•  16
    Rethinking Functionalist Accounts of Blame
    The Journal of Ethics 1-17. forthcoming.
    Functionalist accounts of blame have been rising in popularity. Proponents of the approach claim that, by defining blame in terms of its function or functions, their account has the advantage of being able to accommodate a wide range of attitudes and activities as blame; but their opponents question the extensional and explanatory adequacy of such accounts. This paper contributes to this burgeoning literature by presenting new challenges to the existing functionalist accounts. The fundamental pr…Read more
  •  294
    The Communication Argument and the Pluralist Challenge
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (5): 384-399. 2021.
    Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a con…Read more
  •  85
    Response-Dependence in Moral Responsibility: A Granularity Challenge
    American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (3). 2022.
    According to the response-dependence view of moral responsibility, a person is morally responsible just in case, and in virtue of the fact that, she is an appropriate target for reactive attitudes. This paper raises a new puzzle regarding response-dependence: there is a mismatch between the granularity of the reactive attitudes and of responsibility facts. Whereas the reactive attitudes are comparatively coarse-grained, responsibility facts can be quite fine-grained. This poses a challenge for re…Read more
  •  522
    Shame and the Scope of Moral Accountability
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3): 544-564. 2021.
    It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. Th…Read more
  •  35
    Sensitivity to shifts in probability of harm and benefit in moral dilemmas
    with Arseny A. Ryazanov, Samuel C. Rickless, Craig R. M. McKenzie, and Dana Kay Nelkin
    Cognition 209 (C): 104548. 2021.
    Psychologists and philosophers who pose moral dilemmas to understand moral judgment typically specify outcomes as certain to occur in them. This contrasts with real-life moral decision-making, which is almost always infused with probabilities (e.g., the probability of a given outcome if an action is or is not taken). Seven studies examine sensitivity to the size and location of shifts in probabilities of outcomes that would result from action in moral dilemmas. We find that moral judgments diffe…Read more
  •  92
    The experimental critique and philosophical practice
    Philosophical Psychology 31 (1): 89-109. 2018.
    Some experimental philosophers have criticized the standard intuition-based methodology in philosophy. One worry about this criticism is that it is just another version of the general skepticism toward the evidential efficacy of intuition, and is thereby subject to the same difficulties. In response, Weinberg provides a more nuanced version of the criticism by targeting merely the philosophical use of intuition. I contend that, though Weinberg’s approach differs from general skepticism about int…Read more
  •  51
    This dissertation examines the recent arguments against the “Centrality” thesis—the thesis that intuition plays central evidential roles in philosophical inquiry—and their implications for the negative program in experimental philosophy. Two types of objections to Centrality are discussed. First, there are some objections which turn out to only work against Centrality when it is taken as a potential form of philosophical exceptionalism. I respond by showing that negative experimental philosophy …Read more
  •  46
    Is Intuition Central in Philosophy?
    Philosophical Forum 47 (3-4): 281-296. 2016.
    Some experimental philosophers criticize standard philosophical methodology on the basis of survey data reporting variation of intuition according to irrelevant factors like culture and order. I will refer to them as “experimentalists” and their critique as the “experimental critique.” Recently, a few philosophers (e.g., Williamson, Deutsch, and Cappelen) have responded by noting that the experimental critique relies on the “Centrality” assumption—the thesis that intuition plays a central eviden…Read more