David Clark | Philosopher
about.
I am a moral, legal, and political philosopher, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, and a core faculty member in the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in 2023, where my dissertation was chaired by Jonathan Quong and Mark Schroeder.
My current research focuses primarily on the ethics of preventing, distributing, punishing, and compensating for harm. I'm particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms by which our moral rights against harm can be modified or suspended --- and applying these insights to important social and political phenomena, including war, policing, immigration, criminal law, tort law, and contract law.
research.
publications
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Mistaken Defense and the Unbundling of Rights (Ethics, 2025)
At the heart of the ethics of war and self-defense is the project of developing a theory of liability: a theory of when and why (apparent) attackers forfeit their right not to be harmed. This essay contributes to this project by developing and defending a heterodox answer to a serious and long-standing challenge to the project --- what I call the Challenge of Merely Apparent Attackers. I argue that our standard conception of forfeiture is too coarse-grained to adequately answer this challenge, and that we need to distinguish between the forfeiture of one's rights against harm and the forfeiture of the contingent, moral "perks" of those rights. Appreciating this distinction helps us answer the challenge without undermining our ability to make sense of the so-called necessity and proportionality constraints on defensive harm, and without generating perverse incentives or paradoxical results for defenders operating under conditions of uncertainty. Appreciating this distinction, I illustrate, may also bear fruit in other domains of moral philosophy.
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The Demands of Necessity. (Ethics, June 2023)
It is widely believed that there is both a "proportionality" and "necessity" constraint on self-defense. You shouldn't kill someone in self-defense who is only trying to pinch you on the arm; that would be disproportionate. But even when an attacker poses a lethal threat, you shouldn't kill them in self-defense if you can just as well stop their attack with less-than-lethal force; killing them would then be unnecessary. This paper develops an explanation, precisification, and unification of the proportionality and necessity constraints. Unjust attackers would be required to bear a certain amount of cost to avert their own attack were they able. This in turn determines what others may do to them: an attacker can only be made to bear as much cost to avert their attack as they would be required to take upon themselves. The proportionality and necessity constraints, I argue, both express this fundamental principle, only at different levels of generality.
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Refusing Protection. (Philosophy & Public Affairs, Dec. 2022)
You're under attack. I offer my protection. You refuse it. It seems that such refusal can sometimes make it wrong for me to protect you. Why? This paper defends an unorthodox answer to this question, and explores the implications for the ethics of humanitarian interventions. By refusing my protection --- I argue --- you remove me from the class of people with respect to whom your attacker is liable, thereby making it so that your attacker is not liable to suffer defensive harm at my hands.
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The Price of Duty. (Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2025)
State officials regularly impose harm on the citizens they are supposed to serve, some of it wrongful. Who should bear the burden of paying compensation for
these wrongs? Should it be the agents themselves, or should the burden be spread across the citizenry via taxation? This essay develops a theory of limited official immunity, according
to which citizens have a moral duty to assume the costs of certain official wrongs. I argue that limited official immunity is an upshot of a general principle of compensatory morality, according to which those who are morally required to participate in some project are for that reason required to share the compensatory costs of that project. Understanding official immunity as derivative of this principle helps us to identify, not just the grounds, but also some of the limits of official immunity: it helps us to sort between the kinds of official wrongs for which the burdens should fall on the individual agents themselves and the kinds of wrongs for which those burdens should be assumed by the citizenry.
under review
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What's for Desert?
On whether an offender's deserving punishment can explain when and why he lacks a right against punishment.
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A Promising Theory of Contract (with Simone Sepe)
A novel version of the idea that the justification for contract law is grounded in promissory morality.
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The Justifier Pays
An argument that someone who benefits from the infringement of another’s rights may owe compensation for that infringement when, because, and to the extent that her interests contributed to justifying the trespass.
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As If
An interrogation of the idea --- recently developed by Jonathan Quong --- that a person makes herself liable to defensive harm when and because she acts as if other people lack moral rights they in fact possess.
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Defending Thomson on Defense (with Kit Wellman)
A defense of Judith Thomson's oft-maligned theory of self-defense.
teaching.
as primary instructor
Moral rights are boundaries. They constrain what others may do with and to our body and property. But sometimes we may want others to interact with our body or property in ways our rights generally prohibit: we may want to be intimate with another, or to have someone into our home for dinner, or to let a friend borrow our copy of Reasons and Persons. In such cases we may consent to those interactions, and in so doing suspend or “waive” the rights that otherwise prohibit those interactions. In this way we exercise a form of control over our moral boundaries and make possible relationships that would otherwise be unavailable. But we can also act in ways that suspend rights despite having no desire or intention to suspend our rights. If Al batters Bob without justification, Bob may defend himself — with physical force if necessary. By harming Al in self-defense, Bob does not violate Al’s rights. This is because, although Al’s rights normally protect him from physical harm and although he does not consent to harm, Al “forfeits” some of those rights by his act of aggression. This seminar explores the nature of moral rights and of these ways of modifying our own moral boundaries, and what this means for a handful of applied issues (defensive harm, punishment, sex, medicine). (Spring 2025, University of Arizona)
Morality and law are distinct, but deeply interconnected, normative systems. This course
explores their relationship. Among the questions we will investigate: What is the law? What is morality? Is there a duty to obey the law? Should the law enforce morality? What moral grounds does the state have for punishing someone? What limits does morality set on what may be criminalized ? What makes the difference between valid and invalid consent? What is the relationship between contracts and the morality of promising? Should there be legal limits on freedom of contract? What is the moral foundation of the law of torts? How should we understand and measure harm? What is the relationship between causation and the duty to compensate? (Fall 2025 University of Arizona)
This course is an introduction to moral philosophy and moral theory. We will critically survey answers to the following two questions: What makes for a good life? And what makes an action right or wrong? We will also engage with theories of morality in the context of answering questions about specific moral issues: Is there anything wrong with participating in the practice of killing animals for food? Is it morally permissible to have or administer an abortion? What justifies the state in instituting a system of criminal punishment, and what limits does morality impose on such a system? What is the moral importance of consent, and what does it take to give one's consent? (Fall 2025, Fall 2024, University of Arizona)
This course is a tour through various conceptual and ethical issues concerning markets, money, and property. The course explores such questions as: What is money and how should we handle it? What are cryptocurrencies and what are their benefits and risks? What markets systems are morally best? What parts of an economy should be left to private individuals, and what should be left to public policy? What economic obligations do nations have to one another and to the citizens of other nations? What is ownership, and what sorts of ownership regimes are best? (Summer 2023 & Summer 2022, USC)
This course explores some of the most prominent ethical issues of the 21st century (so far). For example: corporate responsibility, democracy, voting rights, political polarization, punishment, reparations, war, immigration, privacy, abortion, artificial intelligence, environmental conservation, and our duties towards future generations. (Summer 2019, USC, w. Andrew Stewart)
as discussion instructor/teaching assistant
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Philosophy of Law (Spring 2021, USC, w. Scott Soames)
Subjects covered: nature of law, legal legitimacy, the nature of rights, legal interpretation, and philosophical issues in American Constitutional and Administrative law.
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Ethical Theory & Practice (Fall 2020, USC, w. Robin Jeshion)
Subjects covered: normative ethical theories, animal ethics, pandemic ethics, justice, mass incarceration, reparations, misogyny, affirmative action, free speech/hate speech/cancel culture, "faith in humanity".
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Philosophy of Law (Spring 2020, USC, w. Scott Soames)
As in 2021 section (above).
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Moral Issues in the Legal Domain (Spring 2019, USC, w. John Hawthorne)
Subjects covered: nature of law, rights, consequentialism, punishment, insanity defense, self-defense, rules of evidence, product liability, privacy, free speech, death penalty, right to bear arms, citizenship, civil disobedience, drug laws.
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Freedom, Equality, and Justice (Fall 2018, USC, w. Jonathan Quong)
Subjects covered: nature of legitimate authority and political obligation, justice, Rawls, libertarianism, freedom and taxes/money/property, socialism, crime and punishment, justice and gender/the family, religion and politics, global justice, immigration, justice and past generation, justice and future generations.
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Epistemology (Spring 2017, Northern Illinois, w. Geoff Pynn)
Subjects covered: skepticism, rationalism, empiricism, analysis of knoweldge, internalism v. externalism, testimony, evidentialism, pragmatism, perception, inference, experts, gossip, rumor, conspiracy theories, epistemology and the media.
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Introduction to Philosophy (Fall 2016, Northern Illinois, w. Mylan Engel)
Subjects covered: logic, epistemology, normative ethics, applied ethics, freedom and determinism, philosophy of religion.
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Contemporary Moral Issues (Spring 2016, Northern Illinois, w. Nicoleta Apostol)
Subjects covered: normative ethical theories, relativism, metaethical theories, drug legalization, gun control, judicial review, freedom of speech, euthanasia, marriage, affirmative action, in-vitro fertilization, cloning, animal ethics.
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Logic (Fall 2015, Northern Illinois, w. John Beaudoin)
Subjects covered: deductive arguments, non-deductive arguments, possible worlds, forms of proof, fallacies, probability, causal reasoning, appeals to the best explanation, propositional logic, categorical logic.