Publications:

“Self-Prediction in Practical Reasoning: its role and limits,” Noûs, (forthcoming) (early view) (pdf)

“Against Doxastic Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophical Research, 44 (2019): 33-51 (published version) (pdf)

“Intention and Prediction in Means-End Reasoning,” American Philosophical Quarterly 55(3) (2018): 251-266 (published version) (pdf)

“How Can Beliefs Wrong?” (with Berislav Marušić), Philosophical Topics, 46(1)(2018): 97-114 (published version) (pdf)

“The Centrality of One’s Own Life,” Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 7 (2018): 229-250  (published version) (pdf)

“On the Moral Objection to Coercion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 45(3) (2017): 199-231 (published version) (pdf)

“Transmission Failures” Ethics 127(3) (2017) (published version) (pdf)

“The Problem of Self-Torture: What’s Being Done?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94(3) (2017) (published version) (pdf)

“Responsibility and the Demands of Morality,” The Journal of Moral Philosophy 14(2) (2017): 315-338 (published version) (pdf).

Gerechtigkeit und Solidarität in Heidbrink, ,Langbehn, and Sombetzki , eds. Handbuch Verantwortung (Handbook of Responsibility) (Springer, 2017) (published version) (English version: Justice, and Solidarity)

“Review of Michael Bratman, Shared Agency,” Ethics (2016) (published version (pdf)

Works in Progress:

Collective Obligations and Individual Participation

There are many morally significant problems whose solution requires the combined or collective action of many different people. The main question I want to pursue in this paper is this: Supposing there are irreducibly collective obligations, what is the normative significance for an individual person of the fact that he or she is a member of group of people who are together obligated to behave in a certain way?

 

Rational Commitment and Knowledge of Intentional Action

It is generally agreed that, as agents, our knowledge of our intentional actions is not based solely on observation or other forms of evidence. According to inferentialism, when an agent knows that she is or will be performing an intentional action, ϕ, what she knows without the help of observation or evidence is just that she intends or has decided to f. Assuming relevant background information, she may then be in a position to infer that she will f. By contrast, according to the “practical reasoning view”, an agent’s knowledge of what she does is grounded primarily in the practical reasoning that supports doing it in the first place. I attempt to provide some motivation for the practical reasoning view by arguing that the inferential view is incompatible with an intuitive conception of intention as a form of rational commitment to action.

 

Action and Production

This paper agues against production-oriented conceptions of practical reason—a conception that understands all reasons for action ultimately in terms of the desirable features of outcomes associated with those actions. I contrast to the production theory, I defend a view according to which some consideration provides an agent with a reason to act in a certain way if the agent would in some respect be acting well in performing the action on the basis of that consideration.

 

“The Relevance of Formative Circumstances to Blameworthiness”

Suppose a person has committed some heinous crime. And suppose we know this person experienced severe abuse and deprivation as a child. Many of us feel hesitant to blame this person fully for her crime. But how is the person’s childhood relevant? The account I offer appeals to a theory of blame and blameworthiness recently defended by T.M. Scanlon. For  Scanlon, blame is a response made appropriate by an impairment of an interpersonal relationship. It follows from this that the kind of reaction (blame) that is appropriate in response to a person’s action depends on the nature of the relationship one has with the person. I argue here that horrific formative circumstances can make a difference to the fundamental moral relations a person has with others and thus to whether she is in any normal sense morally blameworthy for her actions.