Research

Drafts available upon request

Publications

The Normative Common Ground: Blame and Communication (w/ Edward Schwartz, UC Berkeley, forthcoming)

Many theories of responsibility claim that holding someone responsible is "incipiently communicative," but it has been difficult to pin down just what this amounts to in an interesting and informative way. We propose that relationships are (implicitly) structured by a presupposed common ground of norms (mutual demands and expectations, often that we have of one another given some perceived social role). One function of holding one another responsible is to "update" or reinforce the common ground of norms that bind some relationship together. We model this by adapting common ground accounts from the philosophy of language.

Two Dimensions of Responsibility: Quality and Competence of Will

Quality of Will Theories claim that “the ultimate object” of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false; or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object -- namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action, or what I call competence of will. I offer a conjectural explanation of the two dimensions of (moral) responsibility -- namely that it matters to us that people actually perform adequately well, because of how much it matters to us, both for its own sake and for the sake of what it brings about, that we are able to successfully live and work together. 

The Significance of Skepticism

Nihilists about responsibility argue that there is no such thing as "real" responsibility; abolitionists argue we ought to abandon practices of holding one another responsible. Often, abolitionists are abolitionists because they are nihilists. I evaluate the argument from nihilism to abolitionism, and argue that it is unconvincing. Bridging the gap from nihilism to abolitionism is more difficult than the abolitionist thinks, requiring two often unstated and un-argued for bridge premises (which I call Undistorted Truth and Privileged Conception). I then explain how abolitionism can and should pose an interesting skeptical challenge that is independent of the truth or falsity of nihilism.

Who's Afraid of Basic Desert?

Skeptics about moral responsibility are skeptical about “basic desert moral responsibility.” They claim that “we” are committed to basic desert moral responsibility in a wide range of ordinary practices; accordingly, if skeptics are right, “our” practices rest on a widespread mistake. In turn, the (purported) fact that “we” are systematically in error motivates the skeptic’s revisionary proposals for alternative social practices. I aim to head off this line of thought at the first step: we do not have sufficient reason to think that we are committed to basic desert moral responsibility as pervasively as the skeptic contends. The significance of skepticism is proportional to how widespread commitment to basic desert moral responsibility is; accordingly, the less confident we should be that such a commitment is widespread, the less confident we should be that skepticism poses a significant challenge.

Under Review/In Progress 

 The Fourth Function of Responsibility

Three functions of holding people responsible for their behavior are well documented: in a nutshell, responsibility practices incentivize, educate, and communicate. Drawing on research in social psychology, I argue that our responsibility practices have a fourth function: holding people responsible facilitates groups composing and organizing themselves effectively in terms of membership size, retaining or excluding certain participants in the endeavor, and the distribution and structure of tasks and roles. I call this function group composition. Different ways groups can compose themselves can alter their ability to promote the goals or honor the values a group is (implicitly) organized around. Practices of holding one another responsible function to help groups discover and reinforce successful compositions.

How to Think About Responsibility; Or, a manifesto on method

I argue for two methodological points about how we should think about responsibility, one concerning the scope of the inquiry and one concerning the method, on the assumption that we are interested in understanding what justifies singling people out for differential treatment on the basis of their conduct. Regarding scope, there is no principled reason to restrict the scope of the inquiry to blame, moral responsibility, or anything less than a general phenomena that I label “personal responsibility.” Failure to take a broader view threatens to distort the inquiry by encouraging theories to overfit what is only a subset of a larger phenomena. Regarding method, we should adopt a functionalist methodology that examines our responsibility practices through the lens of social life, and in particular their role in broadly cooperative relationships or communities. Our responsibility practices can be understood as having different functions relative to cooperative systems, functions that solve distinctively interpersonal obstacles that living and working together often face. This does not justify our practices, but rather establishes a clear agenda for debate between the skeptical abolitionists and conservatives. 

Reason, Responsibility, and the Resentment of Children

We ordinarily accept that there is a sense in which we are responsible for our behavior in a way that inanimate objects and events, non-human animals, and young children are not. A non-skeptical theory of responsibility owes an account of this apparent truism. One popular answer is that we (functioning, mature humans) have capacities to reflect on and deliberate about what we should think and do, and corresponding capacities to control ourselves in light of our reasoning, that other sorts of agents do not possess. Thus, the fact that we possess an apparently distinctive capacity for rational thought provides a neat and tidy explanation for the responsibility-relevant differences between us and other things. In this paper I pose a puzzle for theories that tie responsibility to rational capacity based on the reactive attitudes of children: children differ significantly from adults in their rational capacities; by the lights of reason-based theories, they are therefore responsible to different degrees; differing degrees of responsibility should be reflected in a difference in the responsibility-implicating responses, like resentment; however, the children sometimes respond to wrongdoing with full-fledged resentment, just like adults. I argue that the puzzle suggests that an alternative, relationship-based theory of responsibility is a superior explanation of why an agent is a responsible agent. 

Strawsonian Redux: Cooperation and the Sociality of Responsibility

In the anti-skeptical spirit of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" and drawing on the work of Margaret Gilbert and work in biological anthropology and comparative psychology, I show there is a (quasi)constitutivist argument in defense of our responsibility practices: holding one another responsible is (quasi)constitutive of an important kind of joint action, namely cooperation; it is "practically inconceivable" that we should abandon cooperation; therefore, it is "practically inconceivable" that we should abandon holding one another responsible. ​

Unwitting Wrongdoing, Omissions, and Adequate Opportunities

I show how we can understand unwitting wrongdoing, omissions, and the nature of "adequate" opportunities if we view responsibility through the lens of cooperation, or a specific kind of joint action. In particular, we use a contrastive style of explanation, reminiscent of the "reasonable person" standard in some legal systems, but one that is instead pegged to salient social roles or identities that the person is taken to occupy (e.g., parent, teacher, quarterback, spouse, etc.).

Strawson's Slingshot

One sort of skeptical challenge to our practices of holding one another responsible begins with observations about the conditions in which we ordinarily excuse someone from responsibility. This sort of skeptic offers a diagnosis of why we excuse people from responsibility on particular occasions and subsequently argues to the surprising conclusion that, properly understood, the excusing conditions always obtain. In other words, the internal skeptic claims that by the lights of the conditions for responsibility we already accept in practice we are committed to thinking that everyone is always excused from responsibility. This is known as the “Generalization Strategy” because it generates wholesale skepticism about responsibility by generalizing from the conditions under which we already admit that someone is not responsible for something. Hieronymi (2020) insightfully reconstructs Strawson’s argument in “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) in a way that explains how it can be wielded to ward off a Generalization Strategy based on the threat of determinism, or causal necessitation, to freedom and responsibility. Given that Strawson’s argument is relatively simple yet capable of taking down a giant skeptical menace, I call it “Strawson’s Slingshot.” However, even if the Slingshot argument is capable of warding off an internal, generalization strategy rooted in the threat of determinism, there are other and, in my view, deeper or more fundamental threats to freedom and responsibility from which other generalization arguments can grow. Even if determinism is false and we possess contra-causal freedom of whatever kind you like, who we are, the situations we find ourselves in, and how our choices play out are, ultimately, a matter of luck. Accordingly, in this paper I set myself the modest task of extending the reach of Strawson’s Slingshot, based on Hieronymi’s (2020) careful exegesis, to ward off generalization arguments based on the threat of moral luck.