•  3
    My aim in this paper is to defend negligence as a legitimate basis for moral and criminal culpability. In so doing, I also hope to demonstrate how philosophical and jurisprudential perspectives on responsibility can mutually inform each other. While much of the paper focuses on criminal negligence, my aim is to show how attention to certain doctrines and concepts in criminal law can shed light on our understanding of moral culpability including culpability for negligence. It is often taken to be…Read more
  •  9
    Inclusive Blameworthiness and the Wrongfulness of Causing Harm
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25 (3). 2023.
    This paper takes up the question of whether the consequences of a person’s volitional actions can contribute to their blameworthiness. On the one hand it is intuitively plausible to hold that if D1 volitionally shoots V with the intention of killing V then D1 is blameworthy for V’s death. On the other hand, if the only difference between D1 and D2 is resultant luck, many find it counter-intuitive to hold that D1 is more blameworthy than D2. There are three broad (non-skeptical) strategies for re…Read more
  •  29
    The Idea of Freedom: New Essays on the Kantian Theory of Freedom (edited book)
    with Dai Heide
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Kant describes the concept of freedom as "the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason." Kant's theory of freedom thus plays a foundational and unifying role in all aspects of his philosophy and is thus of significant interest to historians of Kant's philosophy. Kant's theory of freedom has also played a significant role in contemporary debates in metaphysics, normative ethics, and metaethics. This volume brings historians of Kant's philosophy into c…Read more
  •  21
    Ethics
    with Cynthia Townley and Hugh Upton
    Philosophical Books 46 (2): 174-178. 2005.
  •  6
    Moral Philosophy Does Not Rest on a Mistake: Reasons to be Moral Revisited
    with Sam Black
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 33. 2007.
  •  2
  •  29
    Imputability, answerability, and the epistemic condition on moral and legal culpability
    European Journal of Philosophy 30 (4): 1440-1457. 2022.
    This paper has two main goals. The first is to defend a particular account of answerability according to which a person is (morally or criminally) answerable for their conduct if it is (morally or criminally) wrongful under the same description under which it is imputable to their agency. Negating defences in law aim to defeat criminal answerability by negating some element of the charged offence while their moral analogues aim to defeat moral answerability by defeating the aptness of the descri…Read more
  •  30
    Conceptualizing Coercive Indoctrination in Moral and Legal Philosophy
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (1): 153-179. 2022.
    This paper argues that there are compelling grounds for thinking that coercive indoctrination can defeat or mitigate moral culpability in virtue of being a form of non-culpable moral ignorance. That is, I defend a two-tier account such that what excuses an agent for a wrongful act is the agent’s ignorance regarding the moral quality of their act; and what excuses the defendant for their ignorance is that coercion or manipulation deprived the defendant of a fair opportunity to avoid that ignoranc…Read more
  • The Normativity of Morality
    Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. 2000.
    The goal of this dissertation is to offer an account of the normativity of morality that is consistent with the commitments of philosophical naturalism. The issue of normativity can be divided into two parts: motivation and authority. In chapter 1 I attempt to explain the motivational efficacy of a moral system by arguing that it is the natural, biological function of the moral system to produce beliefs about norms, the general observance of which is mutually advantageous and to regulate behavio…Read more
  •  65
    The rational character of belief and the argument for mental anomalism
    Philosophical Studies 103 (3): 258-314. 2001.
      If mental anomalism is to be interpreted as a thesisunique to psychology, the anomalousness must begrounded in some feature unique to the mental,presumably its rational nature. While the ground forsuch arguments from normativity has been notoriouslyslippery terrain, there are two recently influentialstrategies which make the argument precise. The firstis to deny the possibility of psychophysical bridgelaws because of the different constitutive essences ofmental and physical laws, and the secon…Read more
  •  184
    Why Be an Agent?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2). 2012.
    Constitutivism is the view that it is possible to derive contentful, normatively binding demands of practical reason and morality from the constitutive features of agency. Whereas much of the debate has focused on the constitutivist's ability to derive content, David Enoch has challenged her ability to generate normativity. Even if one can derive content from the constitutive aims of agency, one could simply demur: ?Bah! Agency, shmagency?. The ?Why be moral?? question would be replaced by the ?…Read more
  •  43
    A Functional Account of Moral Motivation
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 41 (4): 601-625. 2003.
  •  31
    Deflationary Normative Pluralism
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 33 (sup1): 231-262. 2007.
    Let us give voice to this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined. -Friedrich NietzscheAnyone who, stimulated by education, has come to feel the force of the various obligations in life, at some time or other comes to feel the irksomeness of carrying them out, and to recognize the sacrifice of interest involved; and, if thoughtful, he inevitably puts to himself the question: “Is there really a reason why I should act in the w…Read more
  •  3
    H.A. Prichard argued that the “why should I be moral?” question is the central subject matter of moral theory. Prichard famously claimed to have proved that all efforts to answer that question are doomed. Many contributors to this volume of contemporary papers attempt to reconstruct Prichard’s argument. They claim either explicitly or implicitly that Prichard was mistaken, and philosophy can contribute to meaningful engagement with the ‘why be moral?’ question. A theme to emerge from these paper…Read more
  •  88
    What is essential about indexicals?
    Philosophical Studies 100 (1): 35-50. 2000.
  •  45
    Choosing freedom: basic desert and the standpoint of blame
    Philosophical Explorations 16 (2): 195-211. 2013.
    One can think of the traditional logic of blame as involving three intuitively plausible claims: (1) blame is justified only if one is deserving of blame, (2) one is deserving of blame only if one is relevantly in control of the relevant causal antecedents, and (3) one is relevantly in control only if one has libertarian freedom. While traditional compatibilism has focused on rejecting either or both of the latter two claims, an increasingly common strategy is to deny the link between blame and …Read more
  •  79
    How Kantian must Kantian constructivists be?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49 (6). 2006.
    Kantian constructivists locate the source of normativity in the rational nature of valuing agents. Some further argue that accepting this premise thereby commits one to accepting the intrinsic or unconditioned value of rational nature itself. Whereas much of the critical literature on this “regress on conditions” argument has focused either on the cogency of the inference from the value-conferring capacity of the will to the unconditional value of that capacity itself or on the plausibility of t…Read more
  •  139
  •  26
    Can Humeans Ask "Why Be Rational?"
    American Philosophical Quarterly 43 (2). 2006.
    None
  •  24
    Deflationary Normative Pluralism
    with Sam Black
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (Supplement): 231-262. 2007.
  •  113
    Semantics San Diego Style
    Journal of Philosophy 96 (8): 416. 1999.
  •  229
    Deflationary normative pluralism
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (5). 2007.
    Let us give voice to this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined. - Friedrich NietzscheAnyone who, stimulated by education, has come to feel the force of the various obligations in life, at some time or other comes to feel the irksomeness of carrying them out, and to recognize the sacrifice of interest involved; and, if thoughtful, he inevitably puts to himself the question: “Is there really a reason why I should act in the …Read more
  •  18
    Deflationary Normative Pluralism
    with Sam Black
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (sup1): 231-262. 2007.