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27Comment on Stephen Darwall’s The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and AccountabilityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 246-252. 2010.
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96The Point of Mens Rea: The Case of Willful IgnoranceCriminal Law and Philosophy 12 (1): 19-44. 2018.Under the “Willful Ignorance Principle,” a defendant is guilty of a crime requiring knowledge he lacks provided he is ignorant thanks to having earlier omitted inquiry. In this paper, I offer a novel justification of this principle through application of the theory that knowledge matters to culpability because of how the knowing action manifests the agent’s failure to grant sufficient weight to other people’s interests. I show that, under a simple formal model that supports this theory, omitting…Read more
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23More on "Ought" Implies "Can" and the Principle of Alternate PossibilitiesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1): 307-312. 2005.
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143Locke on ideas of substance and the veil of perceptionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (3). 2004.John Yolton has argued that Locke held a direct realist position according to which sensory ideas are not perceived intermediaries, as on the representational realist position, but acts that take material substances as objects. This paper argues that were Locke to accept the position Yolton attributes to him he could not at once account for appearance‐reality discrepancies and maintain one of his most important anti‐nativist arguments. The paper goes on to offer an interpretation of Locke's dist…Read more
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81The Voluntary Act RequirementIn Andrei Marmor (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law, Routledge. pp. 174. 2012.
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2Beyond the Brave Officer: Reid on the Unity of the Mind, the Moral Sense, and Locke's Theory of Personal IdentityIn Sabine Roeser (ed.), Reid on ethics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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77Review of John Fischer and mark Ravizza's responsibility and control: A theory of moral responsibility (review)Erkenntnis 53 (3): 429-434. 2000.
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88Peach trees, gravity and God: Mechanism in LockeBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (3). 2004.Locke claimed that God superadded various powers to matter, including motion, the perfections of peach trees and elephants, gravity, and that he could superadd thought. Various interpreters have discussed the question whether Locke's claims about superaddition are in tension with his commitment to mechanistic explanation. This literature assumes that for Locke mechanistic explanation involves deducibility. We argue that this is an inaccurate interpretation and that mechanistic explanation involv…Read more
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54Manifest activity: Thomas Reid's theory of actionOxford University Press. 2004.Manifest Activity presents and critically examines the model of human power, the will, our capacities for purposeful conduct, and the place of our agency in the natural world of one of the most important and traditionally under-appreciated philosophers of the 18th century: Thomas Reid. For Reid, contrary to the view of many of his predecessors, it is simply manifest that we are active with respect to our behaviours; it is manifest, he thinks, that our actions are not merely remote products of fo…Read more
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61Intending to AidLaw and Philosophy 33 (1): 1-40. 2014.Courts and commentators are notoriously puzzled about the mens rea standards for complicity. Accomplices intend to aid, but what attitude need they have towards the crimes that they aid? This paper both criticizes extant accounts of the mens rea of complicity and offers a new account. The paper argues that an intention can commit one to an event’s occurrence without committing one to promoting the event, or making it more likely to take place. Under the proposed account of the mens rea of compli…Read more
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58Desert for WrongdoingThe Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3): 149-171. 2016.Much government and personal conduct is premised on the idea that a person made thereby to suffer deserves that suffering thanks to prior wrongdoing by him. Further, it often appears that one kind of suffering is more deserved than another and, in light of that, conduct inflicting the first is superior, or closer to being justified than conduct inflicting the second. Yet desert is mysterious. It is far from obvious what, exactly, it is. This paper offers and argues for a theory of comparative de…Read more
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116Thomas Reid on consciousness and attentionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (2). 2009.It was common enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find philosophers holding the position that for something to be ‘in the mind’ and for that mind to be conscious of it are one and the same thing. The thought is that consciousness is a relation between a mind and a mental entity playing the same role as the relation of inherence found between a substance and qualities belonging to it. What it is, on this view, for something to ‘inhere’ in the mind is for that mind to be consciou…Read more
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69Recent Work on Addiction and Responsible AgencyPhilosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2): 178-221. 2001.
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