Martin Montminy

I defend a contextualist account of bare epistemic modal claims against recent objections. I argue that in uttering a sentence of the form ‘It might be that p,’ a speaker is performing two speech acts. First, she is (directly) asserting that in view of the knowledge possessed by some relevant group, it might be that p. The content of this first speech act is accounted for by the contextualist view. But the speaker's utterance also generates an indirect speech act that consists in a weak suggestive that p. Since this second speech act is typically the main point of a bare epistemic modal utterance, our (negative or positive) responses to the utterance actually target this second speech act. I show how this two-speech-act account can explain the data recently adduced against contextualism

According to a popular view, resultant luck does not affect the overall degree of responsibility of an agent. A lucky reckless driver who does not harm anyone is overall just as blameworthy as an unfortunate reckless driver who accidentally kills a pedestrian. This view appears to contradict a very plausible thesis about character formation, according to which responsibility for one’s character can increase one’s degree of responsibility for the actions motivated by that character. Given that character formation is ridden with resultant luck, it seems that one cannot hold both that responsibility is immune to resultant luck and that responsibility is increased by prior character-forming actions. I argue that there is no tension between the two theses. Given that agents exercise control over their character-forming actions, character formation is not a purely lucky process, and deniers of resultant luck can consistently hold the plausible thesis about character formation.

I defend the principle that a person is blameworthy for her action only if that action was morally wrong. But what should we say about an agent who does the right thing based on bad motives? I present three types of cases that have these features. In each, I argue, the agent is not culpable for her action; however, she violates the norm of moral responsibility, and thus acts in a morally irresponsible way. This analysis, I show, has several virtues. It also has important theoretical ramifications: it allows for a more nuanced approach to moral luck and paves the way for an unexplored line of defense in favor of a particular norm of moral responsibility.