•  25
    The Logic of Past-Alteration
    In Dean W. Zimmerman & Karen Bennett (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 13, Oxford University Press. pp. 283-314. 2023.
    Is it possible to change the past—to make something that has happened not have happened? Past-alteration is widely believed to be ‘logically impossible’. But despite this, there have been few attempts to actually apply logical resources to the question of whether it is possible to change the past. This chapter articulates a novel tense logic and uses it to argue that past-alteration is possible—with just a single dimension of time—so long as it’s possible for time to have a certain kind of struc…Read more
  •  19
    Responsibility and iterated knowledge
    Philosophical Issues 33 (1): 83-94. 2023.
    I defend an iterated knowledge condition on responsibility for outcomes: one is responsible for a consequence of one's action only if one was in a position to know that, for all one was in a position to know, one's action would have that consequence.
  •  19
    Moore on Degrees of Responsibility
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 18 (1): 151-166. 2023.
    In his latest book Mechanical Choices, Michael Moore provides an explication and defence of the idea that responsibility comes in degrees. His account takes as its point of departure the view that free action and free will consist in the holding of certain counterfactuals. In this paper, I argue that Moore’s view faces several familiar counterexamples, all of which serve to motivate Harry Frankfurt’s classic insight that whether and to what extent one is responsible for one’s action has more to …Read more
  •  82
    Interventionism and Mental Surgery
    Erkenntnis 85 (4): 919-935. 2020.
    John Campbell has claimed that the interventionist account of causation must be amended if it is to be applied to causation in psychology. The problem, he argues, is that it follows from the so-called ‘surgical’ constraint that intervening on psychological states requires the suspension of the agent’s rational autonomy. In this paper, I argue that the problem Campbell identifies is in fact an instance of a wider problem for interventionism, extending beyond psychology, which I call the problem o…Read more
  •  72
    What's Wrong with Prepunishment?
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (3): 622-645. 2023.
    Punishing someone for a crime before they have committed it is widely considered morally abhorrent. But there is little agreement on what exactly is supposed to be wrong with it. In this paper, I critically evaluate several objections to the permissibility of prepunishment, making points along the way about the connections between time, knowledge, desert, deterrence and duty. I conclude that, although the conditions under which it could permissibly be administered are unlikely ever to arise in p…Read more
  •  22
    Alternative possibilities in context
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (10): 1308-1324. 2022.
    ABSTRACT Frankfurt cases are often presented as counterexamples to the principle that one is morally responsible for one’s action only if one could have acted otherwise. But ‘could have acted otherwise’ is context-sensitive; it’s therefore open to a proponent of this principle to reply that although there is a salient sense in which agents in Frankfurt-style cases couldn’t have acted otherwise, there’s another, different sense in which they could have, and it is this latter sense which is releva…Read more
  •  46
    Against Accomplice Liability
    In Leslie Green & Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, Oxford University Press. pp. 124-155. 2011.
    Accomplice liability makes people guilty of crimes they knowingly helped or encouraged others to commit, even if they did not commit the crime themselves. But this method of criminalizing aiders and abettors is fraught with problems. In this chapter, I argue that accomplice liability in the criminal law should be replaced with a system in which agents are criminalized on the basis of their individual contributions to causings of harm—the larger the contribution, the more severe the crime—regardl…Read more
  •  87
    Responsibility and the ‘Pie Fallacy’
    Philosophical Studies 178 (11): 3597-3616. 2021.
    Much of our ordinary thought and talk about responsibility exhibits what I call the ‘pie fallacy’—the fallacy of thinking that there is a fixed amount of responsibility for every outcome, to be distributed among all those, if any, who are responsible for it. The pie fallacy is a fallacy, I argue, because how responsible an agent is for some outcome is fully grounded in facts about the agent, the outcome and the relationships between them; it does not depend, in particular, on how responsible any…Read more
  •  154
    Why Free Will is Real, by Christian List
    Mind 130 (519): 987-996. 2021.
    Why Free Will is Real, by ListChristian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 216.
  •  43
    Review of Carolina Sartorio’s Causation and Free Will (review)
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 13 (3): 551-559. 2019.
  •  47
    Causal Contribution in War
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (3): 364-377. 2020.
    Revisionist approaches to the ethics of war seem to imply that civilians on the unjust side of a conflict can be legitimate targets of defensive attack. In response, some authors have argued that although civilians do often causally contribute to unjustified global threats – by voting for war, writing propaganda articles, or manufacturing munitions, for example – their contributions are usually too ‘small’, or ‘remote’, to make them liable to be intentionally killed to avert the threat. What def…Read more
  •  188
    Stage theory and the personite problem
    Analysis 79 (2): 215-222. 2019.
    Mark Johnston has recently argued that four-dimensionalist theories of persistence are incompatible with some of our most basic ethical and prudential principles. I argue that although Johnston’s arguments succeed on a worm-theoretic account of persistence, they fail on a stage-theoretic account. So much the worse, I conclude, for the worm theory.
  •  163
    It is often natural to compare two events by describing one as ‘more of a cause’ of some effect than the other. But what do such comparisons amount to, exactly? This paper aims to provide a guided tour of the recent literature on ‘degrees of causation’. Section 2 looks at what I call ‘dependence measures’, which arise from thinking of causes as difference‐makers. Section 3 looks at what I call ‘production measures’, which arise from thinking of causes as jointly sufficient for their effects. Fin…Read more
  •  15
    Partial liability—corrigendum
    Legal Theory 23 (2): 141. 2017.
  •  36
    Partial liability
    Legal Theory 23 (1): 1-26. 2017.
    In most cases, liability in tort law is all-or-nothing—a defendant is either fully liable or not at all liable for a claimant's loss. By contrast, this paper defends a causal theory of partial liability. I argue that a defendant should be held liable for a claimant's loss only to the degree to which the defendant's wrongdoing contributed to the causing of the loss. I ground this principle in a conception of tort law as a system of corrective justice and use it to critically evaluate different me…Read more
  •  118
    Causal Contribution
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (3): 387-394. 2016.
    Are there ‘degrees of causation’? Yes and no: causation is not a scalar relation, but different causes can contribute to a causing of an effect to different extents. In this paper, I motivate a probabilistic analysis of an event’s degree of contribution to a causing of an effect and explore some of its consequences.
  •  115
    Causes and Counterparts
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1): 17-28. 2017.
    It follows from David Lewis's counterpart-theoretic analysis of modality and his counterfactual theory of causation that causal claims are relativized to a set of counterpart relations. Call this Shlewis's view. I show how Shlewis's view can provide attractively unified solutions to similar modal and causal puzzles. I then argue that Shlewis's view is better motivated, by his own lights, than the view Lewis actually held, and also better motivated than a similar approach which relativizes causal…Read more
  •  111
    Necessary Connections in Context
    Erkenntnis 82 (1): 45-64. 2017.
    This paper combines the ancient idea that causes necessitate their effects with Angelika Kratzer’s semantics of modality. On the resulting view, causal claims quantify over restricted domains of possible worlds determined by two contextually determined parameters. I argue that this view can explain a number of otherwise puzzling features of the way we use and evaluate causal language, including the difference between causing an effect and being a cause of it, the sensitivity of causal judgements…Read more