Columbia University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1976
CV
Dallas, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics
Philosophy of Law
  •  33236
    This is a presentation of the utilitarian approach to punishment. It is meant for students. A note added in July, 2022 advises the reader about the author's current views on some topics in the paper. The first section discusses Bentham's psychological hedonism. The second briefly criticizes it. The third section explains abstractly how utilitarianism would determine of the right amount of punishment. The fourth section applies the theory to some cases, and brings out how utilitarianism could fav…Read more
  •  778
    Hume's key and aesthetic rationality
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1): 69-76. 1986.
  •  687
    The Origins of the Objection
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 29 (1): 79-101. 2012.
    It is considered to be a devastating objection to utilitarianism (and consequentialism) that it would sometimes favor deliberately punishing an innocent person. I call this The Objection. In this paper I try to find the historical origin of The Objection. Although various writers have suggested that it occurs much earlier, I claim that it emerged in Oxford in the late 1920's, and was developed by E. F. Carritt and A. C. Ewing.
  •  160
    Intention, intentional action, and moral responsibility
    Philosophical Studies 82 (3). 1996.
    Philosophers traditionally have been concerned both to explain intentional behavior and to evaluate it from a moral point of view. Some have maintained that whether actions (and their consequences) properly count as intended sometimes hinges on moral considerations - specifically, considerations of moral responsibility. The same claim has been made about an action's properly counting as having been done intentionally. These contentions will be made more precise in subsequent sections, where infl…Read more
  •  154
    Collective responsibility
    Philosophical Studies 51 (1). 1987.
    More than one person can be responsible for a particular state of affairs--In this sense collective moral responsibility does indeed exist. However, Even in such cases, Moral responsibility is still fundamentally individualized since each agent responsible for a particular state of affairs is responsible for his/her actions which have the intention of producing this state of affairs
  •  126
    Motive and rightness
    Ethics 106 (2): 327-349. 1996.
    Motive and Rightness is the first book-length attempt to answer the question: Does the motive of an action ever make a difference to whether that action is ...
  •  109
    The nature of desert
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 585-594. 1983.
  •  90
    Kant, nonaccidentalness and the availability of moral worth
    The Journal of Ethics 5 (4): 293-313. 2001.
    Contemporary Kantians who defend Kant''s view of the superiority of the sense of duty as a form of motivation appeal to various ideas. Some say, if only implicitly, that the sense of duty is always ``available'''' to an agent, when she has a moral obligation. Some, like Barbara Herman, say that the sense of duty provides a ``nonaccidental'''' connection between an agent''s motivation and the act''s rightness. In this paper I show that the ``availability'''' and ``nonaccidentalness'''' arguments …Read more
  •  86
    Intentionality and moral judgments in commonsense thought about action
    Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2): 224-236. 2004.
    The concept of intentional action occupies a central place in commonsense or folk psychological thought. Philosophers of action, psychologists and moral philosophers all have taken an interest in understanding this important concept. One issue that has been discussed by philosophers is whether the concept of intentional action is purely ‘naturalistic’, that is, whether it is entirely a descriptive concept that can be used to explain and predict behavior. (Of course, judgments using such a concep…Read more
  •  78
    Punishment and Reform
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 8 (3): 619-633. 2014.
    The reform of offenders is often said to be one of the morally legitimate aims of punishment. After briefly surveying the history of reformist thinking I examine the ‘quasi-reform’ theories, as I call them, of H. Morris, J. Hampton and A. Duff. I explain how they conceive of reform, and what role they take it to have in the criminal justice system. I then focus critically on one feature of their conception of reform, namely, the claim that a reformed offender will obey the relevant laws for mora…Read more
  •  71
    Consistency Among Intentions and the ‘Simple View’
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 515-522. 1996.
    What is the relation between the intention to A and doing A intentionally? It is natural to suppose that the latter entails the former. That is, it is natural to accept what Michael Bratman has called the ‘Simple View’ of the relation between acting intentionally and having an intention. Bratman is one noteworthy writer who has denied that the Simple View is true. In the present paper I do not defend this view. I contend that one well-known argument that Bratman offers for thinking that the Simp…Read more
  •  61
    Kantianism, Consequentialism and Deterrence
    In Christian Seidel (ed.), Consequentialism: New Directions, New Problems?, Oxford University Press. pp. 237-57. 2019.
    It is often argued that Kantian and consequentialist approaches to the philosophy of punishment differ on the question of whether using punishment to achieve deterrence is morally acceptable. I show that this is false: both theories judge it to be acceptable. Showing this requires attention to what the Formula of Humanity in Kant requires agents to do. If we use the correct interpretation of this formula we can also see that an anti-consequentialist moral principle used by Victor Tadros to criti…Read more
  •  55
    Book reviews (review)
    with Tomas Kulka and David C. Graves
    Philosophia 21 (1-2): 141-159. 1991.
  •  51
    Pure Negligence
    American Philosophical Quarterly 30 (2). 1993.
  •  50
    Crime and Moral Luck
    American Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1). 1988.
  •  47
    Counterexamples in ethics
    Metaphilosophy 16 (2‐3): 130-145. 1985.
  •  42
    Sidgwick's methodology
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 537-553. 1985.
  •  38
    Punishment
    Law and Philosophy 7 (2). 1988.
    The main previous analyses of punishment by Hart, Feinberg and Wasserstrom are considered and criticized. One persistent fault is the neglect of the idea that in punishment the person subjected to it is represented as having no valid excuse for wrongdoing. A new analysis is proposed which attempts to specify in what sense punishment by its very nature is retributive, as Wasserstrom has asserted. Certain problematic cases such as strict liability offenses and pre-trial detention are considered in…Read more
  •  37
    Giving Wrongdoers What They Deserve
    The Journal of Ethics 20 (4): 385-399. 2016.
    Retributivist approaches to the philosophy of punishment are usually based on certain claims related to moral desert. I focus on one such principle:Censuring Principle : There is a moral reason to censure guilty wrongdoers aversively.Principles like CP are often supported by the construction of examples similar to Kant’s ‘desert island’. These are meant to show that there is a reason for state officials to punish deserving wrongdoers, even if none of the familiar goals of punishment, such as det…Read more
  •  36
    The logic of desert
    Journal of Value Inquiry 17 (4): 317-324. 1983.
  •  36
    Bentham on Temptation and Deterrence
    Utilitas 31 (3): 246-261. 2019.
    In Introduction Bentham considers a difficulty. If the immediate aim of punishment is to deter agents considering breaking the law, then the severity of the threat of punishment must increase if they are strongly tempted to offend. But it seems intuitively that some people who were strongly tempted to offend should be punished leniently. Bentham argues in response that all potential offenders capable of being deterred must be deterred. He makes three mistakes. It is possible that it would produc…Read more
  •  35
    Justice and mercy
    Journal of Social Philosophy 16 (3): 36-47. 1985.
  •  33
    People watching
    The Philosophers' Magazine 57 (57): 122-124. 2012.
  •  27
    The Nature of Desert
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 585-594. 1983.
  •  20
    Hard Luck, by Neil Levy (review)
    Mind 121 (482): 498-501. 2012.
  •  20
    Motive and Rightness
    Oxford University Press UK. 2011.
    Motive and Rightness is the first book-length attempt to answer the question, Does the motive of an action ever make a difference in whether that action is morally right or wrong? Steven Sverdlik argues that the answer is yes. His book examines the major theories now being discussed by moral philosophers to see if they can provide a plausible account of the relevance of motives to rightness and wrongness. Sverdlik argues that consequentialism gives a better account of these matters than Kantiani…Read more
  •  18
    Unconscious Evil Principles
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 9 (1): 13-14. 2002.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 13-14 [Access article in PDF] Unconscious Evil Principles Steven Sverdlik DAVID WARD CONTENDS that Kant cannot explain why people perform evil acts, in the special sense that Ward attaches to the term. He suggests that if we utilize a notion of the unconscious acceptance of certain sorts of principle then a plausible explanation—that still draws on some Kantian ideas—can be given. I hav…Read more
  •  16
    Intentionality and Moral Judgments in Commonsense Thought About Action
    Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2): 224-236. 2004.
    The concept of intentional action occupies a central place in commonsense or folk psychological thought. This paper describes two psychological experiments designed by the author and Joshua Knobe. The experiments investigate further some questions that arose from Knobe's work on responsibility and intentionality beliefs in folk psychology. They show that there is reason to doubt that subjects' beliefs about the intentionality of side effects are simply a product of their beliefs about the agent'…Read more
  •  13
    Desert as a Limiting Condition
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 12 (2): 209-225. 2018.
    I examine two related ideas about the role of desert judgments which say, roughly, that, if a punishment is undeserved, it is impermissible to impose it. These can both be taken to claim that desert is a ‘limiting condition’ on the pursuit of consequentialist aims. I discuss what considerations are supposed to support an offender’s desert claim. I first examine the major divide between contemporary retributivist theories: those that take an offender’s desert to supervene only on culpability cons…Read more