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31An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Moral ResponsibilityRoutledge. 2019.This book develops an intersectional feminist approach to moral responsibility. It accomplisheses four main goals. First, it outlines a concise list of the main principles of intersectional feminism. Second, it uses these principles to critique prevailing philosophical theories of moral responsibility. Third, it offers an account of moral responsibility that is compatible with the ethos of intersectional feminism. And fourth, it uses intersectional feminist principles to critique culturally norm…Read more
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93Moral Responsibility Ain’t Just in the HeadJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (4): 601--616. 2015.Abstract:In this paper, I dispute what I callpsychological internalismabout moral responsibility, which comprises most classic accounts as well as newer neurobiological ones, and I defendpsychological externalismabout moral responsibility instead. According to psychological internalism, an agent's moral responsibility is determined solely or primarily by her intentional states. I argue that psychological internalism is empirically challenged by recent findings in social psychology and cognitive …Read more
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37A virtue ethical approach to decisional capacity and mental healthPhilosophical Psychology 29 (3): 462-475. 2016.It is a common assumption that lack of autonomy is incompatible with decisional capacity and mental health. However, there are two general conceptions of autonomy, one value-neutral and the other value-laden, which imply different notions of mental health. I argue that the value-neutral notion of autonomy is independently inadequate and that it also provides an inadequate foundation for judging whether someone is decisionally incapable or mentally disordered. I propose an alternative, value-lade…Read more
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154Situationism, Moral Responsibility and BlamePhilosophia 41 (1): 179-193. 2013.In Moral philosophy meets social psychology, Gilbert Harman argues that social psychology can educate folk morality to prevent us from committing the ‘fundamental attribution error,’ i.e. ‘the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent’s distinctive character traits’ (Harman, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, 315–331, 1999). An overview of the literature shows that while situationists unani…Read more
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42Diane Enns, The Violence of Victimhood, Review by Michelle Ciurria (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 16 (2): 284-287. 2012.
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54Argumentum ad Verecundiam: New Gender-based Criteria for Appeals to AuthorityArgumentation 28 (4): 437-452. 2014.In his influential work on critical argumentation, Douglas Walton explains how to judge whether an argumentum ad verecundiam is fallacious or legitimate. He provides six critical questions and a number of ancillary sub-questions to guide the identification of reasonable appeals to authority. While it is common for informal logicians to acknowledge the role of bias in sampling procedures and hypothesis confirmation , there is a conspicuous lack of discourse on the effect of identity prejudice on …Read more
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40The Meaning(s) of SituationismTeaching Ethics 15 (1): 137-150. 2015.This paper is about the meaning of situationism. Philosophers have drawn various conclusions about situationism, some more favourable than others. Moreover, there is a difference between public reception of situationism, which has been very enthusiastic, and scholarly reception, which has been more cynical. In this paper, I outline what I take to be four key implications of situationism, based on careful scrutiny of the literature. Some situationist accounts, it turns out, are inconsistent with …Read more
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135Moral Responsibility: Justifying Strawson and the Excuse of Peculiarly Unfortunate Formative Circumstances (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3): 545-557. 2014.P.F. Strawson’s theory of moral responsibility remains eminently influential. However, moral philosophers such as G. Watson and T.M. Scanlon have called into question it explanatory basis, which grounds moral responsibility in human nature and interpersonal relationships. They demand a deeper normative explanation for when it is appropriate to modify or mollify the reactive attitudes. In this paper, following A. Sneddon, I argue that the best interpretation of Strawson is an externalistic one wh…Read more
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46Complicity and Criminal Liability in Rwanda: A Situationist CritiqueRes Publica 17 (4): 411-419. 2011.In Complicity and the Rwandan Genocide ( 2010b ), Larry May argues that complicity can be the basis for criminal liability if two conditions are met: First, the person’s actions or inactions must contribute to the harm in question, and secondly, the person must know that his actions or inactions risk contributing to this harm. May also states that the threshold for guilt for criminal liability is higher than for moral responsibility. I agree with this latter claim, but I think that it casts doub…Read more
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51Tolerance, acceptance and the virtue of orthonomy: a reply to Lawrence Blum and Brenda AlmondJournal of Moral Education 40 (2): 255-264. 2011.In the Journal of Moral Education, 39(2), Brenda Almond and Lawrence Blum debate the importance of tolerance versus acceptance in sex education. Blum defines acceptance as ‘positive regard’, in contradistinction to mere tolerance, ‘a live and let live attitude toward others, an acceptance of coexistence, but with a disapproval of that “other”’. Employing consequentialist and definitional arguments, he defends an acceptant educational policy. I shore up this defence by addressing the issue of aut…Read more
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21Is There a Duty to Use Moral Neurointerventions?Topoi 38 (1): 37-47. 2019.Do we have a duty to use moral neurointerventions to correct deficits in our moral psychology? On their surface, these technologies appear to pose worrisome risks to valuable dimensions of the self, and these risks could conceivably weigh against any prima facie moral duty we have to use these technologies. Focquaert and Schermer :139–151, 2015) argue that neurointerventions pose special risks to the self because they operate passively on the subject’s brain, without her active participation, un…Read more
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139A New Mixed View of Virtue Ethics, Based on Daniel Doviak’s New Virtue CalculusEthical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (2): 259-269. 2012.In A New Form of Agent-Based Virtue Ethics , Daniel Doviak develops a novel agent-based theory of right action that treats the rightness (or deontic status) of an action as a matter of the action’s net intrinsic virtue value (net-IVV)—that is, its balance of virtue over vice. This view is designed to accommodate three basic tenets of commonsense morality: (i) the maxim that “ought” implies “can,” (ii) the idea that a person can do the right thing for the wrong reason, and (iii) the idea that a v…Read more
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43The Standard of the Reasonable Person: An Objective, Intuitive Account That Treats People as PersonsPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21 (1): 21-25. 2014.In my paper on moral responsibility and mental health disabilities, I defended the use of the standard of the reasonable person (SRP), adapted from W.O. Holmes’ famous account of responsibility in The Common Law (1881). This theory is meant to be applicable to all cases of moral responsibility assessment, but it is particularly apt for ascribing moral responsibility in cases of mental illness on a realist basis. This is because it has three distinctive advantages over the alternatives, that is, …Read more
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36Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (review)Philosophical Psychology (4): 1-5. 2013.Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2012.749443
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67Critical Thinking in Moral Argumentation Contexts: A Virtue Ethical ApproachInformal Logic 32 (2): 242-258. 2012.In traditional analytic philosophy, critical thinking is defined along Cartesian lines as rational and linear reasoning preclusive of intuitions, emotions and lived experience. According to Michael Gilbert, this view – which he calls the Natural Light Theory (NLT) – fails because it arbitrarily excludes standard feminist forms of argumentation and neglects the essentially social nature of argumentation. In this paper, I argue that while Gilbert’s criticism is correct for argumentation in general…Read more
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96The Case of Jojo and Our Pretheoretical Intuitions: An Externalist InterpretationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (2): 265-276. 2014.In their contribution to the Review of philosophy and psychology (19 March 2010), David Faraci and David Shoemaker object to Susan Wolf’s sane deep self view of moral responsibility, which is supposed to accord with our pretheoretical intuitions about deprived childhood victims better than the plain deep-self view. Wolf’s account hinges on the intuitiveness of a particular example, which asks us to consider JoJo, the son of an evil dictator of a small, undeveloped country who grows up to adopt h…Read more
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74Moral Responsibility and Mental Health: Applying the Standard of the Reasonable PersonPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21 (1): 1-12. 2014.It is contested whether and to what extent moral responsibility can be ascribed to persons with mental health disabilities. Will Cartwright (2006) evaluates two prevalent theories of responsibility in terms of their suitability for morally appraising sociopathic personality disorder, particularly as embodied in the famous homicidal bank robber Robert Harris. Cartwright argues that our intuitions about Harris conflict because we are instantly horrified by Harris’ actions, but we are forced to rec…Read more
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46Answering the Situationist Challenge: A Defense of Virtue Ethics as Preferable to Other Ethical TheoriesDialogue 53 (4): 651-670. 2014.Dans un célèbre article de 1998, John Doris avance que la psychologie situationniste remet en question l’éthique de la vertu aristotélicienne, laquelle présuppose l’existence de vertus qui sont à la fois fixes et indépendantes d’une situation. Son argument prend la forme d’un dilemme. Le présent article, qui a pour but de répondre à ce dilemme, s’appuie sur des recherches récentes menées dans les domaines de la psychologie et des sciences cognitives afin de démontrer que l’éthique de la vertu, e…Read more
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49Diane Enns, The Violence of Victimhood (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 16 (2): 284-287. 2012.
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Washington University in St. LouisSSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
York University, Toronto
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Metaphilosophy |
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |