• Moral Injury and the Making of Amends
    In Andrew I. Cohen & Kathryn McClymond (eds.), Moral Injury and the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Routledge. forthcoming.
    The clinical literature on moral injury sometimes mentions the making of amends as part of a possible treatment plan. However, it is typically unclear how clinicians are conceiving of the making of amends or “atonement,” particularly in the context of the debilitating cluster of symptoms known as moral injury. This chapter reviews some culturally prominent conceptions of atonement. It then raises a number of objections to these and recommends an alternative model – a “reconciliation theory” of a…Read more
  • The Role of the Public in Public Apology
    In Melissa Schwartzenberg & Eric Beerbohm (eds.), NOMOS LXV: Reconciliation and Repair, Nyu Press. pp. 203-22. 2023.
    This chapter reflects on public apologies as means of moral repair by considering the various roles the public might play in these moral dramas. Audiences to public apologies include people who are related to the transgression in different ways. This chapter focuses on those parties in front of whom public apologies are intentionally performed but who are neither victims nor wrongdoers. Do such third parties add something of value to the apology? If so, how? How might they play their role well? …Read more
  • The Standing to Forgive
    In Glen Pettigrove & Robert Enright (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Forgiveness, Routledge. pp. 323-335. 2023.
    This chapter reviews and evaluates the most common strategies for defending the view that, whatever other reasons might support forgiving in a particular case, forgiveness is defective when the person purporting to forgive lacks standing. Various arguments in favor of limiting standing are used in order to clarify what standing might be. In the end, I endorse an interpretation of standing as the possession of a normative power, which allows for the possibility of third-party forgiveness in some …Read more
  •  32
    Privacy and the Standing to Hold Responsible
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 1-22. forthcoming.
    In order to be held responsible, it is not enough that you’ve done something blameworthy, someone else must also have the standing to hold you responsible. But a number of critics have claimed that this concept of ‘standing’ doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and that we should excise it from our analyses of accountability practices. In this paper, I examine James Edwards’ (2019) attempt to define standing. I pose objections to some key features of Edwards’ account and defend an alternative. Reflecting…Read more
  •  4
    Standing and Accountability
    American Journal of Jurisprudence. forthcoming.
    Increasingly, philosophers who write about moral responsibility and accountability practices invoke the concept of “standing,” a term they claim to borrow from legal contexts. Yet critics point out that these philosophers have been maddeningly unclear about what standing is. Worse yet, no single account of the concept of “standing” seems to accommodate its current usage. This essay presents a thin account of standing, defends its usefulness in philosophical analyses of accountability practices, …Read more
  •  11
    Richardson on moral innovation
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1): 245-250. 2023.
    Henry Richardson’s _Articulating the Moral Community_ develops an account of moral innovation, the process by which new moral norms come to be authoritatively binding and new ethical judgments come to be objectively true. In this essay, I argue Richardson’s proposed process of moral innovation is likely to be exceedingly rare, unnecessary for solving the problems posed by what he calls “objective moral gaps,” and not necessarily more desirable than moral innovation via local convention.
  •  21
    Bystanders and Shared Responsibility
    In Saba Bazargan-Forward & Deborah Perron Tollefsen (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility, Routledge. pp. 313-26. 2020.
    This chapter surveys the variety of ways in which people who may appear at first to be bystanders, or mere bystanders, to wrongdoing, harm or danger might instead share responsibility with other actors. My discussion divides cases into three rough, non- exclusive categories: (a) shared responsibility for wrongs and harms; (b) shared responsibility to provide aid; and (c) shared responsibility to enforce moral norms. The third category has received the least discussion to date. My modest goal fo…Read more
  •  11
    Gardner on Corrective Justice: Comment on From Personal Life to Private Law
    Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 19 (1): 21-33. 2019.
    This article argues that John Gardner’s theory of corrective justice in _From Personal Life to Private Law_ relies on an overly narrow account of wrongdoing, one that it too heavily influenced by law to capture the broader conception of corrective justice that is his topic. I will suggest that these problems are avoided by a reconciliation theory of corrective justice.
  •  91
    How do we punish others socially, and should we do so? In her 2018 Descartes Lectures for Tilburg University, Linda Radzik explores the informal methods ordinary people use to enforce moral norms, such as telling people off, boycotting businesses, and publicly shaming wrongdoers on social media. Over three lectures, Radzik develops an account of what social punishment is, why it is sometimes permissible, and when it must be withheld. She argues that the proper aim of social punishment is to put …Read more
  • The Ethical and Political Dimensions of Making Amends: A Dialogue
    South Central Review 27 (3): 144-61. 2010.
    Our topic is the moral task of righting one’s wrongful actions and the extent to which this should be considered primarily as a task for the wrongdoer alone, an interaction between the wrongdoer and victim, or a more broadly communal act. In considering this question, we are asked to consider what it means for justice to be served with regard to both victim and wrongdoer.
  •  224
    Collective Responsibility and Duties to Respond
    Social Theory and Practice 27 (3): 455-471. 2001.
    This paper defends the claim that collective responsibility can be based on group membership. It argues that collective responsibility is best understood in terms of duties to respond to the victims of collective crimes. Reasonable fear on the part of the victimized groups creates duties to respond for members of the perpetrating group. This account does a better job of capturing our intuitions about actual cases and the phenomenology of collective responsibility than other accounts currently on…Read more
  •  106
    Boycotts and the social enforcement of justice
    Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (1): 102-122. 2017.
    This essay examines the ethics of boycotting as a social response to injustice or wrongdoing. The boycotts in question are collective actions in which private citizens withdraw from or avoid consumer or cultural interaction with parties perceived to be responsible for some transgression. Whether a particular boycott is justified depends, not only on the reasonableness of the underlying moral critique, but also on what the boycotters are doing in boycotting. The essay considers four possible inte…Read more
  •  32
    Jus Post Bellum and Political Reconciliation
    In Larry May & Elizabeth Edenberg (eds.), Jus Post Bellum and Transitional Justice, Cambridge University Press. 2013.
    The category of jus post bellum is a welcome addition to discussions of the justice of war. But, despite its handy Latin label, we will argue that it cannot be properly understood merely as a set of corollaries from jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Instead, an acceptable theory of justice in the postwar period will have to draw on a broader set of normative ideas than those that have been the focus of the just war tradition. In this paper, we will argue that norms of political reconciliation prov…Read more
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    The Ethics of Forgiveness, ed. Christel Fricke (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011. 2011.
  •  30
    Forgiveness and Retribution, by Margaret R. Holmgren (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012. 2012.
  •  202
    Stephen L. Pepper argues that lawyers and clients often act together in ways that their moral convictions would prevent them from acting individually. In an attempt to address this problem, I explore the nature of the attorney's responsibility to help her client reach autonomous decisions. To do this, I review the work of some prominent medical ethicists on a parallel to Pepper's problem in doctor-patient relationships.
  •  323
    Moral Repair and the Moral Saints Problem
    Religious Inquiries 2 (4): 5-19. 2012.
    This article explores the forms of moral repair that the wrongdoer has to perform in an attempt to make amends for her past wrongdoing, with a focus on the issues of interpersonal moral repair; that is, what a wrongdoer can do to merit her victim‘s forgiveness and achieve reconciliation with her community. The article argues against the very general demands of atonement that amount to an obligation to stop being someone who commits wrongs—to become a moral saint—and suggests a new form of atonem…Read more
  •  2
    Tort Processes and Relational Repair
    In John Oberdiek (ed.), Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 231-49. 2014.
    The last twenty-five years or so of thought about tort law have been remarkably productive and dynamic, as the dominance of the law and economics model has been challenged by theories that reintroduce the language of corrective justice. Over this same time period, theorizing about corrective justice has sprung up in response to a wide range of social, political and moral issues. I have in mind work on restorative theories in criminal justice; on postwar justice; on truth commissions, political r…Read more
  •  1
    Joseph Butler on Forgiveness
    In Johannes Brachtendorf & Stephan Herzberg (eds.), Vergebung: Philosophische Perspektiven auf ein Problemfeld der Ethik, Mentis. pp. 139-47. 2014.
    While Charles Griswold's interpretation of Bishop Butler's theory of forgiveness is an improvement over the standard reading, it leaves Butler unable to distinguish between forgiveness and justice. The emotions and actions that are offered as definitive of forgiveness instead merely show that the agent is not unjust. However, if we refocus our interpretation of Butler, we can see how he might disentangle forgiveness and justice.
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    Relationships and Respect for Persons
    Windsor Studies in Argumentation, Vol. 4. 2016.
    Many theorists writing on the aftermath of wrongdoing have been influenced by Trudy Govier’s emphasis on interpersonal relationships. But George Sher has recently challenged this talk of relationships. Read descriptively, he argues, claims about the interpersonal effects of wrongdoing are either exaggerated or false. Read normatively, relationships add nothing to more traditional moral theory. In this essay, I argue that Govier’s relational framework both avoids Sher’s dilemma and enables her to…Read more
  •  101
    Reconciliation
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.
    Particular conceptions of reconciliation vary across a number of dimensions. As section 1 explains, the kind of relationship at issue in a specific context affects the type of improvement in relations that might be necessary in order to qualify as reconciliation. Reconciliation is widely taken to be a scalar concept. Section 2 discusses the spectrum of intensity along which kinds of improvement in relationships fall, and indicates why, in particular contexts, theorists often disagree about the p…Read more
  •  166
    On the Virtue of Minding Our Own Business
    Journal of Value Inquiry 46 (2): 173-182. 2012.
    Sometimes we should mind our own business. But at other times it would be wrong to mind one's own business. This paper explores the tension between these two claims by presenting a tendency to mind one's own business as an Aristotelian-style virtue. It is furthered argued that this is a different virtue than tolerance.
  •  160
    Michael J. Zimmerman offers a conceptual analysis of the moral ‘ought’ that focuses on moral decision-making under uncertainty. His central case, originally presented by Frank Jackson, concerns a doctor who must choose among three treatments for a minor ailment. Her evidence suggests that drug B will partially cure her patient, that one of either drug A or C would cure him completely, but that the other drug would kill him. Accepting the intuition that the doctor ought to choose drug B, Zimmerma…Read more
  •  137
    Gossip and Social Punishment
    Res Philosophica 93 (1): 185-204. 2016.
    Is gossip ever appropriate as a response to other people’s misdeeds or character flaws? Gossip is arguably the most common means through which communities hold people responsible for their vices and transgressions. Yet, gossiping itself is traditionally considered wrong. This essay develops an account of social punishment in order to ask whether gossip can serve as a legitimate means of enforcing moral norms. In the end, however, I argue that gossip is most likely to be permissible where it rese…Read more
  •  52
    Moral Rebukes and Social Avoidance
    Journal of Value Inquiry 48 (4): 643-661. 2014.
    IntroductionStrawsonian theories of moral responsibility, which aim to ground the phenomenon of moral responsibility in our practices of holding one another accountable for our actions, lead us to think more carefully about the content of those practices. Strawson and his followers have done much to explore the significance of the deontic reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation and guilt), which we tend to aim at wrongdoers.P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," Proceedings of the British…Read more
  •  113
    Incorrigible Norms: Foundationalist Theories of Normative Authority
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (4): 633-649. 2000.
    What makes a norm a genuinely authoritative guide to action? For many theorists, the answer takes a foundationalist form, analogous to foundationalism in epistemology. They say that there is at least one norm that is justified in itself. On most versions, the norm is said to be incorrigibly authoritative. All other norms are justified in virtue of their connection with it. This essay argues that all such foundationalist theories of normative authority fail because they cannot give an account of …Read more
  •  74
    Do Wrongdoers Have a Right to Make Amends?
    Social Theory and Practice 29 (2): 325-41. 2003.
    Do people deserve a chance to right the wrongs they have committed? Would denying an offender the opportunity to make amends amount to an injustice? There are compelling reasons to grant such a right. However, there are also significant objections. First, a right to make amends potentially undermines the state's right to punish criminal wrongdoers. Secondly, the alleged right threatens to put undue pressure on victims to forgive their abusers. In this essay I argue that these objections can be m…Read more
  •  60
    A Normative Regress Problem
    American Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1): 35-47. 1999.
    The article argues that theorists who try to justify 'ought'-claims, i.e., who try to show that a standard of behavior has normative authority, will run into a regress problem. The problem is similar in structure to the familiar regress in the justification of belief. The point of the paper is not skeptical. Rather, the aim is to help theorists better understand the challenges associated with formulating a theory of normative authority.