Jeff Mcmahan
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 974291 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jeff Mcmahan |
| PRENOMES | Jeff |
| SOBRENOME | Mcmahan |
| ASSINATURA | MCMAHAN J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 176 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1987 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Peace in Gaza
This article responds to Quassim Cassam’s arguments for the claim that the only viable strategy for Israel in its conflict with Hamas is to continue the war begun in October 2023 until Hamas is “crushed.” It critically examines his reasons for claiming that Hamas fails to satisfy the five conditions he states for potentially successful peace negotiations. While it may be true that Hamas fails to satisfy the conditions, it is also true that Israel…
Moral responsibility for the scarcity of healthcare in Gaza
In response to Arianne Shahvisi’s call for medical ethicists to condemn Israel’s having caused extreme scarcity of healthcare in Gaza, two critical commentaries published in this journal attributed primary moral responsibility for the scarcity to Hamas, arguing that its role in initiating the recent conflict, together with its use of ‘human shields’, justifies Israeli military conduct, up to and including the almost complete destruction of the ci…
A Reply to Statman’s Defense of Israel’s War in Gaza
In ‘McMahan on the War Against Hamas,’ Daniel Statman systematically criticizes arguments advanced in the essay, ‘Proportionality and Necessity in Israel’s Invasion of Gaza, 2023–2024,’ which was published in this journal in 2024. The arguments in that essay assessed Israel’s war by reference to moral principles commonly recognized as governing the resort to war: in particular, principles of just cause, necessity, and proportionality. The present…
Proportionality and Necessity in Israel’s Invasion of Gaza, 2023–2024
This article seeks to show that Israel’s war in Gaza in 2023 and 2024 has been an unjust war because it has violated both the requirement of proportionality and the requirement of necessity. The article explains the nature of proportionality, arguing that the main form of proportionality in war is simply the limit to the amount of harm inflicted on innocent people that can be justified either as the lesser evil or, more plausibly, on the basis of…
Creating People and Saving People
Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. This chapter argues that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be determined how the benefits…
Ethics and Existence
Principles and Persons
Saving People from the Harm of Death
Extremism and Confusion in American Views about the Ethics of War
In their article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino have revealed a wealth of information about the views of contemporary Americans on the ethics of war. Virtually all they have discovered is surprising and much of it is alarming. My commentary in this symposium seeks mainly to extract a bit more from their data and to draw a few further inferences. Among…
On ‘Modal Personism
In this article I present several challenges to the view that S helly K agan calls ‘modal personism’. First, there is a plausible account of our identity that, if true, greatly diminishes the scope of K agan's view. But the scope of the view is already quite limited because the category of modal persons is restricted to those non‐persons that had but have lost the potential to become persons. If the category were to include non‐persons that retai…
Cognitive Surrogacy, Assisted Participation, and Moral Status
Individual Liability in War
This article is a response to commentaries on my book, Killing in War , by Cécile Fabre, Alex Leveringhaus and Victor Tadros. It discusses the implications of the approach I have defended for the morality of war for such issues as internecine killing in war, humanitarian intervention and the bases of individual liability to attack in war
Proportionality in the Afghanistan War
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Ethics and Humanity
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS PREFACE PART 1: TORTURE 1. What Should We Do About Torture? - James Griffin PART 2: WAR 2. The Consequences of War - Thomas Hurka 3. Humanitarian Intervention, Consent, and Proportionality - Jeff McMahan PART 3: ETHICS, TRUTH, AND BELIEF 4. Humanity and the Perils of Perniciously Politicized Science - N. Ann Davis 5. Social Moral Epistemology and the Tasks of Ethics - Allen Buchanan 6. The Strains of Dialogue - Richard Kesh…
Responsibility, Permissibility, and Vicarious Agency
The Just Distribution of Harm Between Combatants and Noncombatants
Killing in War
"Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? Jeff McMahan argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view…
Radical Cognitive Limitation
This chapter deals with the issues of moral status, inviolability, and distributive justice concerning the radically cognitively impaired. It notes these people should not be called disabled because they — the radically cognitively limited human beings — differ only slightly from most other humans. This is with respect to their psychological capacities and potential to realize the higher goods of wellbeing. In fact, any of their claims to equalit…
Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War
Debate
Eating animals the nice way
Infanticide
It is sometimes suggested that if a moral theory implies that infanticide can sometimes be permissible, that is sufficient to discredit the theory. I argue in this article that the common-sense belief that infanticide is wrong, and perhaps even worse than the killing of an adult, is challenged not so much by theoretical considerations as by common-sense beliefs about abortion, the killing of non-human animals, and so on. Because there are no intr…
Challenges To Human Equality
Justice and Liability in Organ Allocation
Justice and Liability in Organ Allocation Jeff McMahan References Munson, Ronald. Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Google Scholar Copyright © 2007 The New School
Is Prenatal Genetic Screening Unjustly Discriminatory
A philosophy professor argues that prenatal genetic testing allows potentially painful afflictions to be discovered prior to birth and does not unjustly discriminate against disabled people. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association
Just Cause for War
The central contention of this essay is that a just cause for war is a wrong that is of a type that can make those responsible for it morally liable to military attack as a means of preventing or rectifying it. This claim has many implications that conflict with assumptions of the currently orthodox theory of the just war. Among the implications explored in the text are that the requirement of just cause is logically and morally prior to all the …
War as Self-Defense
First imagine a case in which a person uses violence in self-defense; then imagine a case in which two people engage in self-defense against a threat they jointly face. Continue to imagine further cases in which increasing numbers of people act with increasing coordination to defend both themselves and each other against a common threat, or a range of threats they face together. What you are imagining is a spectrum of cases that begins with acts …
On the Moral Equality of Combatants
Cognitive Disability, Misfortune, and Justice
The Just Distribution of Harm Between Combatants and Noncombatants
Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War
Innocence, Self‐Defense and Killing in War
Eating animals the nice way
Intervention and Collective Self-Determination
Intervention often violates both respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination. McMahan focuses on the latter ethical dimension rather than the former political and legal one, although his claims have important implications for issues of state sovereignty. He challenges the common assumption that respect for self-determination requires an almost exceptionless doctrine of nonintervention by first defining the notions of “interv…
Challenges To Human Equality
On ‘Modal Personism
In this article I present several challenges to the view that S helly K agan calls ‘modal personism’. First, there is a plausible account of our identity that, if true, greatly diminishes the scope of K agan's view. But the scope of the view is already quite limited because the category of modal persons is restricted to those non‐persons that had but have lost the potential to become persons. If the category were to include non‐persons that retai…
Proportionality in the Afghanistan War
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Debate
Infanticide
It is sometimes suggested that if a moral theory implies that infanticide can sometimes be permissible, that is sufficient to discredit the theory. I argue in this article that the common-sense belief that infanticide is wrong, and perhaps even worse than the killing of an adult, is challenged not so much by theoretical considerations as by common-sense beliefs about abortion, the killing of non-human animals, and so on. Because there are no intr…
Killing and Equality
Although the belief that killing is normally wrong is as universal and uncontroversial a moral belief as we are likely to find, no one, to my knowledge, has ever offered an account of why killing is wrong that even begins to do justice to the full range of common sense beliefs about the morality of killing. Yet such an account would be of considerable practical significance, since understanding why some killings are wrong should help us to determ…
Extremism and Confusion in American Views about the Ethics of War
In their article “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino have revealed a wealth of information about the views of contemporary Americans on the ethics of war. Virtually all they have discovered is surprising and much of it is alarming. My commentary in this symposium seeks mainly to extract a bit more from their data and to draw a few further inferences. Among…
Individual Liability in War
This article is a response to commentaries on my book, Killing in War , by Cécile Fabre, Alex Leveringhaus and Victor Tadros. It discusses the implications of the approach I have defended for the morality of war for such issues as internecine killing in war, humanitarian intervention and the bases of individual liability to attack in war
Turning the Tide
Review of Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace by Noam Chomsky.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Compensatory payments and vasectomy acceptance in urban Sri Lanka
This paper examines the effects of different levels of payment on the acceptance of vasectomy in urban Sri Lanka. Data from 496 vasectomized men are analysed by socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, post-operative problems encountered and attitudes towards vasectomy by amount of payment. The findings show that higher levels of payments have significantly enhanced the adoption of vasectomy, particularly among the low economic status group…
Innocence, Self‐Defense and Killing in War
Genethics
Killing and Equality
Although the belief that killing is normally wrong is as universal and uncontroversial a moral belief as we are likely to find, no one, to my knowledge, has ever offered an account of why killing is wrong that even begins to do justice to the full range of common sense beliefs about the morality of killing. Yet such an account would be of considerable practical significance, since understanding why some killings are wrong should help us to determ…
Intervention and Collective Self-Determination
Intervention often violates both respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination. McMahan focuses on the latter ethical dimension rather than the former political and legal one, although his claims have important implications for issues of state sovereignty. He challenges the common assumption that respect for self-determination requires an almost exceptionless doctrine of nonintervention by first defining the notions of “interv…
Cognitive Disability, Misfortune, and Justice
The morality of nationalism
Nationalism is one of the most intractable political problems in the world today. In this collection of essays, some of today's most eminent political scientists and philosophers address the ethics of nationalism. Rather than focusing on descriptive and prescriptive themes or policy issues, this volume focuses on the deeper moral issues that must be addressed if a policy prescription is to be well grounded. The contributors include Charles Taylor…
Rational Commitment and Social Justice
Gregory S. Kavka (1947–94) was a prominent and influential figure in contemporary moral and political philosophy. The essays in this volume are concerned with fundamental issues of rational commitment and social justice to which Kavka devoted his work as a philosopher. The essays take Kavka's work as a point of departure and seek to advance the respective debates. The topics include: the relationship between intention and moral action as part of …
Killing and Saving
The Ethics of Killing
A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an…
The Ethics of Killing in War
War as Self-Defense
First imagine a case in which a person uses violence in self-defense; then imagine a case in which two people engage in self-defense against a threat they jointly face. Continue to imagine further cases in which increasing numbers of people act with increasing coordination to defend both themselves and each other against a common threat, or a range of threats they face together. What you are imagining is a spectrum of cases that begins with acts …
The Basis of Moral Liability to Defensive Killing
Just Cause for War
The central contention of this essay is that a just cause for war is a wrong that is of a type that can make those responsible for it morally liable to military attack as a means of preventing or rectifying it. This claim has many implications that conflict with assumptions of the currently orthodox theory of the just war. Among the implications explored in the text are that the requirement of just cause is logically and morally prior to all the …
Is Prenatal Genetic Screening Unjustly Discriminatory
A philosophy professor argues that prenatal genetic testing allows potentially painful afflictions to be discovered prior to birth and does not unjustly discriminate against disabled people. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association
On the Moral Equality of Combatants
Infanticide
It is sometimes suggested that if a moral theory implies that infanticide can sometimes be permissible, that is sufficient to discredit the theory. I argue in this article that the common-sense belief that infanticide is wrong, and perhaps even worse than the killing of an adult, is challenged not so much by theoretical considerations as by common-sense beliefs about abortion, the killing of non-human animals, and so on. Because there are no intr…
Challenges To Human Equality
Justice and Liability in Organ Allocation
Justice and Liability in Organ Allocation Jeff McMahan References Munson, Ronald. Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Google Scholar Copyright © 2007 The New School
Debate
Eating animals the nice way
Killing in War
"Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? Jeff McMahan argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view…
Radical Cognitive Limitation
This chapter deals with the issues of moral status, inviolability, and distributive justice concerning the radically cognitively impaired. It notes these people should not be called disabled because they — the radically cognitively limited human beings — differ only slightly from most other humans. This is with respect to their psychological capacities and potential to realize the higher goods of wellbeing. In fact, any of their claims to equalit…
Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War
Political science (31 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Sociology (23 obras) · War, Ethics, and Justification (20 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Torture, Ethics, and Law (16 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (12 obras)