Responsibility
3 writings
Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength
In Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata and Julieta Rabanos (eds.). Oxford: Hart. In Press. https://philpapers.org/archive/QUELAA.pdf
Reads Williams’s “What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?” as a radicalization of Austin’s insight that tort law is where the concepts of common sense are truly put on trial. Identifies seven features of tort litigation that subject notions like fault, intention, negligence, and voluntariness to extraordinary pressure. Explains, by contrasting tort law with criminal law, how differences in evidential standards, case profiles, and doctrines of strict liability display both the power and the weak points of our responsibility-tracking concepts.
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The Essential Superficiality of the Voluntary and the Moralization of Psychology
Philosophical Studies 179 (5): 1591–1620. 2022. doi:10.1007/s11098-021-01720-2
Argues that the notion of the voluntary is an essentially superficial notion that does important work on the condition that we do not try to metaphysically deepen it, and that attempts to deepen it illustrate a problematic tendency to warp our conception of the mind under pressure from moral aspirations.
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The Self-Effacing Functionality of Blame
Philosophical Studies 178 (4): 1361–1379. 2021. doi:10.1007/s11098-020-01479-y
Introduces the concept of “self-effacing functionality” to reconcile two opposing views on blame. While blame serves an important regulatory function, this very functionality requires that it be justified by non-instrumental moral reasons rather than by its functionality. This approach preserves the insights of instrumentalist accounts while vindicating the authority of our moral reasons for blame.
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