In general, my research explores the intersection of ethics and moral psychology. I often find myself drawn to reconsider what appear to be settled assumptions in the literature on moral responsibility. This often leads me to defend what look like counter-intuitive positions; for example, that negligence actually undermines one's moral responsibility, or that coerced agents are often responsible for what they do, not excused. But not only do I think these positions defensible, they often have independent considerations in their favor, and I take pains to show the assumptions they undermine to be more problematic than typically thought. I'm also interested in examining explicitly the connection between moral responsibility and desert. One of the advances of the contemporary dialectic has been to characterize the target concept as “responsibility in the desert-entailing sense”. But this, unfortunately, has the air of stipulation. Apart from a few unexamined presumptions, I think little has been done to show why agents deserve, say, blame or praise in virtue of satisfying the conditions on moral responsibility extant accounts offer. Developing such an explanation, or at least identifying the obstacles and implications of such a project, remains an important task. A second theme of my research concerns the moral evaluation of agents more generally. We need to know both (1) which things an agent is evaluable for, and (2) the evaluative (moral) status of those things. Pursuing such an account reveals certain difficulties. For example, we often judge individuals blameworthy for both their actions and their mental states (e.g., racist attitudes). It is also widely assumed that we deserve blame and praise in light of a certain sort of control we exercise. But there's good reason to think that our thoughts and deeds are importantly different in two significant ways. First, we don't exercise the same sort of control over our thoughts as we do over our deeds. And second, we don't, as morally evaluable agents, stand in the same relation to our thoughts as we do to our deeds. I’m keen on pursuing the implications of these two differences for theories of responsibility and moral theories more generally. I have posted some papers here which pursue some of these topics. Comments are always welcome; please ask permission before citing. Those interested in a more detailed research statement can find one here. |