Publications (click for links, where available)

Book:

Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (Oxford University Press 2011).

Articles:

“Responsibility and Self-Deception: a Framework,” in Humana Mente (A special issue on Self-Deception) (2012)

“Responsibility, Rational Abilities, and Two Kinds of Fairness Arguments,” in Philosophical Explorations (Special Issue: Action, Responsibility, and Belief) (2009).

    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.

“Responsibility and Rational Abilities: Defending an Asymmetrical View,” in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2008).

     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.

“Do We Have a Coherent Set of Intuitions About Moral Responsibility?,” in Philosophy and the Empirical, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31. (2007)

“Good Luck to Libertarians: Reflections on Al Mele’s Free Will and Luck,” Philosophical Explorations 10  (2007): 173-84.  (with a reply by Mele in the same issue)

“Discriminating Shoppers Beware,” in San Diego Law Review (2006).

“Tradition and the Law: A Response to Wax,” San Diego Law Review 42 (2005). 

“Deliberative Alternatives,” in Philosophical Topics (on Agency).  (2004, appeared in 2005). [pdf of draft]

“Freedom, Responsibility, and the Challenge of Situationism,” in Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29.  Cambridge: Blackwell. (2005).

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. 

“Irrelevant Alternatives and Frankfurt Counterfactuals,” Philosophical Studies 121 (2004): 1-25.

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.

“The Sense of Freedom,” in Freedom and Determinism, Volume II, Topics in Contemporary Philosophy.  Edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier.  Cambridge: MIT Press. (2004): 105-134.

    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. 

“Moral Luck,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/moral-luck/>.

“Self-Deception, Motivation, and the Desire to Believe,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2002): 384-406.

    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. 

“Warfield’s New Argument for Incompatibilism” (with Samuel C. Rickless), Analysis (2002): 104-07.

“Phenomenal Consciousness and Intentionality: Comment on Charles Siewert’s The Significance of Consciousness,” Psyche: An Interdisiplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness, (2001).

“The Consequence Argument and the Mind Argument,” Analysis 61 (2001): 107-15.

“How to Solve Blum’s Paradox” (with Samuel C. Rickless), Analysis 61 (2001): 91-94.

“The Lottery Paradox, Knowledge, and Rationality,” The Philosophical Review 109 (2000): 373-409.

     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.

“Two Standpoints and the Belief in Freedom,” Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000): 564-76.

Book Reviews

20. T.M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame, Philosophical Review (2012).
    

George Sher, Who Knew?  Responsibility Without Awareness, Ethics 121 (2011) pp. 675-80.