My current research is on the ethics of war and peace, and on the ethics of economic statecraft. I am also developing an interest in the ethics of espionage on the one hand, and the ethics of cultural heritage on the other hand. You can find an outline of the project, together with a full list of my publications, at http://www.cecilefabre.weebly.comRecent papers are available on this site in PDF format.Employment:1998-2000: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford2000-2007: Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Political Theory, London School of Economics and Political Science2007-2010: Professor of Political Theory, University of Edinburgh2010-2014: Professor of Political Philosophy/Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy, Lincoln College, Oxford2014-present: Senior Research Fellow in Politics, All Souls College, OxfordEducation:1992: BA in History, La Sorbonne1993: MA in Political Theory, University of York1997: D.Phil in Politics, University of Oxford (supervised by G. A. Cohen)Honors2011: election to the British Academy. Phone: +44 1865 279282 Address: All Souls College
Oxford OX14AL
United Kingdom
At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion ... more At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion has been a prominent tool of foreign policy. In the modern era, sovereign states and multilateral institutions have imposed economic sanctions on dictatorial regimes or would-be nuclear powers as an alternative to waging war. They have conditioned offers of aid, loans, and debt relief on recipients' willingness to implement market and governance reforms. Such methods interfere in freedom of trade and the internal affairs of sovereign states, yet are widely used as a means to advance human rights. But are they morally justifiable?Cecile Fabre's Economic Statecraft: Human Rights, Sanctions, and Conditionality provides the first sustained response to that question. For millennia, philosophers have explored the ethics of war, but rarely the ethics of economic carrots and sticks. Yet the issues raised could hardly be more urgent. On what grounds can we justify sanctions, in light of the harms they inflict on civilians? If, as some argue, there is a human right to basic assistance, should donors be allowed to condition the provision of aid on recipients' willingness to do their bidding?Drawing on human rights theories, theories of justifiable harm, and examples such as IMF lending practices and international sanctions on Russia and North Korea, Fabre offers a defense of economic statecraft in some of its guises. An empirically attuned work of philosophy, Economic Statecraft lays out a normative framework for an important tool of diplomacy.
This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerent... more This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerents' conduct in the aftermath of war. Throughout, it relies on the fundamental principle that all human beings, wherever they reside, have rights to the freedoms and resources which they need to lead a flourishing life, and that national and political borders are largely irrelevant to the conferral of those rights. With that principle in hand, the book provides a normative defence of restitutive and reparative justice, the punishment of war criminals, the resort to transitional foreign administration as a means to govern war-torn territories, and the deployment of peacekeeping and occupation forces. It also outlines various reconciliatory and commemorative practices which might facilitate the emergence of trust amongst enemies and thereby improve prospects for peace.
The book offers analytical arguments and normative conclusions, with many historical and/or contemporary examples.
In The Morality of Defensive Force, Quong defends a powerful account of the grounds and condition... more In The Morality of Defensive Force, Quong defends a powerful account of the grounds and conditions under which an agent may justifiably inflict serious harm on another person. In this paper, I examine Quong's account of the necessity constraint on permissible harming-the RESCUE account. I argue that RESCUE does not succeed. Section 2 describes RESCUE. Section 3 raises some worries about Quong's conceptual construal of the right to be rescued and its attendant duties. Section 4 argues that RESCUE does not deliver the verdicts that Quong wants. In those sections, I assume that the attacker is culpable for the threat he poses. Section 5 considers cases where the attacker, though responsible for the wrongful threat he poses and therefore liable to defensive force, has an epistemic justification for acting as he does and thus is not morally culpable. In his discussion of necessity, Quong does not explicitly deal with such cases. I suggest that RESCUE does not operate in the same way when attackers are mistaken as when they are morally culpable. Keywords Defensive force • Necessity • Ethics of killing An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a workshop on the penultimate draft of the book at the University of Warwick in February 2018. I am grateful to the participants for a stimulating discussion, and to Helen Frowe and Jonathan Quong for written comments on an earlier draft.
According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about
others can be morally wron... more According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes based on race and gender (or sexual orientation, disability, and so on) and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does not turn on the truth-value or valence of beliefs.
Anna Stilz's latest book Territorial Sovereignty covers an impressively wide terrain, from the st... more Anna Stilz's latest book Territorial Sovereignty covers an impressively wide terrain, from the state's right to rule over a territory to the right to secede, from cultural neutrality to equitable access to natural resources, from collective self-determination to cooperation with international institutions, from coercive to noncoercive responses to the commission of injustice. In this paper, I examine Stilz's account and defense of territorial sovereignty in the light of the view that there are landmarks (monuments, geological structures, and landscapes) which are located in and subject to the jurisdiction of sovereign states, but which are deemed to be of outstanding value to humankind as a whole, irrespective of whatever economic value they might have. Put differently, I am interested in bringing Stilz's account to bear on the notion of humankind's common heritage. I provide a brief sketch and defense of that notion. I show that Stilz does not have the argumentative resources to make the state's right to rule over its territory conditional upon its common-heritage based decisions, but that she can nevertheless support the weaker claim that those decisions are subject to evaluation at the bar of justice.
Treason is one of the most serious legal o fences that there are, in most if not all jurisdiction... more Treason is one of the most serious legal o fences that there are, in most if not all jurisdictions. Laws against treason are rooted in deep-seated moral revulsion about acts which, in the political realm, are paradigmatic examples of breaches of loyalty. Yet, it is not altogether clear what treason consists in: someone's traitor is of en another's loyalist. In this paper, my aim is twofold: to o fer a plausible conceptual account of treason, and to partly rehabilitate traitors. I focus on informational treason, as the act of passing secret intelligence to foreign actors without authorization. I argue that informational treason is sometimes justi ed, indeed morally mandatory; even when it is morally wrong, its bene ciaries are sometimes justi ed, indeed obliged, to make use of the intelligence thereby provided.
'In defence of EU Armed Forces', in Twelve Stars Initiative Bertelsmann Stiftung (ed.) Twelve Stars - Philosophers Chart a Course for Europe (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2019), available here., 2019
Children are the main victims of war. They are deliberately targeted by combatants; ... more Children are the main victims of war. They are deliberately targeted by combatants; they are used as shields; they are killed as collateral damage, for example when a bomb lands on their school; they are routinely raped and physically abused by soldiers; they are often forced to flee their homes, and suffer disproportionately from war-induced hunger, thirst and diseases; war leaves them orphans, resource-less and at the mercy of the economic-cum-sexual predatory practices of adults. At the same time, it is estimated that there are several dozens of thousands of child soldiers worldwide, some of whom commit atrocities. Notwithstanding the crimes which they commit, and as we shall see throughout this paper, those children too are victims, precisely for that reason.The victimisation of children is morally egregious – in some respects more egregious still than the victimisation of adults. My aim in this chapter is twofold: to provide strong philosophical support for this intuition, and to highlight some important ethical issues arising from children’s involvement in and exposure to war. In the second section, I defend the view that killing children, whether intentionally or not, is morally worse, other things equal, than killing adults. In the third section, I tackle the difficult issues raised by children who actively participate in armed conflicts. I defend the standard prohibition on child enlistment. But I also argue that, once children have been enlisted, it is morally permissible to kill them in self- or other-defence if they commit wrongful killings. This paper appears in G. Calder, J. de Wispelaere and A. Ghaus (eds) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (Routledge, 2018)
Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human right... more Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human rights of both their compatriots or outsiders. Faced with this depressing catalogue of abuses, the international community's response of choice consists in imposing economic sanctions on wrongdoers. The relatively scant philosophical literature on the topic tackles primary sanctions-where the sanctioning party (Sender) restricts economic relationships between, on the one hand, the sanctioned party (Target) and, on the other hand, agents of any nationality who are located on its own territory, or its own nationals wherever they are located – in other words, agents who are subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction. In this paper however I focus on unilateral secondary sanctions, whereby Sender seeks to restrict the economic activities of agents who are not subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction, on the grounds that they trade with or invest in Target. I provide a cosmopolitan defence of those sanctions as a means to stop ongoing grievous human rights violations. I proceed as follows. First, I outline the central tenets of cosmopolitan morality which I take for granted throughout this paper. I then mount my cosmopolitan defence of unilateral secondary sanctions. I end by rejecting the view that multilateral authorisa-tion is a necessary condition for sanctions in general and secondary sanctions in particular, though I consider cases where such authorisation is warranted.
abstraCt laFollette argues that the greatest vice is not cruelty, immorality, or selfishness. rat... more abstraCt laFollette argues that the greatest vice is not cruelty, immorality, or selfishness. rather, it is a failure on our part to 'engage in frequent, honest and rigorous self-reflection'. It is that failure which, on his view, explains the lion's share of the wrong-doings we commit towards one another. In this short reply, I raise (in a sympathetic spirit) some questions about the task of identifying the greatest vice, and draw out some of the implications of laFollette's account of moral ignorance.
This paper offers an account of the role and place of jus post bellum within just war theory and ... more This paper offers an account of the role and place of jus post bellum within just war theory and highlights avenues of inquiry on the aftermath of war that have been largely ignored. I discuss recent arguments to the effect that jus ad bellum and jus in bello exhaust just war theory and that jus post bellum, far from being a key member of the family, in fact does much better as an outsider. I claim, on the contrary, that there is ample space for jus post bellum within just war theory; in partial agreement with those arguments, however, the author agrees that a full account of the ethics of war’s aftermath must also draw on other fields of normative inquiry and fleshes out in greater details connections and disconnections between jus post bellum on the one hand and the other two jura on the other.
Both war and policing involve the use of force. While force in war is more often than not lethal,... more Both war and policing involve the use of force. While force in war is more often than not lethal, in policing it usually falls short of killing. It is not surprising therefore that there should be a vast body of work by (broadly) Western scholars on the ethics of war most of which focuses on killing therein, whereas there is very little philosophical work by similar scholars on the ethics of policing in general, and police killing in particular. This is a regrettable state of affairs, not least because police violence, and in particular lethal violence, is a fact of daily life in most parts of the world – as attested by a growing and rich ethnographic literature which, though empirical in the main, nevertheless grasps with ordinary people’s ethical stand on police killings. In this paper, my brief is to scrutinise some divergences and convergences between the ethics of war on the one hand, and the ethics of policing in particular. I focus on killing, and argue that those acts are governed by the same moral norms, whether they are committed by combatants against other combatants, or by police officers against criminals (and vice versa).
At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion ... more At least since Athenian trade sanctions helped to spark the Peloponnesian War, economic coercion has been a prominent tool of foreign policy. In the modern era, sovereign states and multilateral institutions have imposed economic sanctions on dictatorial regimes or would-be nuclear powers as an alternative to waging war. They have conditioned offers of aid, loans, and debt relief on recipients' willingness to implement market and governance reforms. Such methods interfere in freedom of trade and the internal affairs of sovereign states, yet are widely used as a means to advance human rights. But are they morally justifiable?Cecile Fabre's Economic Statecraft: Human Rights, Sanctions, and Conditionality provides the first sustained response to that question. For millennia, philosophers have explored the ethics of war, but rarely the ethics of economic carrots and sticks. Yet the issues raised could hardly be more urgent. On what grounds can we justify sanctions, in light of the harms they inflict on civilians? If, as some argue, there is a human right to basic assistance, should donors be allowed to condition the provision of aid on recipients' willingness to do their bidding?Drawing on human rights theories, theories of justifiable harm, and examples such as IMF lending practices and international sanctions on Russia and North Korea, Fabre offers a defense of economic statecraft in some of its guises. An empirically attuned work of philosophy, Economic Statecraft lays out a normative framework for an important tool of diplomacy.
This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerent... more This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerents' conduct in the aftermath of war. Throughout, it relies on the fundamental principle that all human beings, wherever they reside, have rights to the freedoms and resources which they need to lead a flourishing life, and that national and political borders are largely irrelevant to the conferral of those rights. With that principle in hand, the book provides a normative defence of restitutive and reparative justice, the punishment of war criminals, the resort to transitional foreign administration as a means to govern war-torn territories, and the deployment of peacekeeping and occupation forces. It also outlines various reconciliatory and commemorative practices which might facilitate the emergence of trust amongst enemies and thereby improve prospects for peace.
The book offers analytical arguments and normative conclusions, with many historical and/or contemporary examples.
In The Morality of Defensive Force, Quong defends a powerful account of the grounds and condition... more In The Morality of Defensive Force, Quong defends a powerful account of the grounds and conditions under which an agent may justifiably inflict serious harm on another person. In this paper, I examine Quong's account of the necessity constraint on permissible harming-the RESCUE account. I argue that RESCUE does not succeed. Section 2 describes RESCUE. Section 3 raises some worries about Quong's conceptual construal of the right to be rescued and its attendant duties. Section 4 argues that RESCUE does not deliver the verdicts that Quong wants. In those sections, I assume that the attacker is culpable for the threat he poses. Section 5 considers cases where the attacker, though responsible for the wrongful threat he poses and therefore liable to defensive force, has an epistemic justification for acting as he does and thus is not morally culpable. In his discussion of necessity, Quong does not explicitly deal with such cases. I suggest that RESCUE does not operate in the same way when attackers are mistaken as when they are morally culpable. Keywords Defensive force • Necessity • Ethics of killing An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a workshop on the penultimate draft of the book at the University of Warwick in February 2018. I am grateful to the participants for a stimulating discussion, and to Helen Frowe and Jonathan Quong for written comments on an earlier draft.
According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about
others can be morally wron... more According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes based on race and gender (or sexual orientation, disability, and so on) and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does not turn on the truth-value or valence of beliefs.
Anna Stilz's latest book Territorial Sovereignty covers an impressively wide terrain, from the st... more Anna Stilz's latest book Territorial Sovereignty covers an impressively wide terrain, from the state's right to rule over a territory to the right to secede, from cultural neutrality to equitable access to natural resources, from collective self-determination to cooperation with international institutions, from coercive to noncoercive responses to the commission of injustice. In this paper, I examine Stilz's account and defense of territorial sovereignty in the light of the view that there are landmarks (monuments, geological structures, and landscapes) which are located in and subject to the jurisdiction of sovereign states, but which are deemed to be of outstanding value to humankind as a whole, irrespective of whatever economic value they might have. Put differently, I am interested in bringing Stilz's account to bear on the notion of humankind's common heritage. I provide a brief sketch and defense of that notion. I show that Stilz does not have the argumentative resources to make the state's right to rule over its territory conditional upon its common-heritage based decisions, but that she can nevertheless support the weaker claim that those decisions are subject to evaluation at the bar of justice.
Treason is one of the most serious legal o fences that there are, in most if not all jurisdiction... more Treason is one of the most serious legal o fences that there are, in most if not all jurisdictions. Laws against treason are rooted in deep-seated moral revulsion about acts which, in the political realm, are paradigmatic examples of breaches of loyalty. Yet, it is not altogether clear what treason consists in: someone's traitor is of en another's loyalist. In this paper, my aim is twofold: to o fer a plausible conceptual account of treason, and to partly rehabilitate traitors. I focus on informational treason, as the act of passing secret intelligence to foreign actors without authorization. I argue that informational treason is sometimes justi ed, indeed morally mandatory; even when it is morally wrong, its bene ciaries are sometimes justi ed, indeed obliged, to make use of the intelligence thereby provided.
'In defence of EU Armed Forces', in Twelve Stars Initiative Bertelsmann Stiftung (ed.) Twelve Stars - Philosophers Chart a Course for Europe (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2019), available here., 2019
Children are the main victims of war. They are deliberately targeted by combatants; ... more Children are the main victims of war. They are deliberately targeted by combatants; they are used as shields; they are killed as collateral damage, for example when a bomb lands on their school; they are routinely raped and physically abused by soldiers; they are often forced to flee their homes, and suffer disproportionately from war-induced hunger, thirst and diseases; war leaves them orphans, resource-less and at the mercy of the economic-cum-sexual predatory practices of adults. At the same time, it is estimated that there are several dozens of thousands of child soldiers worldwide, some of whom commit atrocities. Notwithstanding the crimes which they commit, and as we shall see throughout this paper, those children too are victims, precisely for that reason.The victimisation of children is morally egregious – in some respects more egregious still than the victimisation of adults. My aim in this chapter is twofold: to provide strong philosophical support for this intuition, and to highlight some important ethical issues arising from children’s involvement in and exposure to war. In the second section, I defend the view that killing children, whether intentionally or not, is morally worse, other things equal, than killing adults. In the third section, I tackle the difficult issues raised by children who actively participate in armed conflicts. I defend the standard prohibition on child enlistment. But I also argue that, once children have been enlisted, it is morally permissible to kill them in self- or other-defence if they commit wrongful killings. This paper appears in G. Calder, J. de Wispelaere and A. Ghaus (eds) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (Routledge, 2018)
Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human right... more Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human rights of both their compatriots or outsiders. Faced with this depressing catalogue of abuses, the international community's response of choice consists in imposing economic sanctions on wrongdoers. The relatively scant philosophical literature on the topic tackles primary sanctions-where the sanctioning party (Sender) restricts economic relationships between, on the one hand, the sanctioned party (Target) and, on the other hand, agents of any nationality who are located on its own territory, or its own nationals wherever they are located – in other words, agents who are subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction. In this paper however I focus on unilateral secondary sanctions, whereby Sender seeks to restrict the economic activities of agents who are not subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction, on the grounds that they trade with or invest in Target. I provide a cosmopolitan defence of those sanctions as a means to stop ongoing grievous human rights violations. I proceed as follows. First, I outline the central tenets of cosmopolitan morality which I take for granted throughout this paper. I then mount my cosmopolitan defence of unilateral secondary sanctions. I end by rejecting the view that multilateral authorisa-tion is a necessary condition for sanctions in general and secondary sanctions in particular, though I consider cases where such authorisation is warranted.
abstraCt laFollette argues that the greatest vice is not cruelty, immorality, or selfishness. rat... more abstraCt laFollette argues that the greatest vice is not cruelty, immorality, or selfishness. rather, it is a failure on our part to 'engage in frequent, honest and rigorous self-reflection'. It is that failure which, on his view, explains the lion's share of the wrong-doings we commit towards one another. In this short reply, I raise (in a sympathetic spirit) some questions about the task of identifying the greatest vice, and draw out some of the implications of laFollette's account of moral ignorance.
This paper offers an account of the role and place of jus post bellum within just war theory and ... more This paper offers an account of the role and place of jus post bellum within just war theory and highlights avenues of inquiry on the aftermath of war that have been largely ignored. I discuss recent arguments to the effect that jus ad bellum and jus in bello exhaust just war theory and that jus post bellum, far from being a key member of the family, in fact does much better as an outsider. I claim, on the contrary, that there is ample space for jus post bellum within just war theory; in partial agreement with those arguments, however, the author agrees that a full account of the ethics of war’s aftermath must also draw on other fields of normative inquiry and fleshes out in greater details connections and disconnections between jus post bellum on the one hand and the other two jura on the other.
Both war and policing involve the use of force. While force in war is more often than not lethal,... more Both war and policing involve the use of force. While force in war is more often than not lethal, in policing it usually falls short of killing. It is not surprising therefore that there should be a vast body of work by (broadly) Western scholars on the ethics of war most of which focuses on killing therein, whereas there is very little philosophical work by similar scholars on the ethics of policing in general, and police killing in particular. This is a regrettable state of affairs, not least because police violence, and in particular lethal violence, is a fact of daily life in most parts of the world – as attested by a growing and rich ethnographic literature which, though empirical in the main, nevertheless grasps with ordinary people’s ethical stand on police killings. In this paper, my brief is to scrutinise some divergences and convergences between the ethics of war on the one hand, and the ethics of policing in particular. I focus on killing, and argue that those acts are governed by the same moral norms, whether they are committed by combatants against other combatants, or by police officers against criminals (and vice versa).
Toby Buckle has just set up a new podcast: politicalphilosophypodcast.com. This interview, which ... more Toby Buckle has just set up a new podcast: politicalphilosophypodcast.com. This interview, which was recorded in February 2018, covers the ethics of sex work and organ sales.
Soldiers and police officers, in virtue of their job, are more or less routinely placed in situat... more Soldiers and police officers, in virtue of their job, are more or less routinely placed in situations where they might have to choose between killing or being killed. This is what distinguishes them from almost all other professionals. My aim in this paper is to explore the ethics of killing in the contexts of war and police operations. I argue that thinking about the ethics of killing, and violence in general, in the context of law enforcement should lead us radically to revise our views about the moral permissibility of killing in war. As I also argue, however, thinking about moral restrictions on soldiers’ permissions to kill should also lead us to revise some of our views about the moraly permissibility of police officers’ acts of killing. War violence and police violence, far from being sui generis in relation to each other, are in fact subject to the same moral norms.
NOTE: This is the pre-copy-editing draft. This paper will appear in late 2016 in B. Bradford, B. Jauregui, Ian Loader and J. Steinberg (eds) Sage Handbook of Global Policing (London, Sage.)
This paper is due to appear in a collection of essays edited by Michael Gross and Tamar Meisels, ... more This paper is due to appear in a collection of essays edited by Michael Gross and Tamar Meisels, Soft War (Cambridge University Press, under contract, forthcoming).
Although just war theory occupies centre stage in the political theory of international relations, non-forceful instruments of foreign policy are often both more effective and less destructive than widescale military action. In this paper, I focus on a particular kind of economic sanctions which (to my knowledge) has not been given separate treatment in the relevant political-theoretical literature, and which I call Conditional Sale. To illustrate, suppose that some political actor – call it Affluenza – has in its possession commodities or goods, G, which some other actor – call it Barrenia – badly needs or wants. Suppose further that Affluenza wants something from Barrenia, though is not willing, able, or justified, to go to war for it. Instead, it threatens to raise the price of G to a level - p100 - that Barrenia can ill afford, unless Barrenia gives in to its demands. If Barrenia does give in, Affluenza will lower the price of G to p1. Affluenza, in other words, makes its willingness to sell at an affordable price conditional on Barrenia’s bending to its will. On what grounds and under what conditions may it so act? A sale is conditional by definition: when I offer to sell you G at a given price p, I offer to transfer to you my property rights over G on condition that you pay me p for it. Call this the price-condition. My concern here is with cases where Affluenza is willing to have Barrenia acquire property rights over G on condition that Barrenia should meet both its price-condition and what I shall call its politics-condition. In other words, sales, in this paper, are doubly conditional. In section 2, I bring the question into sharper focus by highlighting differences between conditional sale, economic sanctions, and conditional aid. All three are forms of economic statecraft, but they differ in morally salient ways. In sections 3 and 4, I make a first pass at the question, on the assumption that Affluenza has full control over G and trades directly with Barrenia’s regime. I argue that Conditional Sale is permitted under strict conditions, as a means to redress a justified grievance against Barrenia, or to pursue foreign policy goals more widely. In section 5, I relax that simplifying assumption and briefly highlight some of the difficulties raised by Conditional Sale for private economic actors in both communities.
Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human right... more Many states, or rather their leaders and officials, routinely violate the fundamental human rights of both their compatriots or outsiders. Faced with this relentlessly depressing catalogue of abuse, the international community’s response of choice consists in imposing economic sanctions on wrongdoers. The relatively scant philosophical literature on the topic tackles primary sanctions - where the sanctioning party (Sender) restricts economic relationships between, on the one hand, the sanctioned party (Target) and, on the other hand, agents of any nationality who are located on its own territory, or its own nationals wherever they are located – in other words, agents who are subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction. In this paper however I focus on unilateral secondary sanctions, whereby Sender seeks to restrict the economic activities of agents who are not subject to its territorial and/or personal jurisdiction, on the grounds that they trade with or invest in Target. My aim in this paper is to provide a cosmopolitan defence of those sanctions as a means to stop ongoing grievous human rights violations. I argue that the cosmopolitan considerations which (I briefly claim) support primary sanctions also support secondary sanctions. I proceed as follows. First, I outline the central tenets of cosmopolitan morality which I take for granted throughout this paper. I then mount my cosmopolitan defence of unilateral secondary sanctions. I end by rejecting the view that multilateral authorisation is a necessary condition for sanctions in general and secondary sanctions in particular, though I consider cases where such authorisation is warranted.
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Books by Cecile Fabre
The book offers analytical arguments and normative conclusions, with many historical and/or contemporary examples.
Papers by Cecile Fabre
others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes
based on race and gender (or sexual orientation, disability, and so on) and
which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates
for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most
of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this
paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does not turn on the
truth-value or valence of beliefs.
school; they are routinely raped and physically abused by soldiers; they are often forced to flee their homes, and suffer disproportionately from war-induced hunger, thirst and diseases; war leaves them orphans, resource-less and at the mercy of the economic-cum-sexual predatory practices of adults. At the same time, it is estimated that there are several dozens of thousands of child soldiers worldwide, some of whom commit atrocities.
Notwithstanding the crimes which they commit, and as we shall see throughout this paper, those children too are victims, precisely
for that reason.The victimisation of children is morally egregious – in some respects more egregious still than the victimisation of adults. My aim in this chapter is twofold: to provide strong philosophical support for this intuition, and to highlight some important ethical issues arising from children’s involvement in and exposure to war. In the second section, I defend the view that killing children, whether intentionally or not, is morally worse, other things equal, than killing adults. In the third section, I tackle the difficult issues raised by children who actively participate in armed conflicts. I defend the standard prohibition on child enlistment. But I also argue that, once children have been enlisted, it is morally permissible to kill them in self- or other-defence if they commit wrongful killings.
This paper appears in G. Calder, J. de Wispelaere and A. Ghaus (eds) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (Routledge, 2018)
In this paper, my brief is to scrutinise some divergences and convergences between the ethics of war on the one hand, and the ethics of policing in particular. I focus on killing, and argue that those acts are governed by the same moral norms, whether they are committed by combatants against other combatants, or by police officers against criminals (and vice versa).
The book offers analytical arguments and normative conclusions, with many historical and/or contemporary examples.
others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes
based on race and gender (or sexual orientation, disability, and so on) and
which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates
for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most
of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this
paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does not turn on the
truth-value or valence of beliefs.
school; they are routinely raped and physically abused by soldiers; they are often forced to flee their homes, and suffer disproportionately from war-induced hunger, thirst and diseases; war leaves them orphans, resource-less and at the mercy of the economic-cum-sexual predatory practices of adults. At the same time, it is estimated that there are several dozens of thousands of child soldiers worldwide, some of whom commit atrocities.
Notwithstanding the crimes which they commit, and as we shall see throughout this paper, those children too are victims, precisely
for that reason.The victimisation of children is morally egregious – in some respects more egregious still than the victimisation of adults. My aim in this chapter is twofold: to provide strong philosophical support for this intuition, and to highlight some important ethical issues arising from children’s involvement in and exposure to war. In the second section, I defend the view that killing children, whether intentionally or not, is morally worse, other things equal, than killing adults. In the third section, I tackle the difficult issues raised by children who actively participate in armed conflicts. I defend the standard prohibition on child enlistment. But I also argue that, once children have been enlisted, it is morally permissible to kill them in self- or other-defence if they commit wrongful killings.
This paper appears in G. Calder, J. de Wispelaere and A. Ghaus (eds) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (Routledge, 2018)
In this paper, my brief is to scrutinise some divergences and convergences between the ethics of war on the one hand, and the ethics of policing in particular. I focus on killing, and argue that those acts are governed by the same moral norms, whether they are committed by combatants against other combatants, or by police officers against criminals (and vice versa).
War and Peace
All Quiet on the Western Front
Le Silence de la Mer
Just and Unjust Wars
Killing in War
NOTE: This is the pre-copy-editing draft. This paper will appear in late 2016 in B. Bradford, B. Jauregui, Ian Loader and J. Steinberg (eds) Sage Handbook of Global Policing (London, Sage.)
Although just war theory occupies centre stage in the political theory of international relations, non-forceful instruments of foreign policy are often both more effective and less destructive than widescale military action. In this paper, I focus on a particular kind of economic sanctions which (to my knowledge) has not been given separate treatment in the relevant political-theoretical literature, and which I call Conditional Sale. To illustrate, suppose that some political actor – call it Affluenza – has in its possession commodities or goods, G, which some other actor – call it Barrenia – badly needs or wants. Suppose further that Affluenza wants something from Barrenia, though is not willing, able, or justified, to go to war for it. Instead, it threatens to raise the price of G to a level - p100 - that Barrenia can ill afford, unless Barrenia gives in to its demands. If Barrenia does give in, Affluenza will lower the price of G to p1. Affluenza, in other words, makes its willingness to sell at an affordable price conditional on Barrenia’s bending to its will. On what grounds and under what conditions may it so act?
A sale is conditional by definition: when I offer to sell you G at a given price p, I offer to transfer to you my property rights over G on condition that you pay me p for it. Call this the price-condition. My concern here is with cases where Affluenza is willing to have Barrenia acquire property rights over G on condition that Barrenia should meet both its price-condition and what I shall call its politics-condition. In other words, sales, in this paper, are doubly conditional. In section 2, I bring the question into sharper focus by highlighting differences between conditional sale, economic sanctions, and conditional aid. All three are forms of economic statecraft, but they differ in morally salient ways. In sections 3 and 4, I make a first pass at the question, on the assumption that Affluenza has full control over G and trades directly with Barrenia’s regime. I argue that Conditional Sale is permitted under strict conditions, as a means to redress a justified grievance against Barrenia, or to pursue foreign policy goals more widely. In section 5, I relax that simplifying assumption and briefly highlight some of the difficulties raised by Conditional Sale for private economic actors in both communities.