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76Blameworthiness and Causal OutcomesErkenntnis. forthcoming.It is widely held that whether a person is morally responsible for an outcome partly depends on whether certain causal relations obtain between that person and the outcome. This paper argues that, regardless of whether the preceding claim about moral responsibility is true, moral blameworthiness is independent of such causal considerations. This conclusion is motivated by considering cases from Carolina Sartorio and Sara Bernstein. The causal structures of these cases are complex. Sartorio and B…Read more
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44Moral injury, Moral Suffering, and Moral HealthIn Justin T. McDaniel (ed.), Preventing and Treating the Invisible Wounds of War: Combat Trauma, Moral Injury, and Psychological Health, Oxford University Press. 2023.In this chapter, the authors argue that the concept of “moral injury” needs regimentation: Current definitions are both too broad and too narrow. They are too broad because they ignore or conflate important differences between the kinds of moral conflicts discussed in the literature. They are too narrow because they exclude the possibility of moral injury in the absence of internal moral conflict. The authors argue that it is necessary to first develop a conception of moral health, and they prop…Read more
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115Blaming Reasonable WrongdoersRes Publica 1-17. forthcoming.‘Reasonable wrongdoers’ reasonably, but wrongly, take themselves to act permissibly. Many responsibility theorists assume that since we cannot reasonably expect these wrongdoers to behave differently, they are not blameworthy. These theorists impose a Reasonable Expectation Condition on blame. I argue that reasonable wrongdoers may be blameworthy. It is true that we often excuse reasonable wrongdoers, but sometimes this is because we do not regard their behavior as objectionable in a way that ma…Read more
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331Drone Warfare, Civilian Deaths, and the Narrative of Honest MistakesIn Nobuo Hayashi & Carola Lingaas (eds.), Honest Errors? Combat Decision-Making 75 Years After the Hostage Case, T.m.c. Asser Press. pp. 261-288. 2023.In this chapter, we consider the plausibility and consequences of the use of the term “honest errors” to describe the accidental killings of civilians resulting from the US military’s drone campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We argue that the narrative of “honest errors” unjustifiably excuses those involved in these killings from moral culpability, and reinforces long-standing, pernicious assumptions about the moral superiority of the US military and the inevitability of civil…Read more
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154Causal Involvement, Collectives, and BlameIn Andrés Garcia, Mattias Gunnemyr & Jakob Werkmäster (eds.), Value, Morality & Social Reality: Essays dedicated to Dan Egonsson, Björn Petersson & Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Department of Philosophy, Lund University. pp. 431-445. 2023.This paper argues that there is reason to distinguish between moral responsibility and blameworthiness and, in particular, that we can acknowledge that a person is responsible for the negative outcomes of their behavior without this necessarily informing our judgments about the person’s blameworthiness. This general theme is elaborated in the context of a discussion of some of Björn Petersson’s work on collective moral responsibility.
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24Mapping Responsibility: Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and CulturePhilosophical Review 117 (1): 130-133. 2008.
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41Morality and Agency: Themes From Bernard Williams (edited book)Oxford University Press, Usa. 2022.Bernard Williams was one of the great philosophical figures of the second half of the 20th century and remains deeply influential. This edited volume brings together new articles from prominent scholars that focus on the innovative ideas and methods that Williams developed as part of his distinctive "outlook" in ethics. The chapters in the first section examine Williams's attempts to explore theoretical options beyond the confines of what he called the "morality system." The contributors show ho…Read more
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221Attributionist Theories of Moral ResponsibilityIn Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 50-70. 2022.This chapter describes the attributionist approach to moral responsibility. Works by Pamela Hieronymi, T.M. Scanlon, Angela Smith, and Matthew Talbert are taken to representative of this approach. On the interpretation given here, attributionism is committed to the following: assessments of moral responsibility are, and ought to be, centrally concerned with the morally significant features of an agent’s orientation toward others that are attributable to her, and an agent is eligible for moral pr…Read more
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318Psychopaths and Symmetry: A Reply to NelkinPhilosophia 49 (3): 1233-1245. 2021.An agent is morally competent if she can respond to moral considerations. There is a debate about whether agents are open to moral blame only if they are morally competent, and Dana Nelkin’s “Psychopaths, Incorrigible Racists, and the Faces of Responsibility” is an important contribution to this debate. Like others involved in this dispute, Nelkin takes the case of the psychopath to be instructive. This is because psychopaths are similar to responsible agents insofar as they act deliberately and…Read more
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151Responsibility without Causation, Luck, and Dying of Thirst: A Reply to SartorioMethode - Analytic Perspectives 4 173-184. 2015.This reply to Carolina Sartorio’s “Resultant Luck and the Thirsty Traveler” begins with a discussion of earlier treatments of the thirsty traveler puzzle. I emphasize the way in which adjustments to the case can elicit varying intuitions and conclude with a suggestion as to why the case is so difficult to analyze. Next, I turn to Sartorio’s analysis of the puzzle. I largely agree with her judgments about the causal issues in the case but I am less certain about the conclusions she draws with res…Read more
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30Akrasia, Awareness, and BlameworthinessIn Philip Robichaud & Jan Willem Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition, Oxford University Press. pp. 47-63. 2017.
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79Moral ResponsibilityStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral responsibility.
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36Christian List: Why Free Will is Real: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Hardback € 22.50. 215 PpEthical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (5): 1121-1124. 2019.
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69The Attributionist Approach to Moral LuckMidwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1): 24-41. 2019.Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.
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80War Crimes: Causes, Excuses, and BlameOUP USA. 2019.Why do war crimes occur? Are perpetrators of war crimes always blameworthy? In an original and challenging thesis, this book argues that war crimes are often explained by perpetrators' beliefs, goals, and values, and in these cases perpetrators may be blameworthy even if they sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing.
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45Judgmental alternatives, empathy, and moral responsibilityPhilosophical Studies 175 (4): 973-980. 2018.In Responsibility From the Margins, David Shoemaker distinguishes three forms of responsibility: attributability, answerability, and accountability. The introduction of various normative competence requirements lends precision to the contrasts that Shoemaker draws between these forms of responsibility. I argue, however, that these competence requirements are less well motivated than Shoemaker supposes, which raises the possibility that we cannot distinguish between forms of responsibility in the…Read more
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65Praise and preventionPhilosophical Explorations 15 (1): 47-61. 2012.I argue that it is possible to prevent (and to be praiseworthy for preventing) an unwelcome outcome that had no chance of occurring. I motivate this position by constructing examples in which it makes sense to explain the non-occurrence of a certain outcome by referring to a particular agent's intentional and willing behavior, and yet the non-occurrence of the outcome in question was ensured by factors external to the agent. I conclude that even if the non-occurrence of an unwelcome outcome is e…Read more
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23Contractualism and Our Duties to Nonhuman AnimalsEnvironmental Ethics 28 (2): 201-215. 2006.The influential account of contractualist moral theory offered recently by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other is not intended to account for all the various moral commitments that people have; it covers only a narrow—though important—range of properly moral concerns and claims. Scanlon focuses on what he calls the morality of right and wrong or, as he puts it in his title, what we owe to each other. The question arises as to whether nonhuman animals can be wronged in the narrow sense of …Read more
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52Symmetry, Rational Abilities, and the Ought-Implies-Can PrincipleCriminal Law and Philosophy 10 (2): 283-296. 2016.In Making Sense of Free Will and Moral Responsibility Dana Nelkin defends the “rational abilities view.” According to this view, agents are responsible for their behavior if and only if they act with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. It follows that agents who act well are open to praise regardless of whether they could have acted differently, but agents who act badly are open to blame only if they could have acted on the moral reasons that counted against their behavior. I summ…Read more
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78Implanted Desires, Self-Formation and BlameJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 3 (2): 1-18. 2009.Those who advocate a “historicist” outlook on moral responsibility often hold that people who unwillingly acquire corrupt dispositions are not blameworthy for the wrong actions that issue from these dispositions; this contention is frequently supported by thought experiments involving instances of forced psychological manipulation that seem to call responsibility into question. I argue against this historicist perspective and in favor of the conclusion that the process by which a person acquires…Read more
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137Accountability, Aliens, and Psychopaths: A Reply to ShoemakerEthics 122 (3): 562-574. 2012.I respond here to an argument in David Shoemaker’s recent essay, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility.” Shoemaker finds that “Scanlonian” approaches to moral blame err insofar as they do not include a capacity to respond to moral considerations among the conditions on blameworthiness. Shoemaker argues that wrongdoers must be able to respond to moral reasons for their behavior to express the disrespect to which blaming attitudes like r…Read more
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20Review of Carlos J. Moya, Moral Responsibility: The Ways of Scepticism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (8). 2006.
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45Compatibilism, Common Sense, and PrepunishmentPublic Affairs Quarterly 23 (4): 325-335. 2009.We “prepunish” a person if we punish her prior to the commission of her crime. This essay discusses our intuitions about the permissibility of prepunishment and the relationship between prepunishment and compatibilism about free will and determinism. It has recently been argued that compatibilism has particular trouble generating a principled objection to prepunishment. The failure to provide such an objection may be a problem for compatibilism if our moral intuitions strongly favor the prohibit…Read more
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110Unwitting Behavior and ResponsibilityJournal of Moral Philosophy 8 (1): 139-152. 2011.Unlike much work on responsibility, George Sher's new book, Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness , focuses on the relationship between knowledge and responsibility. Sher argues against the view that responsibility depends on an agent's awareness of the nature and consequences of her action. According to Sher's alternative proposal, even agents who are unaware of important features of their actions may be morally or prudentially responsible for their behavior. While I agree with many of Sh…Read more
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353Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and ProtestThe Journal of Ethics 16 (1): 89-109. 2012.I argue that wrongdoers may be open to moral blame even if they lacked the capacity to respond to the moral considerations that counted against their behavior. My initial argument turns on the suggestion that even an agent who cannot respond to specific moral considerations may still guide her behavior by her judgments about reasons. I argue that this explanation of a wrongdoer’s behavior can qualify her for blame even if her capacity for moral understanding is impaired. A second argument is bas…Read more
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316Blame and responsiveness to moral reasons: Are psychopaths blameworthy?Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (4): 516-535. 2008.Abstract: Many philosophers believe that people who are not capable of grasping the significance of moral considerations are not open to moral blame when they fail to respond appropriately to these considerations. I contend, however, that some morally blind, or 'psychopathic,' agents are proper targets for moral blame, at least on some occasions. I argue that moral blame is a response to the normative commitments and attitudes of a wrongdoer and that the actions of morally blind agents can expr…Read more
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22Review of Nick Smith, I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (10). 2008.
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