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273“Moral Address, Moral Responsibility, and the Boundaries of the Moral CommunityEthics 118 (1): 70-108. 2007.This paper attempts to provide a more plausible theory of moral accountability and the crucial role in it of moral address by taking seriously four "marginal" cases of agency: psychopaths, moral fetishists, and individuals with autism and mild intellectual disabilities. Each case motivates the addition of another key accountability capacity.
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269Caring, identification, and agencyEthics 114 (1): 88-118. 2003.This paper articulates and defends a noncognitive, care-based view of identification, of what privileged psychic subset provides the source of self-determination in actions and attitudes. The author provides an extended analysis of "caring," and then applies it to debates between Frankfurtians, on the one hand, and Watsonians, on the other, about the nature of identification, then defends the view against objections.
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147Responsibility From the MarginsOxford University Press. 2015.David Shoemaker presents a new pluralistic theory of responsibility, based on the idea of quality of will. His approach is motivated by our ambivalence to real-life cases of marginal agency, such as those caused by clinical depression, dementia, scrupulosity, psychopathy, autism, intellectual disability, and poor formative circumstances. Our ambivalent responses suggest that such agents are responsible in some ways but not others. Shoemaker develops a theory to account for our ambivalence, via c…Read more
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148Theoretical Persons and Practical AgentsPhilosophy and Public Affairs 25 (4): 318-332. 1996.This paper defends Parfit's "theoretical" view of personal identity against Christine Korsgaard's objections grounded in practical identity.
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180Qualities of willSocial Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2): 95-120. 2013.One of P. F. Strawson's suggestions in “Freedom and Resentment” was that there might be an elegant theory of moral responsibility that accounted for all of our responsibility responses in a way that also explained why we get off the hook from those responses. Such a theory would appeal exclusively toquality of will: when we react with any of a variety of responsibility responses to someone, we are responding to the quality of her will with respect to us, and when we let her off the hook, we are …Read more
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16Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility: Volume 3 (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2015.Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a forum for outstanding new work in an area of vigorous and broad-ranging debate in philosophy and beyond. What is involved in human action? Can philosophy and science illuminate debate about free will? How should we answer questions about responsibility for action?
Ithaca, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
3 more
Moral Responsibility |
Agency |
Moral Psychology |
Persons |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Applied Ethics |
Free Will |
Value Theory, Miscellaneous |