Dr Patrick Tomlin, Leverhulme Trust Fellowship
Violence in Proportion
There is widespread agreement between philosophers working on the ethics of war, self-defence, punishment and many other areas that, if harm or violence is to be justified, it must be proportionate.
Dr Patrick Tomlin from the Department of Philosophy has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to work on this important moral concept. He will show that this widespread agreement conceals a range of philosophically knotty problems, and will develop solutions to them. These problems include how to make proportionality calculations under uncertainty; what the relationship is between the proportionality of courses of action and individual acts; and how we should aggregate small harms or goods in thinking about proportionality.
Dr Tomlin will detail his research on proportionality in a new book to be published by Oxford University Press.
Dr Patrick Tomlin