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Jeff McMahan

Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University (USA)

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

May 2012

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Ethics of War«

Project outline:

I will be working on a book on the ethics of war called The Right Way to Fight, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. It is intended to be a trade book rather than an academic book and thus will be written to be accessible to a wide readership. It will have chapters on the following topics: whether war can be justified as a means of averting threats to political sovereignty or territorial integrity, preventive war, humanitarian intervention, the intentional killing of innocent people (terrorism), proportionality in the foreseeable but unintended killing of innocent people (what is often called »collateral damage«), the moral status of mercenaries and whether it is permissible for states to employ them, targeted killing, torture, the ethics of military occupation, and the relation between the morality of war and the law of war. (Jeff McMahan)

Funding of the stay:

»Justitia Amplificata. Rethinking Justice − Applied and Global«

Scholarly profile of Jeff McMahan

Main areas of research:

Ethics, Political Philosophy, Legal Theory, Theories of War

Selected publications:

»What Rights May Be Defended by Means of War?«, in: Cécile Fabre and Seth Lazar, eds.: Why We Fight: The Purpose of Military Force in the 21st Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Ethics and Humanity: Themes from the Philosophy of Jonathan Glover. New York: Oxford University Press 2010 (ed. with Ann Davis and Richard Keshen).
Killing in War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009.
The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002.
The Morality of Nationalism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997 (ed. with Robert McKim).

Further Academic activities:
Jeff McMahan is a Research Collaborator at the Center for Human Values at Princeton, an Honorary Fellow of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford, and a Research Associate at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict. His work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Link: Jeff McMahan's homepage, Rutgers University

Jeff McMahan

Scholarly profile of Jeff McMahan

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