• Introduction
    In Taylor W. Cyr, Andrew Law & Neal A. Tognazzini (eds.), Freedom, Responsibility, and Value: Essays in Honor of John Martin Fischer, Routledge. 2023.
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    This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past forty years has been transformative and inspirational. Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also wel…Read more
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    What Time Travel Teaches Us about Moral Responsibility
    with Taylor Cyr
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (3). 2024.
    This paper explores what the metaphysics of time travel might teach us about moral responsibility. We take our cue from a recent paper by Yishai Cohen, who argues that if time travel is metaphysically possible, then one of the most influential theories of moral responsibility (i.e., Fischer and Ravizza’s) is false. We argue that Cohen’s argument is unsound but that Cohen’s argument can serve as a lens to bring reasons-responsive theories of moral responsibility into sharper focus, helping us to …Read more
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    "You're Just Jealous!": On Envious Blame
    In Sara Protasi (ed.), The Moral Psychology of Envy, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 147-162. 2022.
    One common reaction to criticism is to try to deflect it by calling into question the motivations of the person doing the criticizing. For example, if I feel like you are blaming me for something that you yourself are guilty of having done in the past, I might respond with the retort, "Who are you to blame me for this?", where this retort is meant to serve not as an excuse but rather as a challenge to the standing of the blamer. The notion of standing has taken center stage in much recent litera…Read more
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    Blame is fascinating yet elusive, and it is both of these things because it is so complex. It seems to have a cognitive aspect (the belief that someone has done wrong, perhaps), but it also seems to have an emotional aspect (resentment at being disrespected, perhaps). And then of course there is the outside-of-the-head aspect of blame, which manifests itself in rebukes and reprimands, accusations and distrust, cold shoulders and estrangement. Still, accounts of blame that identify it with belief…Read more
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    Although it is widely accepted that hypocritical blamers lack the standing to blame others who have committed similar wrongs, an account of what it is that’s lost when someone loses their standing to blame remains elusive. When moral address is inappropriate because it is or would be hypocritical, what is the precise nature of the complaint that the blamed party is entitled to raise, and that so often gets voiced as “I don’t have to take that from you”? In this paper I argue that extant answers …Read more
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    Silence & Salience: On Being Judgmental
    In Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity, Routledge. pp. 256-269. 2020.
    This chapter explores the concept of judgmentalism: what it is and why it’s morally problematic. After criticizing an account offered by Gary Watson, the paper argues for a broader understanding of what it is to be judgmental, encompassing not just the overall beliefs that we form about someone else, but also the very pattern of our thoughts about those with whom we are involved in interpersonal relationships. The thesis is that to care about someone is to be oriented toward them, or to see them…Read more
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    No one has written more insightfully on the promises and perils of human agency than Gary Watson, who has spent a career thinking about issues such as moral responsibility, blame, free will, addiction, and psychopathy. This special edition of OSAR pays tribute to Watson's work by taking up and extending themes from his pioneering essays
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    Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (4): 809-812. 2012.
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    Pride in Christian Philosophy and Theology
    In Joseph Adam Carter & Emma C. Gordon (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Pride, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 211-234. 2017.
    Our focus in this chapter will be the role the pride has played, both historically and contemporarily, in Christian theology and philosophical theology. We begin by delineating a number of different types of pride, since some types are positive (e.g., when a parent tells a daughter “I’m proud of you for being brave”), and others are negative (e.g., “Pride goes before a fall”) or even vicious. We then explore the role that the negative emotion and vice play in the history of Christianity, with pa…Read more
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    Free Will and Two Local Determinisms
    with Andrew Law
    Erkenntnis 84 (5): 1011-1023. 2019.
    Hudson has formulated two local deterministic theses and argued that both are incompatible with freedom. We argue that Hudson has half the story right. Moreover, reflection on Hudson’s theses brings out an important point for debates about freedom generally: that instead of focusing on the notion of entailment, debates about freedom should focus on the notions of explanation and sourcehood. Hudson’s theses provide an excellent case study for why the latter notions ought to take precedence over t…Read more
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    Blame: Its Nature and Norms (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2012.
    What is it to blame someone, and when are would-be blamers in a position to do so? What function does blame serve in our lives, and is it a valuable way of relating to one another? The essays in this volume explore answers to these and related questions.
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    Engaging with Pike: God, Freedom, and Time
    Philosophical Papers 38 (2): 247-270. 2009.
    Nelson Pike’s article, “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action,” is one of the most influential pieces in contemporary Philosophy of Religion. Published over forty years ago, it has elicited many different kinds of replies. We shall set forth some of the main lines of reply to Pike’s article, starting with some of the “early” replies. We then explore some issues that arise from relatively recent work in the philosophy of time; it is fascinating to note that views suggested by recent work in thi…Read more
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    Simples and the possibility of discrete space
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (1). 2006.
    What are the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for an object's being a simple (an object without proper parts)? According to one prominent view, The Pointy View of Simples, an object is a simple if and only if the region occupied by that object contains exactly one point in space. According to another prominent view, MaxCon, an object is a simple if and only if it is maximally continuous. In this paper, I argue that both of these views are inconsistent with the possibility of discrete …Read more
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    Review of Kevin Timpe's Free Will (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 28 (2): 239-243. 2011.
    This is a review article of Kevin Timpe's book, *Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives*.
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    The truth about tracing
    Noûs 43 (3): 531-556. 2009.
    Control-based models of moral responsibility typically employ a notion of "tracing," according to which moral responsibility requires an exercise of control either immediately prior to the behavior in question or at some suitable point prior to the behavior. Responsibility, on this view, requires tracing back to control. But various philosophers, including Manuel Vargas and Angela Smith, have presented cases in which the plausibility of tracing is challenged. In this paper we discuss the example…Read more
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    The Nature and Ethics of Blame
    Philosophy Compass 7 (3): 197-207. 2012.
    Blame is usually discussed in the context of the free will problem, but recently moral philosophers have begun to examine it on its own terms. If, as many suppose, free will is to be understood as the control relevant to moral responsibility, and moral responsibility is to be understood in terms of whether blame is appropriate, then an independent inquiry into the nature and ethics of blame will be essential to solving (and, perhaps, even fully understanding) the free will problem. In this artic…Read more
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    Free Will and Miracles
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (3): 236-238. 2016.
    The Consequence Argument is sound only if no one has a choice about the laws of nature, and one prominent compatibilist reply to the argument—championed by David Lewis —begins by claiming that there is a sense in which we do have such a choice, and a sense in which we don't. Lewis then insists that the sense in which we do have such a choice is the only sense required by compatibilism. Peter van Inwagen has responded that even if Lewis's distinction between two senses of having a choice about th…Read more
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    Persistence and Responsibility
    In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity, Mit Press. 2010.
    In this paper I argue that adopting a perdurance view of persistence through time does not lead to skepticism about moral responsibility, despite what many theorists have thought.
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    A problem for guidance control
    Philosophical Quarterly 58 (233): 685-692. 2008.
    Central to Fischer and Ravizza's theory of moral responsibility is the concept of guidance control, which involves two conditions: (1) moderate reasons-responsiveness, and (2) mechanism ownership. We raise a worry for Fischer and Ravizza's account of (1). If an agent acts contrary to reasons which he could not recognize, this should lead us to conclude that he is not morally responsible for his behaviour; but according to Fischer and Ravizza's account, he satisfies the conditions for guidance co…Read more
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    Omniscience, Freedom, and Dependence
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2): 346-367. 2014.
    Several theorists (Merricks, Westphal, and McCall) have recently claimed to offer a novel way to respond to the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge, rooted in Molina's insight that God's beliefs depend on what we do, rather than the other way around. In this paper we argue that these responses either beg the question, or else are dressed-up versions of Ockhamism.
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    In his classic essay, "The Dilemma of Determinism", William James argues that the truth of determinism would make regret irrational. Given the central role of regret in our moral lives, James concludes that determinism is false. In this paper I explore the attitude of regret and show that James's argument is mistaken. Not only can we rationally regret events that were determined to occur, but we can also rationally regret events that had to occur.
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    The Hybrid Nature of Promissory Obligation
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (3). 2007.
    How do promissory obligations get created? Some have thought that the answer to this question must make reference to our social practice of promising. Recently, however, T.M. Scanlon has argued (in his book What We Owe to Each Other) for a pure ‘expectation view’ of promising, according to which promissory obligations arise as a result of our producing certain expectations in others. He formulates a principle of fidelity (Principle F) that tells us when one has gained an obligation due to pro…Read more
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    Blame
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.
    In this entry we provide a critical review of recent work on the nature and ethics of blame, including issues of moral standing.
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    Free Will (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 28 (2): 239-243. 2011.
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    Why Frankfurt-Examples Don’t Need to Succeed to Succeed
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (3): 551-565. 2010.
    In this paper we argue that defenders of Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities do not need to construct a metaphysically possible scenario in which an agent is morally responsible despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. Rather, there is a weaker (but equally legitimate) sense in which Frankfurt-style counterexamples can succeed. All that's needed is the claim that the ability to do otherwise is no part of what grounds moral responsibility, when the ag…Read more
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    Blame and Avoidability: A Reply to Otsuka
    The Journal of Ethics 14 (1). 2010.
    In a fascinating recent article, Michael Otsuka seeks to bypass the debates about the Principle of Alternative Possibilities by presenting and defending a different, but related, principle, which he calls the “Principle of Avoidable Blame.” According to this principle, one is blameworthy for performing an act only if one could instead have behaved in an entirely blameless manner. Otsuka claims that although Frankfurt-cases do undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, they do not unde…Read more