Research

My work on the ethics of war and self-defence has been published in Ethics, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, Journal of Moral Philosophy, as two monographs (Defensive Killing, Oxford University Press; The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction, Routledge) and in numerous edited collections. I am also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War.

I am currently writing on a book on the duty to rescue. I have published papers on this topic in Ethics, Philosophical Quarterly and Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The latter won the 2019 Marc Sanders Prize in Political Philosophy. 

I am also working on the ways in which we can be implicated in other people's wrongdoing. My paper on Wrongful Observation (co-authored with Jonathan Parry) has appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs. Another, on wrongful assistance, was published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy as part of a symposium on the ethics of indirect intervention. This symposium is part of my project on the ethics of foreign intervention, which is funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. A third, on moral coercion, was published in Philosophical Studies. 

Between 2017 and 2020, I was co-PI on an AHRC project on the status of cultural heritage in war (with Derek Matravers). Derek and I are writing a book on this work, provisionally entitled Stones and Lives: Protecting Heritage in War. An edited collection of papers from the project, Heritage in War: Ethical Issues, is under contract with Oxford University Press. 

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• 'The moral irrelevance of moral coercion'

  2021. Helen Frowe. Philosophical Studies

  Artikel

  An agent A morally coerces another agent, B, when A manipulates non-epistemological facts in order that B's moral commitments enjoin B to do what A wants B to do, and B is motivated by these commitments. It is widely argued that forced choices arising from moral coercion are morally distinct from forced choices arising from moral duress or happenstance. On these accounts, the fact of being coerced bears on what an agent may do, the voluntariness of her actions, and/or her accountability for any harms that result from her actions (where accountability includes liability to defensive harm, punishment, blame and compensation). This paper does not provide an account of the wrongness of moral coercion. Rather, I argue that, whatever the correct account of its wrongness, the mere fact of being coerced has no bearing on what the agent may do, on the voluntariness of her action, or her accountability for any resultant harm, compared to otherwise identical cases arising from duress and happenstance.

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• Liability for Wrongful Assistance

  2020. Helen Frowe. Journal of Applied Philosophy

  Artikel

  Several states, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, have recently engaged in the high-profile supporting of foreign rebel fighters, providing them with training, weapons, and financial resources. Justifications for providing this assistance usually invoke, at least in part, our obligations to prevent harm to the citizens of oppressive and violent regimes. Providing such assistance is often presented as a morally safe 'middle ground' between doing nothing and putting one's own troops at risk. Yet this assistance typically enables rebels to cause unjust harms, since armed uprisings almost invariably cause harm to innocent people. I argue that enabling these unjust harms can render the provision of assistance unjustified. When a state could prevent at least as much harm by using its resources in other ways, such as preventing disease, without thereby causing comparable unjust harm and without incurring a (significantly greater) supererogatory cost, the state acts unjustifiably if it nonetheless funds the rebellion. When assistors unjustifiably enable unjust harms, they are morally liable to bear costs for the sake of people who suffer those harms. This is true even if the rebels act justifiably in directly inflicting those harms.

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• If You'll Be My Bodyguard

  2019. Helen Frowe. Ethics 129 (2), 204-229

  Artikel

  This article explores how agreements to preferentially save can ground an exception to the duty to minimize harm when saving. A rescuer preferentially saves if she knowingly fails to minimize harm among prospective victims, even though minimizing harm would not have imposed greater costs on the rescuer herself. Allowing rescuers to act on agreements to preferentially save is justified by the reasons we have to respect the agreements that agents form as a means of pursuing their own ends.

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• Wrongful Observation

  2019. Helen Frowe, Jonathan Parry. Philosophy & Public Affairs 47 (1), 104-137

  Artikel

  This paper emerged from the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace's ‘Conversations on War’ series. We are grateful to participants at those workshops for helpful discussion. Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Birmingham Global Ethics Seminar; the LSE Choice Group Seminar; the University of Warwick Centre for Ethics, Law and Philosophy; the Moral and Political Philosophy Seminar at Australian National University; the Uppsala Women in Philosophy conference; the University of Melbourne Philosophy Department seminar; the University of Washington Philosophy Department seminar; and as a public lecture at the University of Southampton. For very helpful written comments and conversations, thanks to Avia Pasternak, Tom Parr, Derek Matravers, Bob Goodin, Al Wilson, Nic Southwood, Seth Lazar, Suzanne Uniacke, and Christian Barry. Thanks to two associate editors for this journal, whose comments significantly improved the paper. Work on this paper was supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Grant no. 1521101.

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• Civilian Liability

  2019. Helen Frowe. Ethics 129 (4), 625-650

  Artikel

  Adil Ahmad Haque argues that civilians who contribute to unjust lethal threats in war, but who do not directly participate in the war, are not liable to defensive killing. His argument rests on two central claims: first, that the extent of a person's liability to defensive harm in virtue of contributing to an unjust threat is limited to the cost that she is initially required to bear in order to avoid contributing, and second, that civilians need not bear lethal costs in order to avoid indirectly contributing to unjust lethal threats. I argue that Haque's defense of each claim fails.

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• Lesser-Evil Justifications for Harming

  2018. Helen Frowe. Philosophical quarterly (Print) 68 (272), 460-480

  Artikel

  Much philosophical attention has been paid to the question of whether, and why, one may divert a runaway trolley away from where it will kill five people to where it will kill one. But little attention has been paid to whether the reasons that ground a permission to divert thereby ground a duty to divert. This paper defends the Requirement Thesis, which holds that one is, ordinarily, required to act on lesser-evil justifications for harming for the sake of others. Cases in which we have lesser-evil justifications of harming for the sake of others are rescue cases. Ordinarily, an agent is under a duty to rescue unless doing so imposes too great a cost on her, or violates someone else's rights. When neither of these defeating conditions obtain, one is required to rescue even if this involves causing harm to innocent people.

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• The Duty to Remove Statues of Wrongdoers

  2019. Helen Frowe. Journal of Practical Ethics 7 (3), 1-31

  Artikel

  This paper argues that public statues of persons typically express a positive evaluative attitude towards the subject. It also argues that states have duties to repudiate their own historical wrongdoing, and to condemn other people's serious wrongdoing. Both duties are incompatible with retaining public statues of people who perpetrated serious rights violations. Hence, a person's being a serious rights violator is a sufficient condition for a state's having a duty to remove a public statue of that person. I argue that this applies no less in the case of the 'morally ambiguous' wrongdoer, who both accomplishes significant goods and perpetrates serious rights violations. The duty to remove a statue is a defeasible duty: like most duties, it can be defeated by lesser-evil considerations. If removing a statue would, for example, spark a violent riot that would risk unjust harm to lots of people, the duty to remove could be outweighed by the duty not to foreseeably cause unjust harm. This would provide a lesser-evil justification for keeping the statue. But it matters that the duty to remove is outweighed, rather than negated, by these consequences. Unlike when a duty is negated, one still owes something in cases of outweighing. And it especially matters that it is outweighed by the predicted consequences of wrongful behaviour by others.

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