Alan Brian Carter (born 1952) is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.
Carter's first academic position was lecturer in political theory at University College Dublin.
[2] Carter's state-primacy theory has been discussed by Robyn Eckersley[3] and criticized by John Barry.
[5] Carter has responded by arguing that his critics fail to take sufficiently into account the problems the military causes in modern societies: "it is telling how little attention green liberal critics of the state-primacy theory have paid to the role of the military and to its highly distorting effects.
Failing to examine in any detail military requirements within ostensibly 'liberal democracies', whether existing or imagined, is more like simply ignoring an argument rather than answering it.