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104Contractualism and our duties to nonhuman animalsEnvironmental Ethics 28 (2): 201-215. 2006.The influential account of contractualist moral theory offered recently by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other is not intended to account for all the various moral commitments that people have; it covers only a narrow—though important—range of properly moral concerns and claims. Scanlon focuses on what he calls the morality of right and wrong or, as he puts it in his title, what we owe to each other. The question arises as to whether nonhuman animals can be wronged in the narrow sense of …Read more
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123Situationism, normative competence, and responsibility for wartime behaviorJournal of Value Inquiry 43 (3): 415-432. 2009.About a year after the start of the Iraq War, a story broke about the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison. Editorialists and science writers noted affinities between what happened at Abu Ghraib and Philip Zimbardo’s famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment is part of the “situationist” literature in social psychology, which suggests that the contexts in which agents act have a larger influence on behavior, and that personality traits have a…Read more
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30Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, by Derk Pereboom. New York: Oxford University PressMind 125 (497): 248-252. 2016.
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849Unwitting Wrongdoers and the Role of Moral Disagreement in BlameIn David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2013.I argue against the claim that morally ignorant wrongdoers are open to blame only if they are culpable for their ignorance, and I argue against a version of skepticism about moral responsibility that depends on this claim being true. On the view I defend, the attitudes involved in blame are typically responses to the features of an action that make it objectionable or unjustifiable from the perspective of the one who issues the blame. One important way that an action can appear objectionable to …Read more
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63Praise and preventionPhilosophical Explorations 15 (1): 47-61. 2012.I argue that it is possible to prevent (and to be praiseworthy for preventing) an unwelcome outcome that had no chance of occurring. I motivate this position by constructing examples in which it makes sense to explain the non-occurrence of a certain outcome by referring to a particular agent's intentional and willing behavior, and yet the non-occurrence of the outcome in question was ensured by factors external to the agent. I conclude that even if the non-occurrence of an unwelcome outcome is e…Read more
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23Contractualism and Our Duties to Nonhuman AnimalsEnvironmental Ethics 28 (2): 201-215. 2006.The influential account of contractualist moral theory offered recently by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other is not intended to account for all the various moral commitments that people have; it covers only a narrow—though important—range of properly moral concerns and claims. Scanlon focuses on what he calls the morality of right and wrong or, as he puts it in his title, what we owe to each other. The question arises as to whether nonhuman animals can be wronged in the narrow sense of …Read more
Lund, Skane Lan, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |