Summary: I am currently working on a book manuscript that brings together my recent work in moral and criminal responsibility. The underlying view is that: A person is answerable (morally or criminally) for something just in case it it wrongful (morally or criminally) under the same description under which it is imputable to their agency. Part I articulates and defends this theoretical framework by articulating and defending the three main concepts: answerability, wrongfulness, and imputability. Part II applies this framework to different issues in moral and criminal responsibility, such as: negligence, culpability for omissions, culpability transfer, insanity, and ignorance.
Summary: I challenge the orthodox view which holds that the actus reus element of an offence establishing wrongdoing, while mens rea establishes the agent's culpability for that wrongdoing. In contrast, I argue that the mens rea element functions to jointly determine (with actus reus) the deontic status of the act for which one is being called to account, rather than the hypological status of the agent who commits that act.
Summary: I take issue with the idea that there is a volitional constraint on action. I argue for a response-dependant view of action which holds that (i) the scope of the concept of 'action' -- what counts as a doing, as opposed to a happening -- is partly determined by its aptness for an answerability-demand. This means that we can be held answerable for things like forgetting, omitting, losing, or neglecting as a doing, rather than as a mere happening or a causal consequence of something we've done, even those these things are not under our direct volitional control.
Summary: I argue against principles that transfer or trace moral responsibility and criminal culpability, using Section 33.1 of the Canada's Criminal Code as a case study.
Summary: I defend negligence as a legitimate basis for moral and criminal culpability.
Summary: I defend resultant moral luck by arguing that consequences affect degree of blameworthiness by affecting the wrongfulness of that for which one is being blamed.
Summary: I argue that there are important differences in the way that ignorance functions in negating defences and their moral analogues (which aim to defeat answerability) and affirmative defences and their moral analogues (which aim to defeat accountability). These differences are especially important when it comes to the exculpatory power of moral ignorance.
Summary: I argue that there are compelling grounds for thinking that coercive indoctrination can defeat or mitigate moral culpability in virtue of being a form of non-culpable moral ignorance.
Summary: This essay documents the "meta-normative turn" that characterizes much of late twentieth and early twenty-first century metaethics. While this turn to reasons is often traced to the 1970's, this essay traces the meta-normative turn to Falk's 1948 address to the Aristotelian Society.
Summary: I argue that the logic of blame cannot be separated from the logic of basic desert, but the libertarian condition on desert has a practical, rather than theoretical, justification. I argue that blame constitutively requires adopting the participant perspective, understood as as second-personal address, which involves an ontological commitment to freedom.
Summary: I defend a qualified version of the "shmagency" objection to constitutivism. The argument targets only those versions of constitutivism that purport to derive agent-neutral requirements of practical reason by arguing that any conception of agency that is sufficiently robust to derive substantive content is normatively escapable.
Summary: I defend a deflationary and pluralist view of normativity. I argue that there are a plurality of sources of contributory reasons and there is no unitary, authoritative standpoint from which to weigh these reasons against each other. To say that there is a reason for A to do x in circumstances C just is to say that there is a normative standpoint which favours A's doing x in C.
Summary: This paper takes issue with the claim (defended by Don Hubin) that Humean rationality is special because it's demands are "unshruggable." I argue that insofar as they theory remains genuinely normative, its demand are shruggable, at least absent a defence of a radically individualist account of mental content.
Summary: I argue that the Kantian Constructivist "regress on conditions" argument for the unconditional value of rational nature (most notably associate with Christine Korsgaard) succeeds only if one accepts a full-fledged Kantian moral psychological, including a presupposition of transcendental freedom.
Summary: This paper takes up the idea that reasons-internalism can be motivated by an "alienation constraint" on practical reason which holds that agents cannot be intolerably alienated from their practical reasons. I argue that, despite the intuitive appeal of such a constraint, it ends up circular (by presupposing internalism in defending the constraint) or trivial (by understanding alienation in terms of one's prior theory of practical reason).
Summary: I defend the view that the natural, biological function of the moral system is to regulate behaviour according to norms, the general observance of which are mutually beneficial. This explains the reliable, but contingent, connection between moral judgment and motivation.
Summary: I argue that the putative "problem of the essential indexical" is due to the opaque nature of the contexts in which the indexicals occur, rather than to their indexicality. While I agree Perry has identified a problem with the "doctrine of propositions," I argue that this is due to the implicit Fregean anti-psychologism and that a more psychologically realist theory of language is better suited to handle the problem.
Summary: I argue that Paul Churchland's state-space semantics theory, when construed as a version of conceptual-role semantics, cannot adequately address the challenge of providing an account of similarity of meaning.