Helen Frowe did BA and MA in Philosophy at the University of Kent before undertaking a PhD investigating permissible killing at the University of Reading. Her MA thesis defended the moral distinction between doing and allowing, laying the foundations for an ongoing obsession with permissible killing. She then undertook a PhD in normative ethics at the University of Reading, supervised by Brad Hooker and Andrew Williams. Her PhD develops a new conception of threats and bystanders, and argues for a deontological account of permissible defence against the innocent. The final part of her PhD she worked with Jeff McMahan at Rutgers.
After finishing her PhD, she spent three years in the Philosophy department at the University of Sheffield, first as a lecturer and then as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. She used Leverhulme Fellowship to write a book on self-defence and war. She argue that the rules of war are extensions of the rules of self-defence, and that it is sometimes permissible to attack non-combatants in war. She spent part of this fellowship visiting the Philosophy department at Harvard. Aside from just war theory and self-defence, her research interests include deontological ethics, applied ethics (especially bioethics), political philosophy and philosophy of law.
She is the Editor of Continuum’s Political Philosophy series, and on the executive committees of the British Society for Ethical Theory and the Society for Applied Philosophy. She is also the Director of Undergraduate Admissions for Philosophy at Kent.
