•  765
    Resisting Tracing's Siren Song
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 10 (1): 1-24. 2016.
    Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The cu…Read more
  •  647
    Being Sympathetic to Bad-History Wrongdoers
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1): 147-169. 2021.
    For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should …Read more
  •  420
    Review of Alexander Sarch’s Criminally Ignorant (review)
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 15 (3): 521-527. 2021.
  •  411
    Defending Elective Forgiveness
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.
    In deciding whether to forgive, we often focus on the wrongdoer, looking for an apology or a change of ways. However, to fully consider whether to forgive, we need to expand our focus from the wrongdoer and their wrongdoing, and we need to consider who we are, what we care about, and what we want to care about. The difference between blame and forgiveness is, at bottom, a difference in priorities. When we blame, we prioritize the wrong, and when we forgive, we shift our priorities away from the …Read more
  •  369
    Distinctive duress
    Philosophical Studies 177 (4): 1007-1026. 2020.
    Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they have acted under duress. In this paper, I o…Read more
  •  324
    Minding Negligence
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (2): 231-251. 2022.
    The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.
  •  79
    Tobacco regulation: autonomy up in smoke?
    Journal of Medical Ethics 35 (6): 365-368. 2009.
    Over the past few decades, “Big Tobacco” has spread its tentacles across the developing world with devastating results. The global incidence of smoking has increased exponentially in Africa, Asia and South America and it is leading to an equally rapid increase in the incidence of smoking-induced morbidity and mortality on these continents. The World Health Organization (WHO) has tried to respond to this crisis by devising a set of regulations to limit the spread of smoking, and many countries ha…Read more
  •  25
    Blaming Kids
    In Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 681-702. 2022.
    We can enrich the explanation of how we should treat kid wrongdoers by recognizing that it matters who does the blaming and punishing. That we should think about who does the blaming and punishing is perhaps unsurprising, but it is nonetheless often underappreciated. Here, I offer two lessons about blame and punishment by thinking about who judges kids. First, the right account of moral and legal responsibility should allow that kids may rightly blame each other, and I argue that we can best acc…Read more