• Utrecht University
    Department for Philosophy and Religious Studies
    Assistant Professor (Part-time)
Utrecht University
Department for Philosophy and Religious Studies
PhD, 2018
  •  21
    A Logical Study of Moral Responsibility
    Erkenntnis 1-42. forthcoming.
    This paper proposes a logical framework for studying the structure of moral responsibility for outcomes. The analysis incorporates two vital features: an agency condition and a negative condition of an alternative possibility. The logical language allows us to identify and disambiguate seven plausible criteria for moral responsibility. To accommodate interdependent decision contexts, the semantics are given in terms of so-called responsibility games. The logical framework enables us to classify …Read more
  •  14
    The Logic of Responsibility Voids
    Springer Cham. 2022.
    This book focuses on the problem of responsibility voids: these are cases where responsibility for a morally undesirable outcome cannot be attributed to any of the involved agents. Responsibility voids are thought to occur in collective decision-making and in the context of artificial intelligent systems. In these cases, philosophers worry that there is a shortfall of moral responsibility. In particular, such voids are often assumed to justify a notion of collective responsibility that cannot be…Read more
  •  97
    Collective obligations, group plans and individual actions
    Economics and Philosophy 33 (2): 187-214. 2017.
    If group members aim to fulfill a collective obligation, they must act in such a way that the composition of their individual actions amounts to a group action that fulfills the collective obligation. We study a strong sense of joint action in which the members of a group design and then publicly adopt a group plan that coordinates the individual actions of the group members. We characterize the conditions under which a group plan successfully coordinates the group members' individual actions, a…Read more
  •  77
    An impossibility result on methodological individualism
    Philosophical Studies 178 (12): 4165-4185. 2021.
    Methodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can ultimately be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. Any Nagelian version of methodological individualism requires that there be bridge laws that translate social statements into individualistic ones. We show that Nagelian individualism can be put to logical scrutiny by making the relevant social and individualistic languages fully explicit and mathematically precise. In particular, we prove that…Read more
  •  51
    Conflicting intentions: rectifying the consistency requirements
    Philosophical Studies 176 (4): 1097-1118. 2019.
    Many philosophers are convinced that rationality dictates that one’s overall set of intentions be consistent. The starting point and inspiration for our study is Bratman’s planning theory of intentions. According to this theory, one needs to appeal to the fulfilment of characteristic planning roles to justify norms that apply to our intentions. Our main objective is to demonstrate that one can be rational despite having mutually inconsistent intentions. Conversely, it is also shown that one can …Read more
  •  48
    We use a deontic logic of collective agency to study reducibility questions about collective agency and collective obligations. The logic that is at the basis of our study is a multi-modal logic in the tradition of *stit* logics of agency. Our full formal language has constants for collective and individual deontic admissibility, modalities for collective and individual agency, and modalities for collective and individual obligations. We classify its twenty-seven sublanguages in terms of their e…Read more
  •  69
    Cooperation, fairness and team reasoning
    Economics and Philosophy 37 (3): 413-440. 2021.
    This paper examines two strands of literature regarding economic models of cooperation. First, payoff transformation theories assume that people may not be exclusively motivated by self-interest, but also care about equality and fairness. Second, team reasoning theorists assume that people might reason from the perspective of the team, rather than an individualistic perspective. Can these two theories be unified? In contrast to the consensus among team reasoning theorists, I argue that team reas…Read more
  •  49
    Philosophical accounts of collective intentionality typically rely on members to form a personal intention of sorts, viewed as a mental state. This tendency is opposed by recent economic literature on team-directed reasoning, which focuses on the reasoning process leading up to the formation of the members’ intentions. Our formal analysis bridges these paradigms and criticizes the team- directed reasoning account on two counts: first, team-directed reasoning is supposed to transcend traditional …Read more
  •  343
    Ethics of digital contact tracing and COVID-19: who is (not) free to go?
    Ethics and Information Technology 23 (1): 69-77. 2020.
    Digital tracing technologies are heralded as an effective way of containing SARS-CoV-2 faster than it is spreading, thereby allowing the possibility of easing draconic measures of population-wide quarantine. But existing technological proposals risk addressing the wrong problem. The proper objective is not solely to maximise the ratio of people freed from quarantine but to also ensure that the composition of the freed group is fair. We identify several factors that pose a risk for fair group com…Read more
  •  70
    Should one trust experts?
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 9289-9312. 2021.
    Should one trust experts? My answer to this question is a qualified ‘no’. In this paper I explore the conditions under which it is rational to trust and defer to experts, and those under which it may be rational to refrain from doing so. I draw on two important factors for an actor’s trust in a partner: trust depends on the partner’s competence and on the partner’s interests. I propose that the conditions under which it is rational to trust and defer to experts depend on the competences of the l…Read more
  •  56
    Responsibility Voids and Cooperation
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (4): 434-460. 2018.
    Do responsibility voids exist? That is, are there situations in which the group is collectively morally responsible for some outcome although no member can be held individually morally responsible for it? To answer these questions, I draw a distinction between competitive and cooperative decision contexts based on the team-reasoning account of cooperation. Accordingly, I provide a reasoning-based analysis of cooperation, competition, moral responsibility, and, last, potential responsibility void…Read more
  •  51
    Doing without action types
    with Jan Broersen, Alexandra Kuncová, and Aldo Iván Ramírez Abarca
    Review of Symbolic Logic 1-31. forthcoming.
    This paper explores the analysis of ability, where ability is to be understood in the epistemic sense—in contrast to what might be called a causal sense. There are plenty of cases where an agent is able to perform an action that guarantees a given result even though she does not know which of her actions guarantees that result. Such an agent possesses the causal ability but lacks the epistemic ability. The standard analysis of such epistemic abilities relies on the notion of action types—as oppo…Read more
  •  11
    Uniting social constructivism and logic
    Metascience 1-4. forthcoming.
    Mahoney undertakes the wide-reaching project of providing foundations for the social sciences by building on the set-theoretic framework. I enjoyed reading the book and laud the accessible writing style and the wealth of examples from case studies, making it an engaging read despite its methodological aim. The main aims of the book are threefold: (1) to introduce the theory of scientific constructivism, (2) to introduce the set-theoretic methodology that captures the logic of scientific-construc…Read more