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12Accountability, reasons-responsiveness, and narcos’ moral responsibilityAsian Journal of Philosophy 3 (2): 1-25. 2024.A prominent position about moral responsibility claims that a necessary condition on accountability blame is that, at the time of action, the agent must be sufficiently reasons-responsive so as to be capable of acting differently by following the pertinent moral reasons and thus avoid wrongdoing. Call this the Accountability with Avoidability view (or AWA). In this paper I aim to show that AWA is false by doing three things. First, I argue that it badly contradicts moral commonsense concerning t…Read more
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28Manuel Vargas. 2013. Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (review)Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 33 (3): 541-543. 2018.Review of 'Manuel Vargas. 2013. Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility'.
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399It’s (Almost) All About Desert: On the Source of Disagreements in Responsibility StudiesSouthern Journal of Philosophy 59 (3): 386-404. 2021.In this article I discuss David Shoemaker’s recently published piece “Responsibility: The State of the Question. Fault Lines in the Foundations.” While agreeing with Shoemaker on many points, I argue for a more unified diagnosis of the seemingly intractable debates that plague (what I call) “responsibility studies.” I claim that, of the five fault lines Shoemaker identifies, the most basic one is about the role that the notion of deserved harm should play in the theory of moral responsibility. I…Read more
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336Inverse enkrasia and the real selfThought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4): 228-236. 2020.Non‐reflectivist real self views claim that people are morally responsible for all and only those bits of conduct that express their true values and cares, regardless of whether they have endorsed them or not. A phenomenon that is widely cited in support of these views is inverse akrasia, that is, cases in which a person is praiseworthy for having done the right thing for the right reasons despite her considered judgment that what she did was wrong. In this paper I show that non‐reflectivist rea…Read more
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2The moral psychology of moral responsibilityIn Manuel Vargas & John Doris (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, Oxford University Press. 2022.In this chapter I survey the two main families of views about the moral psychology of moral responsibility, i.e., about the mental capacities or psychological functioning that distinguishes responsible agents from non-responsible agents. These are self-expression views, which maintain that responsible agency is essentially about being able to express one's practical stance or moral orientation in conduct; and reasons-responsiveness views, according to which responsible agency requires a suite of…Read more
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31In defense of a strong persistence requirement on intentionSynthese 198 (11): 10289-10312. 2020.An important recent debate in the philosophy of action has focused on whether there is a persistence requirement on intention and, if there is, what its proper formulation should be. At one extreme, Bratman has defended what I call Strong Persistence, according to which it’s irrational to abandon an intention except for an alternative that is better supported by one’s reasons. At the other extreme, Tenenbaum has argued that there isn’t a persistence requirement on intention at all. In the middle…Read more
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104Reasonable expectations, moral responsibility, and empirical dataPhilosophical Studies (10): 2945-2968. 2020.Many philosophers think that a necessary condition on moral blameworthiness is that the wrongdoer can reasonably be expected to avoid the action for which she is blamed. Those who think so assume as a matter of course that the expectations at issue here are normative expectations that contrast with the non-normative or predictive expectations we form concerning the probable conduct of others, and they believe, or at least assume, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the two. In this pap…Read more
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113The epistemic condition for moral responsibilityStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.An encyclopedia article on the epistemic or knowledge condition for moral responsibility, written for the SEP.
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500Moral ignorance and the social nature of responsible agencyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (5): 821-848. 2023.In this paper I sketch a socially situated account of responsible agency, the main tenet of which is that the powers that constitute responsible agency are themselves socially constituted. I explain in detail the constitution relation between responsibility-relevant powers and social context and provide detailed examples of how it is realized by focusing on what I call ‘expectations-generating social factors’ such as social practices, cultural scripts, social roles, socially available self-conce…Read more
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66Give People a Break: Slips and Moral ResponsibilityPhilosophical Quarterly 69 (277): 721-740. 2019.I examine the question of whether people are sometimes morally blameworthy for what I call ‘slips’: wrongful actions or omissions that a good-willed agent inadvertently performs due to a non-negligent failure to be aware of relevant considerations. I focus in particular on the capacitarian answer to this question, according to which possession of the requisite capacities to be aware of relevant considerations and respond appropriately explains blameworthiness for slips. I argue, however, that ca…Read more
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479So why can’t you intend to drink the toxin?Philosophical Explorations 22 (3): 294-311. 2019.In this paper I revisit Gregory Kavka’s Toxin Puzzle and propose a novel solution to it. Like some previous accounts, mine postulates a tight link between intentions and reasons but, unlike them, in my account these are motivating rather than normative reasons, i.e. reasons that explain (rather than justify) the intended action. I argue that sensitivity to the absence of possible motivational explanations for the intended action is constitutive of deliberation-based intentions. Since ordinary ra…Read more
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28Assertion, justificatory commitment, and trustAnálisis Filosófico 36 (1): 29-53. 2016.This paper discusses the commitment account of assertion, according to which two necessary conditions for asserting that p are the speaker's undertaking a commitment to justify her assertion in the face of challenges and the speaker's licensing the audience to defer justificatory challenges back to her. Relying on what I call the "cancellation test," and focusing on Robert Brandom's version of the CAA, I show that the latter is wrong: it is perfectly possible to assert that p even while explicit…Read more
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399A Capacitarian Account of Culpable IgnorancePacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (S1): 398-426. 2017.Ignorance usually excuses from responsibility, unless the person is culpable for the ignorance itself. Since a lot of wrongdoing occurs in ignorance, the question of what makes ignorance culpable is central for a theory of moral responsibility. In this article I examine a prominent answer, which I call the ‘volitionalist tracing account,’ and criticize it on the grounds that it relies on an overly restrictive conception of responsibility‐relevant control. I then propose an alternative, which I c…Read more
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National Autonomous University of MexicoInstituto de Investigaciones FilosóficasAssistant Professor
Mexico City, CDMX, Mexico
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Areas of Interest
Moral Responsibility |