Selected Papers

1 /  When Suicide is Unjust Violence: Power, Structural Harms and Moral Culpability 

This article shows how patterns of suicide and self-harm can manifest a form of structural injustice and violence inflicted on the vulnerable. It introduces the original concept of induced self-violence (ISV) to identify the corresponding moral culpability of the state, employers, and other agents. ISV occurs when an institution inflicts a degrading psychosocial environment on a group when it is foreseeable this will result in heightened rates of suicide or self-harm—whether from mental illness or as a means of escape or protest...read more.

2 / Domination and Disobedience: Protest, Coercion and the Limits of an Appeal to Justice 

I offer a conceptual framework for assessing the normative legitimacy of coercive disobedience—involving threats, disruption, force, and deceit—by social movements. I offer a principled defense of coercive disobedience, not only in repressive states but in plausibly democratic societies....read more.

3 / Against Online Public Shaming: Ethical Problems with Mass Social Media 

Online Public Shaming (OPS) is a form of norm enforcement that involves collectively imposing reputational costs on a person for having a certain kind of moral character. We argue that this constitutes an informal collective punishment that it is presumptively wrong to impose (or seek to impose) on others. OPS functions as a form of ostracism that fails to show equal basic respect to its targets....read more.

4 / Fragility as Strength: The Ethics and Politics of Hunger Strikes 

This article provides a political theory of the hunger strike, and sets out principles for its normative evaluation. My main focus is on recent actions by detained migrants, though the historical practice of hunger strikes is, of course, much broader, spanning cultural and ideological divides, including the British suffragettes, Gandhi, Irish republicans, the ANC, Turkish communists, Palestinian militants, Guantanamo Bay detainees, and many thousands of ‘regular’ prisoners with no specific political affiliation or status...read more.