I have spent the beginning of the project constructing a rigorous, mathematically informed moral and legal framework that assesses the costs and benefits of armed conflict in order to inform decisions about when wars should end. My framework establishes the normative boundaries of defensive wars aimed at resisting unjustified invasion, deterring aggressors, incapacitating an aggressor’s armed forces, and achieving an enemy’s surrender. The framework explains why, in certain circumstances, even a just conflict must be concluded short of achieving its aims. I then show how the normative criteria for just conduct developed comport with customary legal principles and may therefore be incorporated into international law.
An article I wrote asks whether and how intentions matter when making proportionality calculations in war. In particular, I develop a mathematically robust account of proportionality under conditions of uncertainty. This article has been given the verdict of “revise and resubmit” from Ethics, the leading journal in moral and political philosophy. Working closely with my advisor, Professor Jeff McMahan, has been so fruitful and productive that we have decided to work as coauthors in resubmitting a revised and extended version of the paper.
I have had the honor of being invited to contribute two chapters to edited volumes focused on war, ethics, public policy, and international law. One of these chapters, to appear in Perpetual War and International Law: Legacies of the War on Terror, from Oxford University Press, discusses the complexities of risk-taking and risk-imposition in war, with implications for the laws governing the use of force. The second chapter addresses the problem of moral hazard, which involves allowing an aggressor to benefit from wrongful gains. My work on moral hazard is set to appear in the volume Ending Wars Justly: Theory and Applications, forthcoming with Routledge.
Given my dedication to connecting academic work with practical decision-making, I gratefully accepted an invitation to a two-day roundtable discussion at Reichman University in Israel, on technology’s role in ending wars. Participants include scholars of philosophy, law, and political science as well as civilian policymakers, practitioners in areas of law and human rights, journalists, and others beyond academia. Additionally, in October 2023 I presented a paper examining how AI-driven autonomous weapons can assess proportionality, part of the DILEMA (Designing International Law and Ethics into Military Artificial Intelligence) Project, an initiative of the Asser Institute and the University of Amsterdam.
This past January, I convened a two-day workshop at Corpus Christi College on the subject of moral aggregation—the process of combining and computing morally relevant data to assess the goodness, badness, or desirability of outcomes. Moral aggregation is a topic with direct policy relevance, particularly in fields like health policy and economics. For instance, decisions concerning allocation of limited medical resources during a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic requires careful ethical analysis that considers the aggregation of various moral factors, including saving lives, minimizing harm, and ensuring fairness. Similarly, in economic-policy contexts, ethical considerations should influence cost-benefit analyses. When evaluating the impact of economic policies on societal well-being, policymakers should aggregate moral values related to economic efficiency, income distribution, and social justice to make informed and ethically sound decisions. Scholars participating in the seminar worked in various fields, including the philosophy of economics, rational and social choice theory, health policy, and the ethics of war.
