JOHN W. ROBISON

Welcome to my website! I'm John Robison (CV, jorobis [@] iu.edu).

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington.

I work in moral philosophy and epistemology, and I am especially interested in questions at their intersection. My work appears or is forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and Ergo on topics such as exculpatory moral ignorance, awareness or consciousness conditions on moral responsibility, responsibility for mental states, and respect as a proper responsiveness to persons. My current and future research builds on these projects and addresses connected questions about trust, friendship, blaming and excusing, the ethics and epistemology of testimony, and the epistemology and value of self-conception.

At IU, undergraduate courses I have taught or am teaching include: Introduction to Ethical Theories and Problems (recent syllabus), Biomedical Ethics (recent syllabus), Ethics and Responsible Management (recent syllabus), and Honors Thesis supervision (topic: Ethics Without Free Will).

Before joining IU, I received a Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While living in Western Massachusetts, I taught several courses in the Department of Philosophy at UMass Amherst and in the Department of Philosophy at Smith College, including courses on (or with major units in) medical ethics, animal ethics, moral responsibility, normative ethics, social and political philosophy, epistemology, social epistemology, and philosophical problems concerning unconscious influences and processing.

My dissertation, The Epistemic Dimensions of Moral Responsibility and Respect, was written under the supervision of Hilary Kornblith (chair), Sophie Horowitz, Katia Vavova, and Timothy Pachirat.

Before starting graduate school, I received a B.A. in Philosophy and Music at the University of Rochester, and from 2010-2012, I was a teacher in the Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion Department and the Music Department at a small college preparatory school for grades 9-12 (Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, CT). Much of my pedagogical outlook stems from my time teaching at Loomis Chaffee.

Publications

"Moral Worth and Consciousness: In Defense of a Value-Secured Reliability Theory"

Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming), penultimate draft.

ABSTRACT: What minimal role--if any--must consciousness of morally significant information play in an account of moral worth? According to one popular view, a right action is morally worthy only if the agent is conscious (in some sense) of the facts that make it right. I argue against this consciousness condition and close cousins of it. As I show, consciousness of such facts requires much more sophistication than writers typically suggest--this condition would bar from moral worth most ordinary, intuitively morally worthy agents. Moreover, I show that the attraction to this flavor of consciousness condition rests on mistaken assumptions about what is required for a right act to be non-accidentally right and attributable to the agent. Drawing some lessons from the discussion, I defend a Value-Secured Reliability Theory of Moral Worth and show how a minimal yet indispensable role for consciousness falls out from it. On this independently plausible theory, an action can be morally worthy even when the agent is unaware of the right-making features of her action.

"When and Why is it Disrespectful to Excuse an Attitude?"

Philosophical Studies (2019), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1132-5.

ABSTRACT: It is intuitive that, under certain circumstances, it can be disrespectful or patronizing to excuse someone for an attitude (even for an attitude one finds objectionable). While it is easy enough to find instances where it seems disrespectful to excuse an attitude, matters are complicated. When and why, precisely, is it disrespectful to judge that someone is not responsible for his attitude? In this paper, I show, first, that the extant philosophical literature on this question is underdeveloped and overgeneralized: the writers who address the question suggest quite strikingly that it is always disrespectful to excuse a sane, rational agent for his attitude, and their arguments rely on false generalizations about what is involved in excusing an attitude. I then sketch an account of respect (something conspicuously missing in the literature on this question) to explain when and why it is disrespectful to excuse an attitude. Using this account, I show that one can coherently (and respectfully) excuse an attitude even in some cases where that attitude was produced by a responsiveness to reasons.

"Skepticism About Skepticism About Moral Responsibility"

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2018), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12197.

ABSTRACT: In an influential article on ignorance and moral responsibility, Gideon Rosen endorses the skeptical argument that attributions of blameworthiness are never epistemically justified. Granting Rosen’s controversial claim that an act is blameworthy only if it is either akratic or the causal upshot of some akratic act, I show in this paper that we can and should resist his skeptical conclusion. I show, first, that Rosen’s argument (if successful) is hostage to a much more global skepticism about attributions of praiseworthiness, doxastic justification, and other phenomena that essentially involve causal-historical facts about mental states. I then show how, equipped with proper background knowledge, we can justifiedly attribute blameworthiness.