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151Responsibility 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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174Qualities 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?
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99In Praise of Desire By Nomy Arpaly and Timothy SchroederAnalysis 75 (4): 679-682. 2015.This paper is a review of Arpaly and Schroeder's book, "In Praise of Desire" (OUP).
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420Insanity, Deep Selves, and Moral Responsibility: The Case of JoJoReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3). 2010.Susan Wolf objects to the Real Self View (RSV) of moral responsibility that it is insufficient, that even if one’s actions are expressions of one’s deepest or “real” self, one might still not be morally responsible for one’s actions. As a counterexample to the RSV, Wolf offers the case of JoJo, the son of a dictator, who endorses his father’s (evil) values, but who is insane and is thus not responsible for his actions. Wolf’s data for this conclusion derives from what she takes to be our “preth…Read more
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200Reductionist contractualism: Moral motivation and the expanding selfCanadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 343-370. 2000.According to a popular contemporary contractualist account of moral motivation, the most plausible explanation for why those who are concerned with morality take moral reasons seriously — why these reasons strike those who are moved by them with a particular inescapability — is that they stem from, and are grounded by, a desire to be able to justify one’s actions to others on grounds they could not reasonably reject.1 My
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183Personal identity and bioethics: The state of the artTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31 (4): 249-257. 2010.In this introduction to the special issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics on the topic of personal identity and bioethics, I provide a background for the topic and then discuss the contributions in the special issue by Eric Olson, Marya Schechtman, Tim Campbell and Jeff McMahan, James Delaney and David Hershenov, and David DeGrazia
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 |