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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
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71Symmetry, Rational Abilities, and the Ought-Implies-Can PrincipleCriminal Law and Philosophy 10 (2): 283-296. 2016.In Making Sense of Free Will and Moral Responsibility Dana Nelkin defends the “rational abilities view.” According to this view, agents are responsible for their behavior if and only if they act with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. It follows that agents who act well are open to praise regardless of whether they could have acted differently, but agents who act badly are open to blame only if they could have acted on the moral reasons that counted against their behavior. I summ…Read more
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76Implanted Desires, Self-Formation and BlameJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 3 (2): 1-18. 2009.Those who advocate a “historicist” outlook on moral responsibility often hold that people who unwillingly acquire corrupt dispositions are not blameworthy for the wrong actions that issue from these dispositions; this contention is frequently supported by thought experiments involving instances of forced psychological manipulation that seem to call responsibility into question. I argue against this historicist perspective and in favor of the conclusion that the process by which a person acquires…Read more
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133Accountability, Aliens, and Psychopaths: A Reply to ShoemakerEthics 122 (3): 562-574. 2012.I respond here to an argument in David Shoemaker’s recent essay, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility.” Shoemaker finds that “Scanlonian” approaches to moral blame err insofar as they do not include a capacity to respond to moral considerations among the conditions on blameworthiness. Shoemaker argues that wrongdoers must be able to respond to moral reasons for their behavior to express the disrespect to which blaming attitudes like r…Read more
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20Review of Carlos J. Moya, Moral Responsibility: The Ways of Scepticism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (8). 2006.
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45Compatibilism, Common Sense, and PrepunishmentPublic Affairs Quarterly 23 (4): 325-335. 2009.We “prepunish” a person if we punish her prior to the commission of her crime. This essay discusses our intuitions about the permissibility of prepunishment and the relationship between prepunishment and compatibilism about free will and determinism. It has recently been argued that compatibilism has particular trouble generating a principled objection to prepunishment. The failure to provide such an objection may be a problem for compatibilism if our moral intuitions strongly favor the prohibit…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |