Hannah Tierney

In the philosophical literature, there is growing consensus that while the passage of time alone does not diminish blameworthiness, it can allow agents to undergo changes that mitigate the degree to which they deserve blame and punishment. According to the dilution approach, any notable change to an agent’s psychology alters the degree to which they are blameworthy for past actions. In contrast, the decontamination approach requires agents to alter facts about themselves that are related to their culpability for past wrongs to become less blameworthy. According to these views, wrongdoers must morally improve, experience guilt, and/or offer amends to mitigate their blameworthiness. In this paper, we present a study that investigates the extent to which our responsibility judgments are sensitive to dilution and decontamination changes and why these changes matter. While we found support for both dilution and decontamination approaches, decontamination had a much larger impact on a wider range of responsibility-related judgments than dilution. Our findings indicate that if you want to change people’s minds about how blameworthy you are for past wrongs, altering the facts about yourself that are related to your culpability is often the best way to mitigate the degree to which others blame you.

Pluralism about personal identity has been understudied and underdeveloped in the literature. It merits greater attention, especially in light of recent work by philosophers and psychologists, which illuminates the great number of our evaluative practices that presuppose personal identity. It is unlikely that traditional monistic approaches to personal identity can ground or explain all of these practices and concerns. If philosophical theories are taken to be saying anything about the commonsense conception of personal identity, then this empirical work ought to be taken seriously. Chapter 5 proposes the author’s own pluralist account of personal identity—the Subscript View. On this view, there typically exist (at least) two individuals whenever it was once thought there was only one, a psychological individual (self p ) and a biological individual (self b ). According to Tierney, the Subscript View can better account for many identity-related practical concerns than traditional monistic approaches to persistence.

Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This chapter focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect.

The authors argue in favor of the “nonconciliation” (or “steadfast”) position concerning the problem of peer disagreement. Throughout the paper they place heavy emphasis on matters of phenomenology—on how things seem epistemically with respect to the net import of one’s available evidence vis-à-vis the disputed claim p, and on how such phenomenology is affected by the awareness that an interlocutor whom one initially regards as an epistemic peer disagrees with oneself about p. Central to the argument is a nested goal/sub-goal hierarchy that the authors claim is inherent to the structure of epistemically responsible belief-formation: pursuing true beliefs by pursuing beliefs that are objectively likely given one’s total available evidence; pursuing this sub-goal by pursuing beliefs that are likely true (given that evidence) relative to one’s own deep epistemic sensibility; and pursuing this sub-sub-goal by forming beliefs in accordance with one’s own all-in, ultima facie, epistemic seemings.

In this paper, we review Keith Lehrer’s account of the basing relation, with particular attention to the two cases he offered in support of his theory, Raco (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge, 1990; Theory of knowledge, (2nd ed.), 2000) and the earlier case of the superstitious lawyer (Lehrer, The Journal of Philosophy, 68, 311–313, 1971). We show that Lehrer’s examples succeed in making his case that beliefs need not be based on the evidence, in order to be justified. These cases show that it is the justification (rather than the belief) that must be based in the evidence. We compare Lehrer’s account of basing with some alternative accounts that have been offered, and show why Lehrer’s own account is more plausible.