BLAME,
EXCUSES, and
RESPONSIBILITY
MORAL AND LEGAL PERSPECTIVES
MAY 22 - 23, 2025
Department of Philosophy
The University of Neuchâtel
Neuchâtel, Switzerland
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette
Antoine Dang Van
Patricia Sánchez Olivia
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Luís Duarte d’Almeida (Lisbon / Edinburgh)
David Owens (KCL / Oxford)
MAY 22, 2025
12:30 PM
CHECK IN @ Faubourg de L'Hôpital 61, room B1
GOOGLE MAPS: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rkYqp6sym2dCUnU19
APPLE MAPS: http://maps.apple.com/?q=46.994806, 6.937688
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
David Owens (KCL / Oxford)
3 PM - 4 PM
Niels de Haan (University of Vienna)
"Guarding against Manipulation and Coercion"
4 PM - 5:30 PM
Luís Duarte d’Almeida (Lisbon/Edinburgh)
7:15 PM
Dinner: Restaurant Le Silex
MAY 23, 2025
9:30 AM
CHECK IN + SNACKS AND COFFEE
10 AM - 11:00 AM
Daniele Bruno (Humboldt)
"Excuses, Expectability, and Supererogation"
11:15 AM - 12:15 PM
Roman Heil (Frankfurt)
"Justification, Excuses and Non-punitive Measures"
LUNCH - Bach et Buck Creperie
1:45 PM - 2:45 PM
Ashley Purdy (University of Arkansas)
"Ignorance, Excuses, and the Involuntary in Aristotle"
3 PM - 4 PM
John Fan (New York University)
"Writing Someone Off as a Form of Blame"
4:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Zeb Dempsy (University of Southern California)
"How to Be Angry at Children"
5:15 PM
END OF CONFERENCE
Debates about responsibility have traditionally focused on its nature or being, what the conditions are for a person to be responsible, and the compatibility between these inquiries with various philosophical and scientific theories about the world and the mind. These inquiries continue to circle around prevailing issues at stake across these debates, including control, awareness, the quality of one’s will, reactive attitudes, and so much more.
This conference aims to redirect our focus on questions about defenses and others way of being shielded from responsibility, for instance, in the sense of excusing or mitigating one’s responsibility and blame. These questions provide a lens through which to explore the details of responsibility and to map its connections across the normative landscape by contrasting it with notions like self-defense, duress, entrapment, mistake of fact, and so much more. But other conceptual categories that have exculpatory features, or provide some reason to hold others less responsible or blameworthy, are relevant too, like forgiveness.
Finally, although it is a contentious but cogent claim that law and morality come apart in many contexts, it is not clear that they do when it comes to what defenses excuse and what it takes to have one across criminal and civil law. Because law contributes to much of our knowledge concerning the nature, standards, and diversity of defenses available in normative situations, legal work on excusing or mitigating one’s responsibility is definitely relevant to this conference.
Against this background, the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel welcomes potential contributions from scholars working on moral and legal questions about defenses to moral or legal responsibility. Questions that directly address or merely implicate the following and other points of inquiry are especially welcome:
• Under what conditions should someone be excused from moral responsibility, and how are these conditions related to the conditions of responsibility?
• Why do specific defenses, like self-defense and entrapment, excuse responsibility, and what normative limitations are there on these defenses?
• How do concepts like self-defense, mistake of fact, duress, entrapment, and others connect or conflict within the landscape of defenses and responsibility? Is the difference just a matter of their physical, mental, or political elements? Or is there something more principled between these concepts that makes them essentially different kinds of defenses?
• Do legal defenses offer insights into the moral concept of excusing responsibility, and where do they align or diverge?
• Are there unique normative considerations in criminal and civil law regarding what it means to be excused, and how might these shape our understanding of moral responsibility?
• In what ways might forgiveness act as an exculpatory category, and how does it differ from traditional defenses in moral and legal philosophy?
• Are there any emerging defenses in the moral or legal domains that challenge traditional views of responsibility, e.g., the “battered woman syndrome defense” in law.
• What are the implications of viewing defenses through the lens of collective responsibility or systemic issues?