Christian Barry | The Australian National University (original) (raw)

Papers by Christian Barry

Journal of Moral Philosophy

When someone is poised to fail to fulfil a moral duty, we can respond in a variety of ways. We mi... more When someone is poised to fail to fulfil a moral duty, we can respond in a variety of ways. We might remind them of their duty, or seek to persuade them through argument. Or we might intervene forcibly to ensure that they act in accordance with their duty. Some duties appear to be such that the duty-bearer can be liable to forcible interference when this is necessary to ensure that they comply with them. We’ll call duties that carry such liabilities enforcement-apt. Not all duties seem to be enforcement-apt. Some, for example, accept that a person in a monogamous marriage has a moral duty to refrain from infidelity, but deny that a spouse can be compelled to comply with their duty to be faithful without transgressing her rights. More controversially, some think that our duties to assist others in severe need are not enforcement-apt. What could explain the contrast between duties that are enforcement-apt while and those that are not? We’ll call this the puzzle of enforceability and o...

The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, 2019

The Limits of the 'Australian Solution', Nov 27, 2017

Refugees and reflections on the limits of feasibilitybased policy arguments Advocates of the so... more Refugees and reflections on the limits of feasibilitybased policy arguments Advocates of the socalled 'Australian solution' often argue that it represents the only 'feasible' strategy for effectively addressing the refugee crisis. However, this involves serious errors about the nature and proper use of feasibilitybased arguments in politics and public policy. Hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants have sought refuge in Europe over the past several years. A great many of these migrants have fled war in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries. Many thousands of irregular migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean during this period, and countries in which they arrive face significant challenges in assessing their claims to refugee status and finding 'durable solutions' in a timely fashion. Bref, policymakers have scrambled to find effective strategies to address this crisis.

Ethics & International Affairs, 2011

Human rights occupy a privileged position within contemporary politics. They are widely taken to ... more Human rights occupy a privileged position within contemporary politics. They are widely taken to constitute perhaps the most fundamental standards for evaluating the conduct of states with respect to persons residing within their borders. They are enshrined in numerous international documents, national constitutions, and treaties; and those that have been incorporated into international law are monitored and enforced by numerous international and regional institutional bodies. Human rights have been invoked to justify popular revolt, secession, large-scale political reform, as well as forms of international action ranging from the imposition of conditions on foreign assistance and loans to economic sanctions (as in South Africa and Burma) and military intervention (as in Kosovo and East Timor). Michael Ignatieff has gone so far as to claim that human rights have become “the major article of faith of a secular culture that fears it believes in nothing else,” and one might add that th...

The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice, Feb 27, 2020

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017

The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants holds that combatants on either side of a war ha... more The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants holds that combatants on either side of a war have equal moral status even if one side is fighting a just war while the other is not. This chapter examines arguments that have been offered for and against this doctrine, including the collectivist position famously articulated by Walzer and McMahan’s influential individualist critique. We also explore collectivist positions that have rejected the moral equality doctrine and arguments that some individualists have offered in its favor. We defend a noncategorical version of the moral equality doctrine, according to which combatants on either side of a just war sometimes (but not always) have equal moral status. On our view nonculpable combatants are not liable to attack even when they fight for an unjust cause.

Journal of Global Ethics, 2021

In this brief article, I will raise some challenges to each of Pablo Gilabert’s arguments for a H... more In this brief article, I will raise some challenges to each of Pablo Gilabert’s arguments for a Human Right to Democracy (HRD). First, I will question whether the instrumental case for affirming a HRD is as strong as Gilabert and others have suggested. I will then call into question the argument from moral risk, arguing that, for any particular country, we should not operate with a strong presumption that they should pursue further democratization as a high-priority goal. Finally, I will consider the strength of our intuitive support for a stringent human right to democracy. As Gilabert points out, there could be a genuine HRD, even if it did not always provide us with an overriding reason to call for the implementation of democracy. I will explore how much normative priority claims to respect democratic decisions have by considering what we have reason to do when democratic decisions would lead to violations of other human rights.

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2021

Some of the most invidious injustices are the seemingly results of impersonal workings of rigged ... more Some of the most invidious injustices are the seemingly results of impersonal workings of rigged social structures. Who bears responsibility for the injustices perpetrated through them? Iris Marion Young-the preeminent theorist of responsibility for structural injustice-argues that we should be responsible mostly in forward-looking ways for remedying structural injustice, rather than liable in a backward-looking way for creating it. In so doing she distinguishes between individualized responsibility for past structural injustice and collective responsibility for preventing future structural injustice. We reject both those arguments but embrace and extend Young's third line of analysis, which was much less fully developed in her work. We agree that people should take a stand against structural injustice, even if it is likely to prove futile. That is in fact a position that is widely endorsed in social practice.

Ethics, 2021

Suppose one of your actions imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but a s... more Suppose one of your actions imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but a second reduces the risk of harm by a corresponding amount. By pairing the two actions together to form a set of actions that is risk-neutral, can you thereby make your overall course of conduct permissible? We argue that the answer to this is sometimes yes and sometimes no. We propose a criterion, the Principle of Aggregate Risk-Imposition, that distinguishes the two kinds of case, and apply it to the offsetting of personal greenhouse gas emissions.

Law and Philosophy, 2020

Recently, Gerhard Øverland and Alec Walen have developed novel and interesting theories of noncon... more Recently, Gerhard Øverland and Alec Walen have developed novel and interesting theories of nonconsequentialism. Unlike other nonconsequentialist theories such as the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), each of their theories denies that an agent's mental states are (fundamentally) relevant for determining how stringent their moral reasons are against harming others. Instead, Øverland and Walen seek to distinguish morally between instances of harming in terms of the circumstances of the people who will be harmed, rather than in features of the agent doing the harming. In this paper, we argue that these theories yield coun-terintuitive verdicts across a broad range of cases that other nonconsequentialist theories (including the DDE) handle with relative ease. We also argue that Wa-len's recent attempt to reformulate this type of theory so that it does not have such implications is unsuccessful.

Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), 2019

In this paper, we take up the question of whether there comes a point at which one is no longer m... more In this paper, we take up the question of whether there comes a point at which one is no longer morally obliged to do further good, even at very low cost to oneself. More specifically, they ask: under precisely what conditions is it plausible to say that that “point” has been reached? A crude account might focus only on, say, the amount of good the agent has already done, but a moment’s reflection shows that this is indeed too crude. We develop and defend a pluralistic account according to which considerations of three types are all relevant to whether one has satisfied one’s duties to assist: types and quantities of sacrifice made), the beliefs and intentions that informed the donor’s decisions), and the extent to which the donations in question succeeded in generating value.

Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2018

Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, 2019

In this chapter we introduce the nascent literature on Moral Uncertainty Theory and explore its a... more In this chapter we introduce the nascent literature on Moral
Uncertainty Theory and explore its application to the criminal law.
Moral Uncertainty Theory seeks to address the question of what we
ought to do when we are uncertain about what to do because we are torn
between rival moral theories. For instance, we may have some credence
in one theory that tells us to do A but also in another that tells us
to do B. We examine how we might decide whether or not to criminalize
some conduct when we are unsure as to whether or not the conduct is
morally permitted, and whether or not it is permissible to criminalize
the conduct. We also look at how we might make sentencing decisions
under moral uncertainty. We argue that Moral Uncertainty Theory can be
an illuminating way to address these questions, but find that doing so
is a lot more complicated than applying Moral Uncertainty Theory to
individual conduct.

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutio... more When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

In her inventive and tightly argued book Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe defends the view that bys... more In her inventive and tightly argued book Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe defends the view that bystanders—those who do not pose threats to others—cannot be liable to being harmed in self-defence or in defence of others. On her account, harming bystanders always infringes their rights against being harmed, since they have not acted in any way to forfeit them. According to Frowe, harming bystanders can be justified only when it constitutes a lesser evil. In this brief essay, I make the case that some bystanders can indeed be liable to harm. They can be liable, I will argue, because they can be morally responsible for threats of harm, and in becoming responsible they can forfeit their rights. While bystanders cannot be responsible for initiating threats, they can become responsible for the persistence of threats, and for culpably failing to prevent them from being initiated in the first place.

Indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Latin America make land claims and support them with... more Indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Latin America make land claims and support them with a variety of arguments. Some, such as Zapatistas and the Mapuche, have appealed to the " ancestral " or " historical " connections between specific communities and the land. Other groups, such as MST in Brazil, have appealed to the extremely unequal distribution of the land and the effects of this on the poor; the land in this case is seen mainly as a means for securing a decent standard of living for members of disadvantaged groups. Although there is a large literature on the history as well as the social and political dimensions of land contes-tations and conflicts in Latin America, the question of whether the land claims put forward by disadvantaged groups can be morally justified has not been adequately examined. In this essay, we investigate the scope and limits of appeals to what we shall call assistance-based, contribution-based, and benefitting-based moral reasons with respect to land claims made by these disadvantaged groups. RESUMEN Distintas comunidades en América Latina (indígenas y no indígenas) han realizado recla-mos de tierras sobre la base de una variedad de argumentos. Algunas de esas comunidades y grupos, tal como los zapatistas y el pueblo Mapuche, han efectuado estos reclamos apelando a conexiones " ancestrales " o " históricas " entre comunidades específicas y un territorio particular. Otros grupos, tal como el movimiento sin tierra (MST) en Brasil, sustentan sus re-clamos en rechazo a una desigual extrema en la distribución de la tierra y los efectos que este fenómeno tiene sobre los más pobres. En este caso, la tierra se concibe como un medio esen-cial para asegurar un nivel de vida digno para los miembros de esos grupos desaventajados. Aunque existe una extensa literatura sobre la historia, las dimensiones políticas y sociales de los reclamos territoriales en América Latina, la pregunta sobre en qué medida esos reclamos puede ser moralmente justificados no ha sido adecuadamente examinada.

Journal of Moral Philosophy

The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, 2019

The Limits of the 'Australian Solution', Nov 27, 2017

Ethics & International Affairs, 2011

The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice, Feb 27, 2020

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017

Journal of Global Ethics, 2021

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2021

Ethics, 2021

Law and Philosophy, 2020

Effective Altruism: Philosophical Issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Hilary Greaves & Theron Pummer (eds.), 2019

Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2018

Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, 2019

In our book Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency (Cambridge University ... more In our book Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2016), we argue for conclusions about the meaning and stringency of different kinds of responsibilities to address poverty and other harms. We employ a plurality of strategies, which we describe briefly here and defend against some criticisms. A central strategy that we employ is to appeal to our reader's intuitive judgements about cases, real and hypothetical. For example, we argue in our book against very stringent principles of assistance-based responsibilities by appealing to what we take to be the widely shared intuitive judgement that a person is not ordinarily morally required to sacrifice a leg to save a drowning innocent, and for very stringent principles not to do harm to innocents by appealing to the intuition that we could not drown a stranger to prevent the loss of a leg. Other appeals concern more general principles, such as the idea that when a person gives rise to some cost that either they or some others will have to bear, then fairness dictates that they be willing to take on some of that cost. We'd like to make it clear from the outset that in appealing to intuitive judgements about cases and more general principles, we are not positing a distinct sense, or faculty, that provides a kind of direct access to moral truths. This view of moral intuitions had currency a century ago. 1 But, as Bernard Williams observed, the term " intuition " no longer carries the implications it once did. He writes: 'Intuitions used to be taken as an intellectual power of arriving at abstract truths, and its application to *

The extent and severity of global poverty are among the most profoundly disturbing aspects of our... more The extent and severity of global poverty are among the most profoundly disturbing aspects of our world. Statistics provide some sense of the scale of the problem. But they are relatively sterile, not least from being so often repeated, and fail to capture important features of the lived experience of those in severe poverty. We – relatively affluent people in the developed world – are accustomed to being able to change our circumstances for the better through hard work. We are able to guard against misfortune fairly easily most of the time. Those in severe poverty cannot do so and live in a precarious state. What would it be like for an unexpected illness or weather event to push us from just barely meeting our needs to not meeting them at all? What would it be like for our children or others close to us to die or experience debilitating illness from what (in our current state of affluence) causes only relatively short-term inconvenience? When we think about poverty, to the extent that we can, in terms of its implications for day-today experience, its prevalence and persistence seems all the more terrible. But it is one thing to recognize a terrible problem and quite another to establish who, if anyone, is responsible for doing something about it and what they might sensibly do. This book is a philosophical exploration of the nature of the moral responsibilities of relatively affluent individuals in the developed world to address global poverty and the arguments that philosophers have offered for our having these responsibilities.

Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe, eds. Oxford University Press, 2017

The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants—we'll refer to it throughout this chapter as Equ... more The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants—we'll refer to it throughout this chapter as Equality—holds that combatants on either side of a war have equal moral status so long as they abide by certain norms governing how wars must be fought. Proponents of Equality distinguish sharply between the issue of whether the resort to war is justified and the issue of who may permissibly kill in war. There are constraints on what soldiers may do in war—they can become guilty of criminal offenses when they use unjust means in pursuing their war aims. However, that they are involved in an unjust war and even that they are fighting for an unjust cause is, as Walzer puts it, 'the king's business—a matter of state policy, not of individual volition'. 1 Their participation in the war is not something for which they can be held to account morally. The debates about Equality are closely related to other hotly contested issues, such as whether combatants on either side should have the same legal protections, and whether and how the moral distinction between combatants and non-combatants is justified. In this chapter, we will set aside those debates to focus squarely on the moral justifications that can be offered for Equality, as well as the critiques of those justifications.

Many approaches to addressing labour injustices—shortfalls from minimally decent wages and workin... more Many approaches to addressing labour injustices—shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions— focus on how governments should orient themselves toward other states in which such phenomena take place, or to the firms that are involved with such practices. But of course the question of how to regard such labour practices must also be faced by individuals, and individual consumers of the goods that are produced through these practices in particular. Consumers have become increasingly aware of their connections to complex global production processes that often involve such injustice. For example, activist campaigns have exposed wrongful harm in factories producing clothes, shoes and mobile phones and farms producing coffee, tea and cocoa. These campaigns have promoted the message to ordinary people that by becoming connected to unjust labour practices through their purchasing behaviour, they acquire special additional moral responsibilities to contribute to reforming such practices, or to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing that result from them.

Despite the prevalence of human rights discourse, the very idea or concept of a human right remai... more Despite the prevalence of human rights discourse, the very idea or concept of a human right remains obscure. In particular, it is unclear what is supposed to be special or distinctive about human rights. In this paper, we consider two recent attempts to answer this challenge, James Griffin’s “personhood account” and Charles Beitz’s “practice-based account”, and argue that neither is entirely satisfactory. We then conclude with a suggestion for what a more adequate account might look like – what we call the “structural pluralist account” of human rights.