•  599
    Making Sense of Shame in Response to Racism
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (7): 535-550. 2021.
    Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of her race, but by her inability to choose when her stigmatised race is made salient. I argue that th…Read more
  •  304
    Proof Paradoxes, Agency, and Stereotyping
    Philosophical Issues 31 (1): 355-373. 2021.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 355-373, October 2021.
  •  198
    Alex Sarch’s recent book, Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What We Don’t is a wonderfully rich work.1 Sarch provides and defends an explanatorily powerful theory of criminal culpab...
  •  256
    Shame and the Ethical in Williams
    In Andras Szigeti & Talbert Matthew (eds.), Agency, Fate and Luck: Themes from Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press. 2022.
    Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity (1993) was an influential early contribution to what has become a broader movement to rehabilitate shame as a moral emotion. But there is a tension in Williams’ discussion that presents an under-appreciated difficulty for efforts to rehabilitate shame. The tension arises between what Williams takes shame in its essence to be and what shame can do—the role that shame can be expected to play in ethical life. Williams can—and we argue, should—be read as avoidin…Read more
  •  314
    This paper proposes a distinctive kind of agency that can vindicate the agency of members of marginalised groups while accommodating the autonomy-undermining influences of oppression. Socially-embedded agency—the locus of which is in the exercise of our ability to negotiate between different social features—is compatible with, and can explain, various phenomena, including double-consciousness and white fragility. Moreover, although socially-embedded agency is neither necessary nor sufficient for…Read more
  •  801
    Disability, Impairment, and Marginalised Functioning
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4): 730-747. 2021.
    One challenge in providing an adequate definition of physical disability is unifying the heterogeneous bodily conditions that count as disabilities. We examine recent proposals by Elizabeth Barnes (2016), and Dana Howard and Sean Aas (2018), and show how this debate has reached an impasse. Barnes’ account struggles to deliver principled unification of the category of disability, whilst Howard and Aas’ account risks inappropriately sidelining the body. We argue that this impasse can be broken usi…Read more
  •  163
    Review of Equality and Legitimacy by Wojciech Sadurski (review)
    Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 34 266-268. 2009.
  •  729
    Conjuring Ethics from Words
    with Jonathan McKeown-Green and Glen Pettigrove
    Noûs 49 (1): 71-93. 2012.
    Many claims about conceptual matters are often represented as, or inferred from, claims about the meaning, reference, or mastery, of words. But sometimes this has led to treating conceptual analysis as though it were nothing but linguistic analysis. We canvass the most promising justifications for moving from linguistic premises to substantive conclusions. We show that these justifications fail and argue against current practice (in metaethics and elsewhere), which confuses an investigation of a…Read more
  •  951
    Burdens of Proof and the Case for Unevenness
    with Imran Aijaz and Jonathan McKeown-Green
    Argumentation 27 (3): 259-282. 2013.
    How is the burden of proof to be distributed among individuals who are involved in resolving a particular issue? Under what conditions should the burden of proof be distributed unevenly? We distinguish attitudinal from dialectical burdens and argue that these questions should be answered differently, depending on which is in play. One has an attitudinal burden with respect to some proposition when one is required to possess sufficient evidence for it. One has a dialectical burden with respect to…Read more