•  213
    I defend a deontological social contract justification of punishment for free will deniers. Even if nobody has free will, a criminal justice system is fair to the people it targets if we would consent to it in a version of original position deliberation (OPD) where we assumed that we would be targeted by the justice system when the veil is raised. Even if we assumed we would be convicted of a crime, we would consent to the imprisonment of violent criminals if prison conditions were better than …Read more
  •  307
    Five perspectives on holding wrongdoers responsible in Kant
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (1): 100-125. 2023.
    The first part of this paper surveys five perspectives in Kant’s philosophy on the quantity of retribution to be inflicted on wrongdoers, ordered by two dimensions of difference – whether they are theoretical or practical perspectives, and the quantity of retribution they prescribe: (1) theoretical zero, the perspective of theoretical philosophy; (2) practical infinity, the perspective of God and conscience; (3) practical equality, the perspective of punishment in public law; (4) practical degre…Read more
  •  8
    This chapter offers non-retributive, broadly Kantian justifications of punishment and remorse that can be endorsed by free will skeptics. We lose our grip on some Kantian ideas if we become skeptical about free will, but we can preserve some important ones that can do valuable work for free will skeptics. The justification of punishment presented here has consequentialist features but is deontologically constrained by our duty to avoid using others as mere means. It draws on a modified Rawlsian …Read more
  •  32
  •  284
    This chapter offers non-retributive, broadly Kantian justifications of punishment and remorse which can be endorsed by free will skeptics. We lose our grip on some Kantian ideas if we become skeptical about free will, but we can preserve some important ones which can do valuable work for free will skeptics. The justification of punishment presented here has consequentialist features but is deontologically constrained by our duty to avoid using others as mere means. It draws on a modified Rawl…Read more
  •  577
    Sages, Sympathy, and Suffering in Kant’s Theory of Friendship
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (6): 452-467. 2021.
    Kant’s theory of friendship is crucial in defending his ethics against the longstanding charge of emotional detachment. But his theory of friendship is vulnerable to this charge too: the Kantian sage can appear to reject sympathetic suffering when she cannot help a suffering friend. I argue that Kant is committed to the view that both sages and ordinary people must suffer in sympathy with friends even when they cannot help, because sympathy is necessary to fulfill the imperfect duty to adopt oth…Read more
  •  401
    Kantian Remorse with and without Self-Retribution
    Kantian Review 27 (3): 421-441. 2022.
    This is a semifinal draft of a forthcoming paper. Kant’s account of the pain of remorse involves a hybrid justification based on self-retribution, but constrained by forward-looking principles which say that we must channel remorse into improvement, and moderate its pain to avoid damaging our rational agency. Kant’s corpus also offers material for a revisionist but textually-grounded alternative account based on wrongdoers’ sympathy for the pain they cause. This account is based on the value of…Read more
  •  698
    Free Will Skepticism and Personhood as a Desert Base
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3): 489-511. 2009.
    In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. (Free will is understood here as whatever satisfies the control condition of moral responsibility.) Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of…Read more
  •  202
    Kant’s conception of remorse has not received focused discussion in the literature. I argue that he thinks we ought to experience remorse for both retributivist and consequentialist reasons. This account casts helpful light on his ideas of conversion and the descent into the hell of self-cognition. But while he prescribes a heartbreakingly painful experience of remorse, he acknowledges that excess remorse can threaten rational agency through distraction and suicide, and this raises question…Read more
  •  215
    “Reason's sympathy” and others' ends in Kant
    European Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 96-112. 2021.
    Kant’s notion of (what I will call) rational sympathy solves a problem about how we can voluntarily fulfill our imperfect duty to adopt those ends of others which have value only because they have been set by rational agents, ends which I will refer to as merely permissible ends (MPEs). Others’ MPEs are individuated in terms of their own concepts of their MPEs, and we can only adopt their MPEs in terms of their concepts, since to adopt them in terms of different concepts would be to adopt diffe…Read more
  •  284
    This paper argues that Kant endorses a distinction between rational and natural sympathy, and it presents an interpretation of rational sympathy as a power of voluntarya posterioriproductive imagination. In rational sympathy we draw on the imagination’s voluntary powers (a) to subjectively unify the contents of intuition, in order to imaginatively put ourselves in others’ places, and (b) to associate imagined intuitional contents with the concepts others use to convey their feelings, in such a w…Read more
  •  322
    An Asymmetrical Approach to Kant's Theory of Freedom
    In Dai Heide & Evan Tiffany (eds.), The Idea of Freedom: New Essays on the Kantian Theory of Freedom, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Asymmetry theories about free will and moral responsibility are a recent development in the long history of the free will debate. Kant commentators have not yet explored the possibility of an asymmetrical reconstruction of Kant's theory of freedom, and that is my goal here. By "free will", I mean the sort of control we would need to be morally responsible for our actions. Kant's term for it is "transcendental freedom", and he refers to the attribution of moral responsibility as "imputation". …Read more
  •  1976
    This chapter has two goals. First, I will present an interpretation of Kant’s mature account of punishment, which includes a strong commitment to retributivism. Second, I will sketch a non-retributive, “ideal abolitionist” alternative, which appeals to a version of original position deliberation in which we choose the principles of punishment on the assumption that we are as likely to end up among the punished as we are to end up among those protected by the institution of punishment. This is ra…Read more
  •  1
    An Interpretation and Defense of Kant's Theory of Free Will
    Dissertation, The University of Chicago. 2002.
    Kant is entitled to his claim that determinism and incompatibilist moral responsibility coexist if he is interpreted as holding that each agent qua noumenon is atemporally responsible for the particular causal laws which necessitate the actions of that agent qua temporal phenomenon. The fact of causal necessitation is imposed on the empirical world a priori by theoretical reason, and it serves to objectively temporally order phenomena. This imposition is purely formal, however, and explains only…Read more
  •  647
    Can we interpret Kant as a compatibilist about determinism and moral responsibility?
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (4). 2004.
    In this paper, I discuss Hud Hudson's compatibilistic interpretation of Kant's theory of free will, which is based on Davidson's anomalous monism. I sketch an alternative interpretation of my own, an incompatibilistic interpretation according to which agents qua noumena are responsible for the particular causal laws which determine the actions of agents qua phenomena. Hudson's interpretation should be attractive to philosophers who value Kant's epistemology and ethics, but insist on a deflation…Read more
  •  745
    The Scope of Responsibility in Kant's Theory of Free Will
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (1): 45-71. 2010.
    In this paper, I discuss a problem for Kant's strategy of appealing to the agent qua noumenon to undermine the significance of determinism in his theory of free will. I then propose a solution. The problem is as follows: given determinism, how can some agent qua noumenon be 'the cause of the causality' of the appearances of that agent qua phenomenon without being the cause of the entire empirical causal series? This problem has been identified in the literature (Ralph Walker provides what is per…Read more
  •  325
    Free will and the Asymmetrical Justifiability of Holding Morally Responsible
    Philosophical Quarterly 65 (261): 772-789. 2015.
    This paper is about an asymmetry in the justification of praising and blaming behaviour which free will theorists should acknowledge even if they do not follow Wolf and Nelkin in holding that praise and blame have different control conditions. That is, even if praise and blame have the same control condition, we must have stronger reasons for believing that it is satisfied to treat someone as blameworthy than we require to treat someone as praiseworthy. Blaming behaviour which involves serious h…Read more
  •  1962
    Persons, punishment, and free will skepticism
    Philosophical Studies 162 (2): 143-163. 2013.
    The purpose of this paper is to provide a justification of punishment which can be endorsed by free will skeptics, and which can also be defended against the "using persons as mere means" objection. Free will skeptics must reject retributivism, that is, the view that punishment is just because criminals deserve to suffer based on their actions. Retributivists often claim that theirs is the only justification on which punishment is constrained by desert, and suppose that non-retributive justifica…Read more
  •  864
    Free will skepticism and personhood as a desert base
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3). 2009.
    In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of giving up the belief that we are morally responsible are not quite this dramatic. Giving up the belief …Read more
  •  709
    Hard Determinism, Remorse, and Virtue Ethics
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 42 (4): 547-564. 2004.
    When hard determinists reject the claim that people deserve particular kinds of treatment because of how they have acted, they are left with a problem about remorse. Remorse is often represented as a way we impose retribution on ourselves when we understand that we have acted badly. (This view of remorse appears in the work of Freud, and I think it fits our everyday, pretheoretical understanding of one kind of remorse.) Retribution of any kind cannot be appropriate if we do not deserve bad tr…Read more
  •  1814
    Hard Determinism, Humeanism, and Virtue Ethics
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (1): 121-144. 2010.
    Hard determinists hold that we never have alternative possibilities of action—that we only can do what we actually do. This means that if hard determinists accept the “ought implies can” principle, they must accept that it is never the case that we ought to do anything we do not do. In other words, they must reject the view that there can be “ought”‐based moral reasons to do things we do not do. Hard determinists who wish to accommodate moral reasons to do things we do not do can instead appeal …Read more
  •  688
    Taking Free Will Skepticism Seriously
    Philosophical Quarterly 62 (249): 833-852. 2012.
    An apparently increasing number of philosophers take free will skepticism to pose a serious challenge to some of our practices. This must seem odd to many—why should anyone think that free will skepticism is relevant for our practices, when nobody seems to think that other canonical forms of philosophical skepticism are relevant for our practices? Part of the explanation may be epistemic, but here I focus on a metaethical explanation. Free will skepticism is special because it is compatible with…Read more
  •  281
    This paper concerns the role of the transcendental distinction between agents qua phenomena and qua noumena in Kant's theory of free will. It argues (1) that Kant's incompatibilism can be accommodated if one accepts the "ontological" interpretation of this distinction (i.e. the view that agents qua noumena are ontologically prior to agents qua phenomena), and (2) that Kant's incompatibilism cannot be accommodated by the "two-aspect" interpretation, whose defining feature is the rejection of the…Read more
  •  21
    On a tension in diamond's account of tractarian nonsense
    Philosophical Investigations 26 (3). 2003.
    Cora Diamond is among the most influential Wittgenstein commentators of recent years. One of her memorable contributions to the literature is her colorful characterization of some of the Tractatus interpretations she disagrees with – she calls them “chickening out” interpretations. “Chickening out” interpretations are ones which acknowledge Wittgenstein’s claim at 6.54 that his propositions are nonsense, but still hold that there is a deep sense in which Wittgenstein’s nonsense shows us somethin…Read more
  •  269
    The People Problem
    In Gregg D. Caruso (ed.), Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Lexington Books. pp. 141. 2013.
    One reason that many philosophers are reluctant to seriously contemplate the possibility that we lack free will seems to be the view that we must believe we have free will if we are to regard each other as persons in the morally deep sense—the sense that involves deontological notions such as human rights. In the contemporary literature, this view is often informed by P.F. Strawson's view that to treat human beings as having free will is to respond to them with the reactive attitudes, and that …Read more
  •  47
    Free Will and Reasonable Doubt
    American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2): 131-140. 2009.
    The goal of this paper is to explain and defend the following argument: (1) If it can be reasonably doubted that someone had free will with respect to some action, then it is a requirement of justice to refrain from doing serious retributive harm to him in response to that action. (2) Anyone who believes the free will debate to be philosophically valuable must accept that it can be reasonably doubted that anyone ever has free will. (3) Therefore, anyone who believes the free will debate to be ph…Read more