•  201
    Standing to Praise
    European Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    This paper argues that praise is governed by a norm of standing, namely the evaluative commitment condition. Even when the target of praise is praiseworthy and known to be so by the praiser, praise can be inappropriate owing to the praiser’s lacking the relevant evaluative commitment. I propose that uncommitted praisers lack the standing to praise in that, owing to their lack of commitment to the relevant value, they have not earned the right to host the co-valuing that is the communicative aim …Read more
  •  141
    Fortunately Forgiven
    Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. forthcoming.
    Proceeding from the assumptions that forgiveness is at least sometimes elective and that it changes the normative relations between victims and wrongdoers, this paper argues that our practices of forgiveness are subject to an overlooked form of moral luck, forgiveness-luck. Forgiveness-luck is introduced via reflection on ‘differential forgiveness’, wherein of two equally culpable and remorseful agents, one is forgiven and the other not, and both justifiably so. In being forgiven—at least if for…Read more
  •  6
    Nietzsche’s Values (John Richardson) (review)
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 54 (2): 218-223. 2023.
    This book traverses an incredibly wide range of topics, unified by attention to Nietzsche on value, which, Richardson writes, “has a good claim to be Nietzsche’s primary topic” (1). The challenge that Richardson takes Nietzsche to address (especially in his later work) is the establishment of a kind of compatibility thesis, namely the compatibility of accepting that values are, as Nietzsche takes them to be, essentially perspectival and dependent for their existence on valuers, and that we nonet…Read more
  •  160
    Communicating Praise
    In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility, Routledge. 2023.
    This chapter introduces readers to the view that praise is a form of address, or is communicative in the sense of seeking uptake from its target. The proposal that praise is communicative will seem counterintuitive if we take blame to be our paradigm of what it is for a responsibility-response to be communicative. This is because blame is communicative in a manner that intuitively presupposes some normative failure; it involves calling its target to account (or answer) for some wrongdoing. But, …Read more
  •  622
    Condemnatory Disappointment
    Ethics 132 (4): 851-880. 2022.
    When blame is understood to be emotion-based or affective, its emotional tone is standardly identified as one of anger. We argue that this conception of affective blame is overly restrictive. By attending to cases of blame that emerge against a background of a particular kind of hope invested in others, we identify a blaming response characterized not by anger but by sadness: reactive disappointment. We develop an account of reactive disappointment as affective blame, maintaining that while angr…Read more
  •  400
    Praise
    Philosophy Compass 17 (10): 1-19. 2022.
    One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard another as, a responsibl…Read more
  •  230
    Benevolent Situations and Gratitude
    Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (4): 383-388. 2021.
    [Commentary on Kwong-loi Shun, “Anger, Compassion, and the Distinction between First and Third Person” Australasian Philosophical Review 6.1 (Issue theme: Moral psychology— Insights from Chinese Philosophy), forthcoming.] In maintaining that gratitude fails to reflect a perspectival distinction based on whether the grateful agent is the direct beneficiary of the benefactor’s good will, Kwong-loi Shun suggests that gratitude might be felt to benefactors for benefits bestowed to strangers. With an…Read more
  •  321
    Relation-Regret and Associative Luck: On Rationally Regretting What Another Has Done
    In Andras Szigeti & Talbert Matthew (eds.), Agency, Fate and Luck: Themes from Bernard Williams, Oxford University Press. pp. 233-264. 2022.
    I argue that the phenomenon underlying Bernard Williams’ (1976) “agent-regret” is considerably broader than appreciated by Williams and others. Agent-regret— an anguished response that agents have for harms they have caused, even if faultlessly— I maintain, is a species of a more general response to harms that need not be one’s fault, but which nonetheless impact one’s practical identity in a special way. This broader genus includes as a species what I call “relation-regret”, a pained response t…Read more
  •  540
    Praise as Moral Address
    Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility 7. 2021.
    While Strawsonians have focused on the way in which our “reactive attitudes”—the emotions through which we hold one another responsible for manifestations of morally significant quality of regard—express moral demands, serious doubt has been cast on the idea that non-blaming reactive attitudes direct moral demands to their targets. Building on Gary Watson’s proposal that the reactive attitudes are ‘forms of moral address’, this paper advances a communicative view of praise according to which the…Read more
  •  812
    The Emotion-Virtue-Debt Triad of Gratitude: An Introduction to The Moral Psychology of Gratitude
    with Robert C. Roberts
    In Robert Roberts & Daniel Telech (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Gratitude, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
  •  94
    Demanding more of Strawsonian accountability theory
    European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4): 926-941. 2020.
    A neglected and non-trivial problem exists for a central cluster of Strawsonian accountability theories of moral responsibility, namely those that, following Gary Watson, understand the reactive attitudes to be implicit forms of moral address, particularly moral demand. The problem consists in the joint acceptance of two claims: (a) Accountability is a matter of agents holding one another to moral demands, and (b) accountability is a view of blame and praise. I label joint acceptance of these cl…Read more
  •  1094
    Nietzsche and Moral Psychology
    In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 103-115. 2016.
    A remarkable number of Nietzsche's substantive moral psychological views have been borne out by evidence from the empirical sciences. Moral judgments are products of affects on Nietzsche's view, but the latter are in turn causally dependent upon more fundamental features of the individual. Nietzsche accepts a doctrine of types. The path is short from the acceptance of the Doctrine of Types to the acceptance of epiphenomenalism, as Leiter, and more recently, Riccardi argue. This chapter explains …Read more
  •  313
    Mercy at the Areopagus: A Nietzschean Account of Justice and Joy in the Eumenides
    In Alison L. LaCroix, Richard H. McAdams & Martha Craven Nussbaum (eds.), Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature, Oxford University Press. pp. 15-40. 2016.
    "This essay focuses on the third play in the Oresteia trilogy, the Eumenides. Telech provides a compelling reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s reading of Aeschylus's masterpiece, saving the reading from the complaint that it oversimplifies and sentimentalizes the Oresteia by celebrating the triumph of a modern and liberal understanding of law's rationalist virtues over customary and traditional forms. Telech provides an alternative Nietzschean reading that is consistent with Nietzsche's own, that re…Read more
  •  106
    The Comparative Nonarbitrariness Norm of Blame
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 16 (1). 2019.
    Much has been written about the fittingness, epistemic, and standing norms that govern blame. In this paper, we argue that there exists a norm of blame that has yet to receive philosophical discussion and without which an account of the ethics of blame will be incomplete: a norm proscribing comparatively arbitrary blame. By reflecting on the objectionableness of comparatively arbitrary blame, we stand to elucidate a substantive, and thus far overlooked, norm governing our attributions of respons…Read more
  •  56
    The Moral Psychology of Gratitude (edited book)
    with Robert Roberts
    Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
    Expressions of gratitude abound. Hardly a book is published that does not include in its preface or acknowledgments some variation on, “I am grateful to…for…” Indeed, most achievements come to be only through the help of others. We value the benevolence of others, and when we—or our loved ones—are the recipients of benevolence, our emotional response is often one of gratitude. But, are we bound to the requirement of ‘repaying’ our benefactors in some way? If we are, and there are—as ordinary la…Read more