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9Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral ResponsibilityIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirica…Read more
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439Blame, deserved guilt, and harms to standingIn Andreas Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility, Cambridge University Press. 2022.Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame do…Read more
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498Being implicated: on the fittingness of guilt and indignation over outcomesPhilosophical Studies 178 (11). 2021.When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related but importantly different answer: Wha…Read more
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436Group Duties Without Decision-Making ProceduresJournal of Social Ontology 6 (1): 127-139. 2020.Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to take st…Read more
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231Quality of will and radical value reversalsPea Soup Symposium on Al Mele's Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. 2020.Al Mele’s Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility (OUP 2019) is an extraordinarily careful and clear little book. A central recurring element is the use of examples of radical value reversals due to manipulation. In this commentary, I discuss the relevance of these examples to a simple quality of will account of blameworthiness without explicit historical conditions. Such an account, I suggest, can fairly straightforwardly explain how value reversals might mitigate blameworthiness. …Read more
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359Ways to be Blameworthy: Rightness, Wrongness, and Responsibility, by Elinor Mason (review)Mind 130 (519): 978-986. 2021.Ways to be Blameworthy: Rightness, Wrongness, and Responsibility, by Elinor Mason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 227.
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707Determinism and attributions of consciousnessPhilosophical Psychology 33 (4): 549-568. 2020.The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent’s behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or mediated by notions linked to agency – notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation. This result extends work on attributions of consciousness and …Read more
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1403Do ‘Objectivist’ Features of Moral Discourse and Thinking Support Moral Objectivism?The Journal of Ethics 16 (4): 367-393. 2012.Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior se…Read more
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678Experimental philosophy and moral responsibilityIn Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, Oxford University Press. 2022.Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Specifically, can folk judgments in line with a particular answer to that question provide support for that answer. Based on reasoning familiar from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, such support could be had if individual judges track the truth of the matter independently and with some modest reliability: such reliabi…Read more
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1114Collective responsibility and collective obligations without collective moral agentsIn Saba Bazargan-Forward & Deborah Tollefsen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility, Routledge. 2020.It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of moral demands o…Read more
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419Strategic Content: Representations of Epistemic Modality in BiosemanticsTheoria 84 (3): 259-277. 2018.A central idea in Ruth Millikan’s biosemantics is that a representation’s content is restricted to conditions required for the normal success of actions that it has as its function to guide. This paper raises and responds to a problem for this idea. The problem is that the success requirement seems to block us from saying that epistemic modal judgments represent our epistemic circumstances. For the normal success of actions guided by these judgments seems to depend on what is actually the case, …Read more
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602Free Will Skepticism and BypassingIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, Mit Press. 2014.Discusses Eddy Nahmias' “Is Free Will an Illusion?”
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482'Must', 'Ought' and the Structure of StandardsIn Olivier Roy, Allard Tamminga & Malte Willer (eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, College Publications. 2016.This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak neces-sity modals. First we identify a number of explananda: their well-known in-tuitive difference in strength between ‘must’ and ‘ought’ as well as differ-ences in connections to probabilistic considerations and acts of requiring and recommending. Here we argue that important extant analyses of the se-mantic differences, though tailored to account for some of these aspects, fail to account for all. We proceed to suggest that t…Read more
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281Review of Rik Peels' Responsible Belief: A Theory in Ethics and Epistemology (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201710. 2017.In this book, Rik Peels provides a comprehensive original account of intellectual duties, doxastic blameworthiness, and responsible belief. The discussions, relating to work in epistemology as well as moral responsibility, are clear and often provide useful entries into the literature. Though I disagree with some of the main conclusions, the arguments are carefully laid out and typically merit a good amount of thought even where one remains unconvinced. After providing an overview of the content…Read more
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794Explaining away epistemic skepticism about culpabilityIn Shoemaker David (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility, Oxford University Press. 2017.Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases t…Read more
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133Why emotivists love inconsistencyPhilosophical Studies 104 (1). 2001.Emotivists hold that moral opinions are wishes and desires, and that the function of moral language is to “express” such states. But if moral opinions were but wishes or desires, why would we see certain opinions as inconsistent with, or following from other opinions? And why should our reasoning include complex opinions such as the opinion that a person ought to be blamed only if he has done something wrong? Indeed, why would we think that anything is conditional on his doing something wrong un…Read more
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135Motivational Internalism: Contemporary DebatesIn Gunnar Björnsson, Caj Strandberg, Ragnar Francén Olinder, John Eriksson & Fredrik Björklund (eds.), Motivational Internalism, Oxford University Press. 2015.Motivational internalism—the idea that moral judgments are intrinsically or necessarily connected to motivation—has played a central role in metaethical debates. In conjunction with a Humean picture of motivation, internalism has provided a challenge for theories that take moral judgments to concern objective aspects of reality, and versions of internalism have been seen as having implications for moral absolutism, realism, and rationalism. But internalism is a controversial thesis, and the appa…Read more
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767Incompatibilism and "Bypassed" AgencyIn Alfred R. Mele (ed.), Surrounding Free Will, Oxford University Press. 2014.Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray have recently argued that when people take agents to lack responsibility in deterministic scenarios, they do so because they take agents’ beliefs, desires and decisions to be bypassed, having no effect on their actions. This might seem like an improbable mistake, but the Bypass Hypothesis is bolstered by intriguing experimental data. Moreover, if the hypothesis is correct, it provides a straightforward error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. This chapter argues…Read more
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1199Contextualism in EthicsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.There are various ways in which context matters in ethics. Most clearly, the context in which an action is performed might determine whether the action is morally right: though it is often wrong not to keep a promise, it might be permissible in certain contexts. More radically, proponents of moral particularism (see particularism) have argued that a reason for an action in one context is not guaranteed to be a reason in a different context: whether it is a reason against an act that it breaks a …Read more
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1244On individual and shared obligations: in defense of the activist’s perspectiveIn Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), Philosophy and Climate Change, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.We naturally attribute obligations to groups, and take such obligations to have consequences for the obligations of group members. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change provides an urgent case. It seems that we, together, have an obligation to prevent climate catastrophe, and that we, as individuals, have an obligation to contribute. However, understood strictly, attributions of obligations to groups might seem illegitimate. On the one hand, the groups in question—the people alive tod…Read more
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231How Emotivism Survives Immoralists, Irrationality, and DepressionSouthern Journal of Philosophy 40 (3): 327-344. 2002.Argues that emotivism is compatible with cases where we seem to lack motivation to act according to our moral opinions.
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85Meaning as a Normative ConceptTheoria 73 (3): 190-206. 2007.IN LATE SPRING 2007, professor Allan Gibbard gave the Hägerström Lectures at Uppsala University, Sweden, under the title of “Meaning as a Normative Concept”. He met up with Gunnar Björnsson and Arvid Båve to talk about the views he develops and defends in the lectures.
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En internalistisk teori om moraliska uppfattningarFilosofisk Tidskrift 1. 2000.Responds to Ingmar Persson's criticism of my Moral Internalism: An Essay in Moral Psychology. In Swedish.
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1498Recent Work on Motivational InternalismAnalysis 72 (1): 124-137. 2012.Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.
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1405Explaining (away) the epistemic condition on moral responsibilityIn Philip Robichaud & Jan Willem Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition, Oxford University Press. 2017.It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known better”, but it is unclear how to spell o…Read more
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642Contextualism, assessor relativism, and insensitive assessmentsLogique Et Analyse 52 (208): 363-372. 2009.Recently, contextualism about epistemic modals and predicates of taste have come under fire from advocates of assessment relativistic analyses. Contextualism, they have argued, fails to account for what we call "felicitous insensitive assessments". In this paper, we provide one hitherto overlooked way in which contextualists can embrace the phenomenon by slightly modifying an assumption that has remained in the background in most of the debate over contextualism and relativism. Finally, we brief…Read more
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174Motivational Internalism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2015.Motivational internalism—the idea that there is an intrinsic or necessary connection between moral judgment and moral motivation—is a central thesis in a number of metaethical debates. In conjunction with a Humean picture of motivation, it provides a challenge for cognitivist theories that take moral judgments to concern objective aspects of reality. Versions of internalism have potential implications for moral absolutism, realism, non-naturalism, and rationalism. Being a constraint on more deta…Read more
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706Internalists Beware—we Might all be Amoralists!Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1): 1-14. 2013.Standard motivational internalism is the claim that by a priori or conceptual necessity, a psychological state is a moral opinion only if it is suitably related to moral motivation. Many philosophers, the authors of this paper included, have assumed that this claim is supported by intuitions to the effect that amoralists—people not suitably related to such motivation—lack moral opinions proper. In this paper we argue that this assumption is mistaken, seeming plausible only because defenders of s…Read more
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250Christine Korsgaards moralfilosofiNorsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 1. 2005.Critical introduction in Swedish of Christine Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity and Self-Constitution.
Stockholm, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Responsibility |
Philosophy of Language |
Metaphilosophy |