•  228
    Frog and toad lose control
    Analysis 56 (2). 1996.
    It seems to be a truism that whenever we do something - and so, given the omnipresence of trying (Hornsby 1980), whenever we try to do something - we want to do that thing more than we want to do anything else we can do (Davidson 1970). However, according to Frog, when we have will power we are able to try not to do something that we ‘really want to do’. In context the idea is clearly meant to be that what we really want to do and what we most want to do are one and the same. But how is this mea…Read more
  •  3
    Truthfulness and Sense-Making: Two Modes of Respect for Agency
    Journal of Philosophy 121 (2): 61-88. 2024.
    According to a Kantian conception truthfulness is characterised as a requirement of respect for the agency of another. In lying we manipulate the other’s rational capacities to achieve ends we know or fear they may not share. This is paradigmatically a failure of respect. In this paper we argue that the importance of truthfulness also lies in significant part in the ways in which it supports our agential need to make sense of the world, other people, and ourselves. Since sense-making is somethin…Read more
  • Against Retributivism in Health Care
    In Ben Daies, Gabriel De Marco, Neil Levy & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Responsibility and Healthcare. forthcoming.
  •  18
    Capacity, attributability, and responsibility in mental disorder
    Philosophical Psychology 37 (3): 618-630. 2024.
    In this commentary on Anneli Jefferson’s Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? I endorse her capacitarian approach to responsibility but suggest that the effects of at least some mental/brain disorders on the agent’s psychology show that we cannot neatly separate the epistemic condition from the control condition when assessing agential capacity. I then discuss the labeling issue in the context of rival attributionist accounts of responsibility which hold that agents are responsible if their act…Read more
  •  36
    Neuroscience and Punishment: From Theory to Practice
    Neuroethics 14 (Suppl 3): 269-280. 2019.
    In a 2004 paper, Greene and Cohen predicted that neuroscience would revolutionise criminal justice by presenting a mechanistic view of human agency that would change people’s intuitions about retributive punishment. According to their theory, this change in intuitions would in turn lead to the demise of retributivism within criminal justice systems. Their influential paper has been challenged, most notably by Morse, who has argued that it is unlikely that there will be major changes to criminal …Read more
  •  62
    Explaining Addiction: How Far Does the Reward Account of Motivation Take Us?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (5). 2013.
    ABSTRACT Choice theorists such as George Ainslie and Gene Heyman argue that the drug-seeking behaviour of addicts is best understood in the same terms that explain everyday choices. Everyday choices, they claim, aim to maximise the reward from available incentives. Continuing drug-use is, therefore, what addicts most want given the incentives they are aware of but they will change their behaviour if and when better incentives become available. This model might explain many typical cases of addic…Read more
  •  12
    Truthfulness in dementia care
    with Philippa Byers and Steve Matthews
    Bioethics 35 (9): 839-841. 2021.
  •  19
    Respecting Agency in Dementia Care: When Should Truthfulness Give Way?
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (1): 117-131. 2021.
    Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  15
    Striving to Make Sense: The Duty of Respect for Persons with Psychosis
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (3): 251-253. 2021.
    In her wonderfully rich and insightful article, Sofia Jeppsson argues that, although a person with psychosis may seem to be strange and unintelligible to us, we nevertheless have duties of intelligibility toward them. And she draws upon her own experience to show that psychotic experiences and reasoning are more intelligible than we might have thought.In this brief commentary, I focus on why the assumption of hypothetical intelligibility is a duty of respect owed to those experiencing psychosis.…Read more
  •  19
    The Impact of Dementia on the Self: Do We Consider Ourselves the Same as Others?
    with Sophia A. Harris, Amee Baird, Steve Matthews, Rebecca Gelding, and Celia B. Harris
    Neuroethics 14 (3): 281-294. 2021.
    The decline in autobiographical memory function in people with Alzheimer’s dementia has been argued to cause a loss of self-identity. Prior research suggests that people perceive changes in moral traits and loss of memories with a “social-moral core” as most impactful to the maintenance of identity. However, such research has so far asked people to rate from a third-person perspective, considering the extent to which hypothetical others maintain their identity in the face of various impairments.…Read more
  •  61
    Intimate relations: friends and lovers
    In E. Kroeker and K. Schaubroek (ed.), Love, Reason and Morality, . 2017.
    In this paper we look at two kinds of relations that give rise to reasons for action of a distinctive sort: friendship and erotic love. We argue that what is common to these different relations of affection is that the people in them exhibit dispositions toward mutual direction by one another and interpretation of one another (in a sense that we describe in detail below). This mutual responsiveness is, in part, a matter of responding to reasons that arise from the relation of love or friendship.…Read more
  •  20
    Blame, Reproach, and Responsibility
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (4): 395-397. 2020.
    In the study reported in their rich article, Brandenburg and Strijbos investigate the attitudes of clinicians, in a facility for adults with autism, to norm transgressions by service users. In doing so they interrogate Hanna Pickard’s responsibility without blame approach to therapy and ask whether it applies across different clinical settings.Pickard draws a distinction between responsibility for an action in the sense of being the agent of the action and so, by definition, having some control …Read more
  •  217
    Self Control and Moral Security
    In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6, Oxford University Press. pp. 33-63. 2019.
    Self-control is integral to successful human agency. Without it we cannot extend our agency across time and secure central social, moral, and personal goods. But self-control is not a unitary capacity. In the first part of this paper we provide a taxonomy of self-control and trace its connections to agency and the self. In part two, we turn our attention to the external conditions that support successful agency and the exercise of self-control. We argue that what we call moral security is a crit…Read more
  •  53
    The Cost of Conscience
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 26 (1): 69-81. 2017.
    :The spread of demands by physicians and allied health professionals for accommodation of their private ethical, usually religiously based, objections to providing care of a particular type, or to a particular class of persons, suggests the need for a re-evaluation of conscientious objection in healthcare and how it should be regulated. I argue on Kantian grounds that respect for conscience and protection of freedom of conscience is consistent with fairly stringent limitations and regulations go…Read more
  •  31
    Alexander Nehamas, On Friendship
    Ethics 128 (1): 274-276. 2017.
  •  20
    Morality and Interpretation: Commentary on Jonathan Glover's Alien Landscapes?
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 34 (5): 737-742. 2017.
    What is required of the interpreter of disordered minds and what can we learn from the process? Jonathan Glover's book focuses on human interpretation and its role in psychiatry. His hope is that a more careful and sensitive exploration of minds that are very different from our own, will assist us to answer a range of important questions about human agency, identity and responsibility. In this commentary I will focus on the process and purpose of interpretation and expand on some of the moral is…Read more
  •  219
    If you just can't decide what to wear, this enlightening guide will lead you through the diverse and sometimes contradictory aspects of fashion in a series of lively, entertaining and thoughtful essays from prominent philosophers and writers. A unique and enlightening insight into the underlying philosophy behind the power of fashion Contributions address issues in fashion from a variety of viewpoints, including aesthetics, the nature of fashion and fashionability, ethics, gender and identity po…Read more
  •  63
    Morally good action requires both sincere moral judgment and moral motivation. Internalists claim in one way or another that these two things are internally connected. Externalists, on the other hand, claim that the connection between moral judgment and action is forged by motives external to the judgment itself. First we will look at the evidence from psychopathy, then we will turn to cases of so-called acquired sociopathy.
  •  21
    In our chapter we argued that the empirical evidence cited by Roskies and other data we referred to do not in fact undermine internalism. In this brief rejoinder to the commentaries by Roskies and Smith, we want to further address the role of empirical evidence in this debate and in so doing clarify the project of our chapter.
  •  782
    In this chapter we focus on the structure of close personal relations and diagnose how these relationships are disrupted by addiction. We draw upon Peter Strawson’s landmark paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (2008, first published 1962) to argue that loved ones of those with addiction veer between, (1) reactive attitudes of blame and resentment generated by disappointed expectations of goodwill and reciprocity, and (2) the detached objective stance from which the addicted person is seen as less bla…Read more
  •  1117
    Reasons, reflection, and repugnance
    In Alberto Giubilini & Steve Clarke (eds.), The Ethics of Human Enhancement: Understanding the Debate, Oxford University Press. 2016.
    In this chapter we draw comparisons between Kass’ views on the normative authority of repugnance and social intuitionist accounts of moral judgement which are similarly sceptical about the role of reasoned reflection in moral judgement. We survey the empirical claims made in support of giving moral primacy to intuitions generated by emotions such as repugnance, as well as some common objections. We then examine accounts which integrate intuition and reflection, and argue that plausible accounts …Read more
  •  89
  •  2
    Decision Theory and Weakness of Will
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2): 113-130. 1991.
  •  75
    Mental time travel is the ability to simulate alternative pasts and futures. It is often described as the ability to project a sense of self in the service of diachronic agency. It requires not only semantic representation but affective sampling of alternative futures. If people lose this ability for affective sampling their sense of self is diminished. They have less of a self to project hence are compromised as agents. If they cannot “feel the future” they cannot imaginatively inhabit it and h…Read more
  •  49
    Beyond dualism : a plea for an extended taxonomy of agency impairment in addiction
    with Anke Snoek and Craig Fry
    American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 3 (2): 56-57. 2012.
    Pickard (2012) claims that the neurobiological or disease model of addiction hinders the recovery of people because it undermines their feeling of self-efficacy and agency. Sub- stance users are “not aided by being treated as victims of a neurobiological disease, as opposed to agents of their own recovery” (40).Although Pickard acknowledges that claims of powerlessness or loss of agency can have a functional role in the self-narratives of substance users in excusing them from blame, she primaril…Read more