be removed, and therefore does not involve benefiting from the victim's presence; manipulative harm makes use of the victim to achieve an exogenous goal. Quinn claims that manipulative harm is harder to justify than eliminative harm. If this is true, then it might solve the problems of both theorists of self-defence, and just war theorists. If deliberate attacks on noncombatants harm them manipulatively, while attacks on combatants harm them eliminatively, then that helps explain why it is so much harder to justify the former tactic than the latter. Likewise we could explain the permissibility of killing innocent threats, without opening the door to obviously impermissible acts of self-preservation. The eliminative/manipulative distinction (or E/M distinction, for short) has obvious potential.

This paper examines the E/M distinction, and in particular Jon Quong's and Helen Frowe's recent defences of it, from a position of scepticism. I identify two broad worries that any satisfactory account of the distinction will need to address, then consider Quong's and Frowe's responses, which I find broadly unsatisfactory. Although I think the first of these worries could be more satisfactorily addressed within the framework of the E/M distinction, the second identifies, I think, a fatal flaw in the account. The subtle arguments developed by Frowe and Quong, however, do lead to a superior solution to the problem the E/M distinction was supposed to solve, and by exploring and developing recent arguments by Victor Tadros, I think we can alight on a suitable distinction between killing bystanders and threats, that both matches and explains our considered judgments about these cases, without falling into the traps to which the E/M distinction is vulnerable. This is for the book, though I may seek independent publication as an article in the Autumn.

Associative Duties and the Ethics of War (Working Paper)

Associative duties are owed to a person in virtue of a special relationship he or she shares with the duty-bearer. I am interested in the roles that these duties can play in the ethics of killing in war. This paper summarises some of the arguments from my doctoral thesis, which I am now trying to turn into a book. It aims to make three points. First, to explain why philosophers of war tend to ignore associativist morality, and to motivate change. Second, to characterise that morality, in particular to specify the criteria that special relationships should fill to ground relevant associative duties. Third, to explore the restrictive and permissive roles those duties can play in the ethics of war. This is for the book.

War and Associative Duties (D.Phil. Thesis)

Last year I finished my doctoral thesis in political theory, researching the role that associative duties—that is, duties owed in virtue of our special relationships with family, friends, and perhaps compatriots—might play in the the morality of war. The thesis is titled 'War and Associative Duties'.

The argument is set up in two parts. I start out by criticising a particular view of the ethics of war, according to which some wars can be fought without many rights being violated, at least by the justified side. The tradition of just war theory, and contemporary philosophers who ground the ethics of war in principles of self-defence, have generally concurred on this view, but I think it's a mistake. Obviously, in most wars many noncombatants will be killed, whether intentionally, recklessly, or even when due care is taken. I think these people suffer violations of their rights. But I am also sceptical about attempts to show that even combatants on the unjustified side lose their rights to life: after all, your rights to life are a fundamental part of your moral status, to be the sort of being it's not wrong to kill is to be the same as a mosquito, or a wasp, not a person. Philosophers have tried to argue that combatants are responsible for the wars they fight, but many soldiers fight with the reasonable belief—in conditions of radical uncertainty and great risk—that their cause is justified. Ultimately, it's a matter of luck which side you're on (not in all cases, of course). And I don't think moral status should be vulnerable to fluctuations in luck.

So, if warfare is always a necessarily duty-breaching endeavour, then should we just be pacifists, and forego all wars? While I think this is a live possibility, there is an alternative: warfare might, in some cases, be all things considered justified, though it does involve breaches of duty. There may be other duties we have, which we would breach if we don't fight, and fighting might in fact be the lesser of two evils. What other duties, then, might play this role? In the second part of the thesis I explore the possibility that associative duties might be relevant to the justification of killing in war: we may have duties to protect our loved ones, friends, and political communities, and indeed people at large, the breach of which can in some cases be worse than breaching the duties involved in fighting a war.

Suppose, for example, your country has launched a war which you know to be unjust, and the enemy is justifiably launching air raids against your military installations. Those air raids will predictably cause a considerable number of foreseeable but unintended casualties, but, according to the standard view of the doctrine of double effect, that 'collateral damage' is justified. Suppose, however, that it is your family that will be affected—your son or daughter who will become collateral damage. Are you justified in firing Surface-to-Air Missiles at the incoming aircraft? I think that you may be, and the most plausible reason is that your associative duty to protect your family overrides your duty not to harm even justified attackers.

The supervisor of my D.Phil. thesis was Professor Henry Shue, one of the foremost philosophers in the ethics of international affairs. The examiners were David Rodin and Jeff McMahan, of Oxford and Rutgers. The unpublished parts of the thesis won the Frank Chapman Sharp American Philosophical Association for the best unpublished monograph on the philosophy of war and peace.

Publications

2010    'A Liberal Defence of (Some) Duties to Compatriots', Journal of Applied Philosophy, forthcoming

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.

2010 'The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 38:2, 180-213

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' for McMahan's theory of killing in war.

You can read the paper here.

2009 'The Nature & Disvalue of Injury', Res Publica, 15:3, pp. 289-304

This paper 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.

2009 'Responsibility, Risk, & Killing in Self-Defense', Ethics, 119:4, 699-728

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.

2009 'Do Associative Duties Really Not Matter?', Journal of Political Philosophy, 17:1, 90-101

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.

2008 'Corrective Justice & the Possibility of Rectification', Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, 11:4, 355–68

In this paper, 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 online here.

Curriculum Vitae: Seth Lazar

Teaching Materials

Political Theory Syllabus

War and Global Justice Syllabus

Ethics Syllabus

Ethics of Killing Syllabus

Bioethics Syllabus

Essay Writing Guide

Revision Guide

Galleries

You can view my pictures in different ways, depending what you're interested in. My travel photography is at www.sethlazar.com.

If it's my commercial photography you're interested in, you can see my collection of panoramic art prints of the Oxford skyline, at Oxford Panoramas. Go to that page if you want to see art prints of the dreaming spires. If you would like to see my Oxford framed canvas prints, then this is the gallery.

For vertical panoramas of the Radclife Camera, St Mary's Church, and Magdalen College, try here and here. If you would like to see Bamburgh Castle panoramic prints and Dunstanburgh Castle panoramic prints, then these are the links, here and here.

My Cornwall shots, from Kynance Cove, Mullion Cove, and Coverack Bay, can be found by following those links.

I also have global panoramas, from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Spallumcheen, Canada. You can see them here.

I'll also be showcasing pictures on Lu and my blog for our African Alphabet trip, from March to September 2009. Check it out at www.alphabettravel.com.