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17"the Government Beguiled Me": The Entrapment Defense and the Problem of Private EntrapmentJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (1): 1-50. 2005.Defendants who are being tried for accepting a temptation issued by the government sometimes employ the entrapment defense. Acquittal of some of them is thought to be justified either on the grounds that culpability was undermined by the temptation or on the grounds that the government acted objectionably in issuing the temptation . Advocates of the objective approach often criticize those who employ the subjective by citing what is here called “the problem of private entrapment”: we don’t grant…Read more
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8Promises, social acts, and Reid's first argument for moral libertyJournal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2): 267-289. 2007.This paper is concerned to bring out the philosophical contribution that Thomas Reid makes in his discussions of promising. Reid discusses promising in two contexts: he argues that the practice of promising presupposes the belief that the promisor is endowed with what he calls 'active power' , and he argues against Hume's claim that the very act of promising—and the obligation to do as one promised—are "artificial," or the products of human convention . In addition to explaining what Reid says i…Read more
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6More Attempts: A Reply to Duff, Husak, Mele and Walen (review)Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (3): 429-444. 2012.In this paper, I reply to the very thoughtful comments on my book by Antony Duff, Doug Husak, Al Mele and Alec Walen
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5In Defense of Criminal PossessionCriminal Law and Philosophy 10 (3): 441-471. 2016.Criminal law casebooks and treatises frequently mention the possibility that criminal liability for possession is inconsistent with the Voluntary Act Requirement, which limits criminal liability to that which includes an act or an omission. This paper explains why criminal liability for possession is compatible with the Voluntary Act Requirement despite the fact that possession is a status. To make good on this claim, the paper defends the Voluntary Act Requirement, offers an account of the natu…Read more
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5Comment on Stephen Darwall’s The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and AccountabilityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 246-252. 2010.
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14The 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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5More on "Ought" Implies "Can" and the Principle of Alternate PossibilitiesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1): 307-312. 2005.
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11Locke 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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6The 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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23Peach 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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7Review 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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