Selected Articles by Area (page in progress)

This paper begins with a problem posed by Kant: it appears that reason saddles us with inconsistent beliefs, namely, the belief that our actions are free and undetermined, and the belief that our actions are unfree and determined. I then assess an interpretation of Kant's own solution that has recently received considerable attention, both among Kant interpreters and among those working on freedom and responsibility more generally: the "Two Standpoints" account. On this account, it is not problematic to have contradictory beliefs, because each is held from a different standpoint. I then argue that it does not solve the problem it is designed to solve, and offer my own preferred response. On my view, we should reject a key assumption in the very posing of the problem: namely, the assumption that reason commits us to any belief about the truth of falsity of determinism.

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In this paper, I defend compatibilism of freedom and determinism against the Consequence Argument, which stands as one of the main pillars of support for incompatibilism. The basic idea of this argument is that if determinism is true, then our actions are the consequences of laws and events over which we have no control, and, therefore, our actions cannot be free. I consider this argument in conjunction with the classic anti-libertarian Mind Argument (so named for the journal in which it appeared on a number of occasions). The basic idea behind the Mind argument is that the prospects for freedom are not bright in an indeterministic world, thus undermining libertarian hopes. I go on to argue that the anti-compatibilist Consequence Argument and the anti-libertarian Mind argument stand and fall together, despite very clever attempts by libertarians to pry them apart. Thus, the two remaining choices are to accept both, in which case, one adopts skepticism, or to reject both, in which case one of the main arguments against compatibilism is undermined. Since there are good independent reasons to resist skepticism, compatibilism gains important support.

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This paper begins with a rare point of agreement among compatibilists, libertarians, and skeptics about freedom, namely, that in virtue of being rational deliberators, we have an inescapable sense of freedom. In this paper, I argue that this is correct, and that the best understanding of this claim is that we are committed in some way to our actions being up to us in such a way that we are accountable for them. Thus, we can understand our sense of freedom in such a way that does not require a commitment to our having undetermined alternatives. I make this key point, while offering a new account of what that sense of freedom is.

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In this paper, I consider a very interesting alternative way of defending compatibilism from the challenge that responsibility requires indeterministic options, and argue that it is destined to fail. Very generally, it is claimed to be irrelevant to an agent’s responsibility for an action whether she had alternatives, as long as it is true that she wouldn’t have availed herself of those alternatives even if she did have them. Since this sort of claim can be true, it follows that having alternatives can be irrelevant to responsibility. I believe that this approach fails for interesting reasons that I bring out in the paper, including a very natural confusion about how to understand both indeterministic and “interlegal” counterfactuals. I suggest that acknowledging these points leads to an appreciation of alternative ways of defending compatibilism.

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This paper centers on how we conceive of our alternatives when we deliberate. I argue that being deliberators does not make us natural indeterminists; at the same time, I explore some of the other interesting commitments we might have about the alternatives we consider in deliberation. Taking a page from some philosophers of science who discuss scientific explanation, I employ the concept of a contrastive explanation in our deliberative commitments. Very roughly, I argue that at least one strong candidate commitment we have as deliberators is that we will be the explanatory nexus of our actions in such a way that our decisions provide a contrastive explanation of why we act in one way rather than another. This commitment helps explain why we can deliberate in many situations and why we cannot in many others, without assuming a belief in indeterminism.

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This paper centers on how we conceive of our alternatives when we deliberate. I argue that being deliberators does not make us natural indeterminists; at the same time, I explore some of the other interesting commitments we might have about the alternatives we consider in deliberation. Taking a page from some philosophers of science who discuss scientific explanation, I employ the concept of a contrastive explanation in our deliberative commitments. Very roughly, I argue that at least one strong candidate commitment we have as deliberators is that we will be the explanatory nexus of our actions in such a way that our decisions provide a contrastive explanation of why we act in one way rather than another. This commitment helps explain why we can deliberate in many situations and why we cannot in many others, without assuming a belief in indeterminism.

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In this paper, I defend a view according to which one is responsible for one’s actions to the extent that one has the ability to do the right thing(s) for the right reasons. Following Susan Wolf, I call the view “asymmetrical” because it requires the ability to do otherwise when one acts badly (or for the wrong reasons), but it requires no such ability in cases in which one acts well for the right reasons. Despite the intuitive appeal of the view, its asymmetry makes it a target of both of the main camps in the debate over responsibility. I begin by motivating the view and distinguishing it from some of its main competitors, and then address two important objections to it. The first, developed by Gary Watson, primarily targets the implications for the view about “good” actions; it suggests that the view appears plausible only insofar as we fail to distinguish between two notions of responsibility, and goes on to raise deep questions about the relationship between fairness and responsibility. The second objection, raised initially by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, targets implications of the view concerning “bad” actions; it calls for examination of a wider set of intuitions that appear to undermine the plausibility of asymmetry, and that ultimately force us to confront questions concerning the nature of “ability” in this context. I argue that the asymmetrical view has surprisingly strong resources with which to meet both sorts of challenges.

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In this paper, I begin by considering a traditional argument according to which it would be unfair to impose sanctions on people for performing actions when they could not do otherwise, and thus that no one who lacks the ability to do otherwise is responsible or blameworthy for their actions in an important sense. Interestingly, a parallel argument concluding that people are not responsible or praiseworthy if they lack the ability to do otherwise is not as compelling. Watson (1996/2004) offers in its stead an “interpersonal” argument that appeals to a distributive notion of unfairness to conclude that praiseworthy actions, too, require the ability to do otherwise. I argue that this argument does not succeed. At this point, it seems that we have support for an asymmetrical treatment of blameworthy and praiseworthy actions. However, I conclude that while such an asymmetrical treatment may ultimately be correct, there is reason to doubt that considerations of fairness of sanction and reward support an asymmetry as well as an appeal to the “ought-implies-can” principle.

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This essay explores a conception of responsibility at work in moral and criminal responsibility. Our conception draws on work in the compatibilist tradition that focuses on the choices of agents who are reasons-responsive and work in criminal jurisprudence that understands responsibility in terms of the choices of agents who have capacities for practical reason and whose situation affords them the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. Our conception brings together the dimensions of normative competence and situational control, and we factor normative competence into cognitive and volitional capacities, which we treat as equally important to normative competence and responsibility. Normative competence and situational control can and should be understood as expressing a common concern that blame and punishment presuppose that the agent had a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This fair opportunity is the umbrella concept in our understanding of responsibility, one that explains it distinctive architecture.

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Responsibility, and blameworthiness in particular, has been characterized in a number of ways in a literature in which participants appear to be talking about the same thing much of the time. More specifically, blameworthiness has been characterized in terms of what sorts of responses are fair, appropriate, and deserved in a basic way, where the responses in question range over blame, sanctions, alterations to interpersonal relationships, and the reactive attitudes, such as resentment and indignation. In this paper, I explore the relationships between three particular theses: (i) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is fair to impose sanctions, (ii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that one deserves sanctions, and (iii) the claim that one is blameworthy to the extent that it is appropriate to respond with reactive attitudes. Appealing to the way in which luck in the outcome of an action can justifiably affect the degree of sanctions received, I argue that (i) is false, and that fairness and desert come apart. I then argue that the relationship between the reactive attitudes and sanction is not as straightforward as has sometimes been assumed, but that (ii) and (iii) might both be true and closely linked. I conclude by exploring various claims about desert, including ones that link it to the intrinsic goodness of receiving what is deserved and to the permissibility or rightness of inflicting suffering.

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Why should we want to be libertarian free agents? In The Significance of Free Will, Robert Kane sets out ten traditional answers in the form of human goods that have been thought by many to be achievable only if we are such beings. In this paper, I explore and assess Kane’s reasoning for thinking that the significance of these human goods depends ultimately on our being indeterministic causes of our actions that is in turn necessary for objective self-worth. I conclude that an inquiry that proceeds in the opposite direction--from the value and nature of the supposed human goods--to the question of whether they require indeterminism has the potential to be more fruitful. Then I turn to some of the goods in question, namely, being responsible agents, being suitable objects of reactive attitudes such as admiration, gratitude, resentment and indignation, and having meaningful relationships with others such as friendship and love. I focus on the current debate about whether meaningful human relationships depend on our proneness to the reactive attitudes, and tentatively suggest that at least a particularly valuable kind of relationship presupposes the responsible agency typically presupposed by such attitudes. At the same time, I argue that this conclusion does not take us all the way to libertarian freedom.

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In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are under explored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza (1998) requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty (contrary to the recent attempt by Coates and Swenson (2012) to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility.

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Recently, there has been much discussion of two challenging arguments that suggest that if we were to lack free will of the sort required for moral responsibility we would lose one of the most important things that give our lives meaning, namely, valuable human relationships such as friendship. One line of argument, defended by Robert Kane, suggests that freely chosen relationships have an irreplaceable value, and the other, defended by Peter Strawson and recently taken up in a new form by Seth Shabo and others, suggests that the most valuable relationships are ones that require susceptibility to the emotions of resentment and indignation that presuppose freedom and responsibility. These arguments have been ably challenged (see, for example, Pereboom 2014). But even if these arguments are unsound, their conclusion might still be true. In this paper, I aim to defend a distinctive third kind of approach. It appeals to the nature of friendship as requiring a special kind of obligations, and in this way draws a closer connection between the aspects of friendship that require free will and moral responsibility itself. The reasoning rests on two main premises. The first is that genuine friendship entails special obligations. Two people are not friends unless they have obligations toward one another that are partially defining of friendship. The second premise is that one has obligations only if one has the freedom to meet them. This idea is closely related to a principle taken to be axiomatic in various ethical and even deontic logical systems: Ought Implies Can. Putting these premises together, we can conclude that friendship (as well as other special relationships) require freedom. Defending these two premises takes us into two entirely separate debates, one in ethical theory and one in free will and responsibility, and a secondary aim of the paper is to bring these two vibrant discussions together.

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In recent decades, participants in the debate about whether we are free and responsible agents have tended with increasing frequency to begin their papers or books by fixing the terms “free” and “responsible” in clear ways to avoid misunderstanding. This is an admirable development, and while some misunderstandings have certainly been avoided, and positions better illuminated as a result, new and interesting questions also arise. Two ways of fixing these terms and identifying the underlying concepts have emerged as especially influential, one that takes the freedom required for responsibility to be understood in terms of accountability and the other in terms of desert. In this paper, I start by asking: are theorists talking about the same things, or are they really participating in two different debates? Are desert and accountability mutually entailing? I then tentatively conclude that they are mutually entailing. Coming to this conclusion requires making finer distinctions among various more specific and competing accounts of both accountability and desert. Ultimately, I argue, that there is good reason to accept that accountability and desert have the same satisfaction conditions.

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Unwitting omissions pose a challenge for theories of moral responsibility. For commonsense morality holds many unwitting omitters morally responsible for their omissions (and for the consequences thereof), even though they appear to lack both awareness and control. For example, some people who leave dogs trapped in their cars outside on a hot day (see Sher 2009), or who forget to pick something up from the store as they promised (see Clarke 2014) seem to be blameworthy for their omissions. And yet, if moral responsibility requires awareness of one’s omission and of its moral significance, as well as control, then it would appear that the unwitting protagonists of these cases are not, in fact, morally responsible for their omissions. In this paper, we consider, and ultimately reject, a number of influential views that try to solve this problem, including skepticism about responsibility for such omissions, a view we call the “decision tracing” view that grounds responsibility for such omissions in previous exercises of conscious agency, and “attributionist” views that ground responsibility for such omissions in the value judgments or other aspects of the agents’ selves. We propose instead a new tracing view that grounds responsibility for unwitting omissions in past opportunities to avoid them, where having such opportunities requires general awareness of the risk of such an omission, but not an exercise of agency, in contrast to the decision tracing view. We argue that the view can better accommodate cases, and fits well with the most plausible conception of the kind of control required for responsibility.

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Psychopaths pose a puzzle. On the one hand, when we focus on the apparent pleasure they can take in the pain of others, they seem the paradigms of evil and blameworthiness. On the other hand, when we focus on their apparent psychological incapacities, they seem to possess what are paradigm excuses on plausible accounts of moral responsibility. In this paper, I examine two influential responses to the puzzle: a solution that claims that psychopaths are morally blameworthy in one sense and not in another, and a solution that rejects the accounts of moral responsibility on which psychopaths have excuses. According to the first, psychopaths are properly appraised as cruel, but are not accountable for their actions, nor are they the proper object of moral demands or reactive attitudes such as resentment and indignation. According to the second, the cruelty that psychopaths display is sufficient for their being accountable. In assessing the two approaches, I offer a new argument against a shared commitment of both, namely, that psychopaths, as understood by the parties in the debate, show cruelty in their actions. The argument appeals to a symmetry between negative and positive appraisals, such as cruelty and kindness. I then go on to show how a proper understanding of the role of moral demands can help resolve a key point of contention about the very nature of moral responsibility. I conclude that two sorts of moral appraisal come apart, but that psychopaths turn out not to be the best illustration of the distinction.

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With a new understanding of the deficits of psychopaths, many have argued that psychopaths are not morally accountable for their actions because they seem to lack any capacity for fundamental moral understanding. And yet, a lack of capacity for empathy, which has been seen as the root of this incapacity, has also been attributed to subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). But there is much evidence that at least many with ASD have moral understanding and are rightly treated as morally accountable agents. Is it possible to explain how those diagnosed in the first group might lack, while those in the second group possess, moral accountability? If so, how? In this paper, I argue that there is an explanation that requires distinguishing between different kinds of empathy and that brings to bear a “fine cuts” approach at the neural and psychological level of explanation.

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People who have a particular behavioral variant of Frontotemporal Dementia (bvFTD) suffer from a puzzling early set of symptoms. They appear to caregivers to cease to care about things that they did before, without manifesting certain other significant deficits that might be expected to accompany this change. Are subjects with bvFTD appropriate objects of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation that seem to presuppose responsible agency? I explore two possible routes to answering this question in the negative that both appeal to the role of the capacity to care in accounts of responsible agency. The first appeals to the capacity to care as fundamental in determining the aptness of moral demands and appraisals; the second appeals to the capacity to care as required for the very possibility of being someone who could in principle receive deserved praise or blame. In order to assess these lines of reasoning, it will be necessary to settle on a plausible account of caring, and the case of subjects with bvFTD can help in illuminating the relevant capacities. I suggest that the two routes, when clarified, are promising, but that interesting questions about the nature of desert and its relationship to caring remain open.

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The doctrine of double effect, together with other moral principles that appeal to the intentions of moral agents, has come under attack from many directions in recent years, as have a variety of rationales that have been given in favor of it. In this paper, our aim is to develop, defend, and provide a new theoretical rationale for a secular version of the doctrine. Following Quinn (1989), we distinguish between Harmful Direct Agency and Harmful Indirect Agency. We propose the following version of the doctrine: that in cases in which harm must come to some in order to achieve a good (and is the least costly of possible harms necessary), the agent foresees the harm, and all other things are equal, a stronger case is needed to justify Harmful Direct Agency than to justify Harmful Indirect Agency. We distinguish between two Kantian rationales that might be given for the doctrine, a “dependent right” rationale, defended by Quinn, and an “independent right” rationale, which we defend. We argue that the doctrine and the “independent right” rationale for it are not vulnerable to counterexamples or counterproposals, and conclude by drawing implications for the larger debate over whether agents' intentions are in any way relevant to permissibility and obligation.

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According to the classical Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), there is a morally significant difference between intending harm and merely foreseeing harm. Versions of DDE have been defended in a variety of creative ways, but there is one difficulty, the so-called “closeness problem,” that continues to bedevil all of them. The problem is that an agent’s intention can always be identified in such a fine-grained way as to eliminate an intention to harm from almost any situation, including those that have been taken to be paradigmatic instances in which DDE applies to intended harm. In this paper, we consider and reject a number of recent attempts to solve the closeness problem. We argue that the failure of these proposals strongly suggests that the closeness problem is intractable, and that the distinction between intending harm and merely foreseeing harm is not morally significant. Further, we argue that there may be a deeper reason why such attempts must fail: the rationale that makes the best fit with DDE, namely, an imperative not to aim at evil, is itself irredeemably flawed. While we believe that these observations should lead us to abandon further attempts to solve the closeness problem for DDE, we also conclude by showing how a related principle that is supported by a distinct rationale and avoids facing the closeness problem altogether nevertheless shares with DDE its most important features, including an intuitive explanation of a number of cases and a commitment to the relevance of intentions.

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In this paper, we defend the general thesis that intentions are relevant not only to moral permissibility and impermissibility, but also to criminal wrongdoing, as well as a specific version of the Doctrine of Double Effect that we believe can help solve some challenging puzzles in the criminal law. We begin by answering some recent arguments that marginalize or eliminate the role of intentions as components of criminal wrongdoing (e.g., Alexander and Ferzan (2009), Chiao (2010) and Walen (2009)). We then turn to some influential theories that articulate a direct role for intentions (e.g., Duff (2007), Husak (2009)). While we endorse the commitment to such a role for intentions, we believe that extant theories have not yet been able to adequately address certain objections or solve certain puzzles such as that some attempt convictions require criminal intent when the crime attempted, if successful, requires only foresight, and that some intended harms appear to be no more serious than non-intended ones of the same magnitude, for example. Drawing on a variety of resources, including the specific version of the Doctrine of Double Effect we have developed in recent published work, we present solutions to these puzzles, which in turn provide mutual support for our general approach to the role of intentions and for thinking that using others as means is itself a special kind of wrongdoing.

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The knowledge version of the paradox arises because it appears that we know our lottery ticket (which is not relevantly different from any other) will lose, but we know that one of the tickets sold will win. The rationality version of the paradox arises because it appears that it is rational to believe of each single ticket in, say, a million-ticket lottery that it will not win, and that it is simultaneously rational to believe that one such ticket will win. It seems, then, that we are committed to attributing two rational beliefs to a single agent at a single time, beliefs that, together with a few background assumptions, are inconsistent and can be seen by the agent to be so. This has seemed to many to be a paradoxical result: an agent in possession of two rational beliefs that she sees to be inconsistent. In my paper, I offer a novel solution to the paradox in both its rationality and knowledge versions that emphasizes a special feature of the lottery case, namely, the statistical nature of the evidence available to the agent. On my view, it is neither true that one knows nor that it is rational to believe that a particular ticket will lose. While this might seem surprising at first, it has a natural explanation and lacks the serious disadvantages of competing solutions.

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In this paper, I take up the question of whether the phenomenon of self-deception requires a radical sort of partitioning of the mind, and argue that it does not. Most of those who argue in favor of partitioning accept a model of self-deception according to which the self-deceived person desires to and intentionally sets out to form a certain belief that she knows to be false. Such a model is similar to that of deception of other persons, and for this reason is thought to require that the self-deceiver’s mind be partitioned; one “part” of her knows the truth, while the other “part” is convinced of a false belief. I argue that while both the partitionist model and its main competitor should be rejected, each contains a key insight. On the one hand, anti-partitionist models correctly invoke some sort of desire or motivation on the part of self-deceivers as playing a role in the acquisition of their beliefs. But it is partitionists who identify the right sort of desire, namely, the desire to believe.

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This paper focuses on the question of whether and, if so, when people can be responsible for their self-deception and its consequences. On Intentionalist accounts, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves, and it is easy to see how they can be responsible. On Motivationist accounts, in contrast, self-deception is a motivated, but not intentional, and possibly unconscious process, making it more difficult to see how self-deceivers could be responsible. I argue that a particular Motivationist account, the Desire to Believe account, together with other resources, best explains how there can be culpable self-deception. In the process, I also show how self-deception is a good test case for deciding important questions about the nature of moral responsibility.

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According to the situationist literature in social psychology, apparently unimportant elements of agents’ situations, rather than what we think of as agents’ stable character traits, play a large role in determining their behavior. For example, an experimenter in a white lab coat politely asks an unsuspecting subject to torture an innocent stranger, and, remarkably, this seems sufficient to induce obedience in otherwise ordinary subjects (Milgram (1963)). Or take an experiment recently much in the news because of the disturbing resemblance of the behavior of its subjects to those of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib: the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Zimbardo and colleagues in 1971. In that experiment, the behavior of undergraduates playing the roles of guards in a simulated prison became increasingly abusive to the point that the experiment was halted after just six days into a scheduled two week run. Recently, some philosophers (e.g., Doris (2002)) have argued that the situationist literature contains a serious threat to the assumptions of well-received moral theories, including the assumption that we are free and responsible agents. In my paper, I begin with the question: Why do freedom and responsibility appear to be threatened by this literature? Only by answering this question can we begin to answer the equally pressing question of whether appearances are a good guide to reality in this case. I argue that the situationist experiments appear threatening not in virtue of their support for the substantive thesis of situationism, according to which character traits play a lesser role in explaining behavior than situational factors. Rather, one ultimate reason they appear threatening is because they suggest the possibility that we are prevented in systematic ways from exercising our capacities to act for good reasons.

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In this paper, I focus on a set of experimental results that includes the testing of people’s intuitions about a wide variety of situations in efforts to either support or undermine traditional philosophical claims that one or another idea about moral responsibility is “intuitive”. Early experiments testing the conditions under which people are willing to attribute moral responsibility revealed a number of surprises, and, at first glance, suggested that people have no coherent concept of responsibility at all. I approach the problem in a ground-clearing way, and I argue that while the data does not require us to abandon the idea that we have a coherent concept of responsibility, it allows us to gain important insights into the contours of our concept and practices.

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There is a vast literature that seeks to uncover features underlying moral judgment by eliciting reactions to hypothetical scenarios such as trolley problems. These thought experiments assume that participants accept the outcomes stipulated in the scenarios. Across seven studies (N = 968), we demonstrate that intuition overrides stipulated outcomes even when participants are explicitly told that an action will result in a particular outcome. Participants instead substitute their own estimates of the probability of outcomes for stipulated outcomes, and these probability estimates in turn influence moral judgments. Our findings demonstrate that intuitive likelihoods are one critical factor in moral judgment, one that is not suspended even in moral dilemmas that explicitly stipulate outcomes. Features thought to underlie moral reasoning, such as intention, may operate, in part, by affecting the intuitive likelihood of outcomes, and, problematically, moral differences between scenarios may be confounded with non‐moral intuitive probabilities.

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In this paper, I begin with a familiar puzzle about forgiveness, namely, how to distinguish forgiveness from excuse on the one hand and “letting go” on the other. After considering three recent and influential accounts of forgiveness that offer answers to this challenge among others, I develop an alternative model of forgiveness as a kind of personal release from debt or obligation. I argue that this model has a number of distinct advantages, including offering a new explanation of the subtle connections between forgiveness, resentment and perspective taking, as well as helping to provide plausible answers to normative questions such as whether forgiveness is ever morally required. Finally, I draw connections between the debate about forgiveness and the debate about free will, and suggest one way in which the compatibility of forgiveness and understanding of an action’s causes can illuminate the debate about the compatibility of freedom and determinism.

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