•  150
    A Moral Predicament in the Criminal Law
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (2): 168-188. 2015.
    This essay is about the difficulties of doing criminal justice in the context of severe social injustice. Having been marginalized as citizens of the larger community, those who are victims of severe social injustice are understandably alienated from the dominant political institutions, and, not unreasonably, disrespect their authority, including that of the criminal law. The failure of equal treatment and protection and the absence of anything like fair and decent life prospects for the members…Read more
  •  36
    Will, Freedom and Power (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 75 (4): 209-217. 1978.
  •  4
    Book reviews (review)
    with Mike W. Martin and David Woodruff Smith
    Topoi 1 (1-2): 58-67. 1982.
  •  99
    Review: George Sher: In Praise of Blame (review)
    Mind 117 (466): 515-520. 2008.
  •  21
    An Essay on Free Will
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (3): 507-522. 1986.
  •  2
    Free Agency
    In Free Will, Oxford University Press. 1975.
  •  115
    XIV—Psychopathic Agency and Prudential Deficits
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113 (3pt3): 269-292. 2013.
    Philosophical discussions of psychopathy have been framed primarily in terms of psychopaths' conspicuous moral shortcomings. But despite their vaunted ‘egocentricity’, another prominent trait in the standard psychopathic profile is a characteristic failure to look after themselves; in an important way, psychopaths appear to be as careless of themselves as they are of others. Assuming that the standard profile is largely correct, the question is how these moral and prudential deficits are related…Read more
  •  23
    Soft Libertarianism and Hard Compatibilism
    The Journal of Ethics 3 (4): 353-368. 1999.
    In this paper I discuss two kinds of attempts to qualify incompatibilist and compatibilist conceptions of freedom to avoid what have been thought to be incredible commitments of these rival accounts. One attempt -- which I call soft libertarianism -- is represented by Robert Kane's work. It hopes to defend an incompatibilist conception of freedom without the apparently difficult metaphysical costs traditionally incurred by these views. On the other hand, in response to what I call the robot obje…Read more
  •  95
    Contractualism and the Boundaries of Morality
    Social Theory and Practice 28 (2): 221-241. 2002.
  •  3
    The Nature of Responsibility
    Dissertation, Princeton University. 1972.
  •  435
    La responsabilité et les limites du mal. Variations sur un thème de Strawson
    Les ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 7 (1): 146-178. 2012.
  •  13
    Gregory S. Kavka 1947-1994
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68 (5). 1995.
  •  89
    The Problematic Role of Responsibility in Contexts of Distributive Justice (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2). 2006.
    It would be surprising if our idea of ourselves as responsible agents did not have a significant place in our understanding of one another as members of a political community with common claims and obligations. We see this idea at work, for example, in disputes about the extent to which the poor are or are not responsible for their lot or smokers for their ill‐health. Its most common use, it seems, is to explain and justify differences in shares of economic and other social goods. We see this us…Read more
  •  14
    Promises, reasons, and normative powers
    In David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
  •  115
    Virtues in excess
    Philosophical Studies 46 (1). 1984.
  • Free Will
    Critical Philosophy 1 (1): 97. 1984.
  •  1
    Free Will
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 47 (3): 541-541. 1985.
  •  88
    Excusing addiction
    Law and Philosophy 18 (6): 589-619. 1999.
    No Abstract
  •  1945
    Free agency
    Journal of Philosophy 72 (April): 205-20. 1975.
    In the subsequent pages, I want to develop a distinction between wanting and valuing which will enable the familiar view of freedom to make sense of the notion of an unfree action. The contention will be that, in the case of actions that are unfree, the agent is unable to get what he most wants, or values, and this inability is due to his own "motivational system." In this case the obstruction to the action that he most wants to do is his own will. It is in this respect that the action is unfree…Read more
  •  99
    Asymmetry and Rational Ability
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2): 467-475. 2013.
    For a symposium on Dana Nelkin's Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility.
  •  121
    Raz on Responsibility
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 10 (3): 395-409. 2016.
    Standard treatments of responsibility have been preoccupied with issues of blame and punishment, and concerns about free will. In contrast, Raz is concerned with problems about responsibility that arise from the “puzzle of moral luck,” puzzles that lead to misguided skepticism about negligence. We are responsible not only for conduct that is successfully guided by what we take to be our reasons for action, but also for misexercises of our rational capacities that escape our rational control. To …Read more
  •  265
    Free will (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 1982.
    The new edition of this highly successful text will once again provide the ideal introduction to free will. This volume brings together some of the most influential contributions to the topic of free will during the past 50 years, as well as some notable recent work
  •  1212