Publications
Journal Articles
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"Could've Known Better", forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly. (published version – early view)
Could you have taken precautions against a risk you were unaware of? This question lies at the heart of debates in ethics and legal philosophy concerning whether it’s justifiable to blame or punish those who cause harm inadvertently or out of ignorance. But the question is crucially ambiguous, depending on what is understood to be inside or outside the scope of the ‘could’. And this ambiguity undermines a number of arguments purporting to show that inadvertent wrongdoers cannot justifiably be blamed or punished. While not all opposition to blaming or punishing inadvertent wrongdoers rests on this ambiguity, some certainly does. And getting clear on this ambiguity is important if we’re to sort good arguments against blaming and punishing inadvertent wrongdoers – if there are any – from bad ones.
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"Awareness and the Recklessness/Negligence Distinction", Criminal Law and Philosophy 18 (2024), pp. 351–367. (published version)
The distinction between the criminal fault elements of recklessness and negligence is one of Anglo-American criminal law’s key distinctions. It is a distinction with practical significance, as many serious crimes require at least recklessness and cannot be committed negligently. The distinction is standardly marked by awareness. Recklessness requires awareness that one’s conduct carries a risk of harm. Negligence only requires that one ought to have been aware that one’s conduct carried such a risk, even if one was in fact unaware of this. But should the recklessness/negligence distinction be marked by awareness of risk, or by something else? Does a defendant’s awareness of risk really have the normative significance to mark such a distinction? In this paper, I answer these questions by discussing a challenge to this ‘standard account’ of the recklessness/negligence distinction raised by the work of Antony Duff, who defends an alternative, non-awareness-based model of the recklessness/negligence distinction. I will argue that, although Duff’s alternative model fails, seeing how it goes wrong helps us see how awareness genuinely does have the right kind of normative significance to mark the distinction between recklessness and negligence.
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"Mental Agency and Rational Subjectivity" (with Lucy Campbell), forthcoming in European Journal of Philosophy 32:1 (2024), pp. 224-245. (published version)
Philosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that understanding certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The force of this ‘Agentialist Dilemma’ has been under-appreciated, and the agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to it. Although we don’t aim to provide to a knockdown argument against the Agential Turn, we do suggest that the Agentialist Dilemma represents a significant challenge to the approach. However, we accept the fundamental critique motivating the Agential Turn, its rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world.
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"Why Criminal Responsibility for Negligence Cannot be Indirect", Cambridge Law Journal 80:3 (2021), pp. 489–514. (penultimate draft) (published version)
A popular way to try to justify holding defendants criminally responsible for inadvertent negligence is via an indirect or ‘tracing’ approach, i.e. an approach which traces the inadvertence back to prior culpable action. I argue that this indirect approach to criminal negligence fails because it can’t account for a key feature of how criminal negligence should be (and sometimes is) assessed. Specifically, it can’t account for why, when considering whether a defendant is negligent, what counts as a risk should be assessed relative to the defendant’s evidence.
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"Epistemic Responsibility and Criminal Negligence", Criminal Law and Philosophy 14 (2020), pp. 91–111. (penultimate draft) (published version)
We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. We often hold each other to account for the beliefs that we hold. We do this by criticising other believers as ‘gullible’ or ‘biased’, and trying to persuade others to revise their beliefs. But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. This paper argues that we can make progress in our understanding of responsibility for belief by thinking about it in parallel with another kind of responsibility: legal responsibility for criminal negligence. Specifically, I argue that that a popular account of responsibility for belief, which grounds it in belief’s reasons-responsiveness, faces a problem analogous to one faced by H.L.A. Hart’s influential capacity-based account of culpability. This points towards a more promising account of responsibility of belief, though, if we draw on accounts of negligence which improve on Hart’s. Broadly speaking, the account of negligence which improves on Hart’s account grounds culpability in a (lack of) concern for others’ interests, whereas my account of epistemic responsibility grounds responsibility for belief in a (lack of) concern for the truth.
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"There is No (Sui Generis) Norm of Assertion", Philosophy 95:3 (2020), pp. 337-362. (penultimate draft) (published version)
There are norms on action and norms on assertion. That is, there are things we should and shouldn’t do, and things we should and shouldn’t say. How do these two kinds of norm relate? Are norms on assertion reducible to norms on action? Many philosophers think they are not. These philosophers claim there is a sui generis norm specific to assertion, a norm which is also often claimed to be constitutive of assertion. Both claims, I argue, should be rejected. The phenomenon claimed to support them – the intuitive wrongness of certain assertions – does not in fact support them. Because assertion is an action, the wrongness of assertions can be explained purely by norms on action. And the specifically epistemic wrongness an assertion norm is typically supposed to explain can be explained by an uncontroversial norm on action: one shouldn’t act on epistemically faulty beliefs. No additional sui generis norm on assertion is needed.
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"Should I Believe All the Truths?", Synthese 197 (2020), pp. 3279–3303. (penultimate draft) (published version)
Should I believe something if and only if it’s true? Many philosophers have objected to this kind of truth norm, on the grounds that it’s not the case that one ought to believe all the truths. For example, some truths are too complex to believe; others are too trivial to be worth believing. Philosophers who defend truth norms often respond to this problem by reformulating truth norms in ways that do not entail that one ought to believe all the truths. Many of these attempts at reformulation, I’ll argue, have been missteps. A number of these different reformulations are incapable of carrying out a central role a truth norm is meant to play, that of explaining justification. The truth norm I’ll defend, however, avoids the implausible results of a prescription to believe all the truths, but doesn’t thereby fail to explain justification. This norm, introduced (but not defended) by Conor McHugh, states that if one has some doxastic attitude about p — i.e. if one believes, disbelieves, or suspends judgement about whether p — then one ought to believe that p if and only if p is true.
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"Is the Norm on Belief Evaluative? A Response to McHugh" (with Christopher Cowie), Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98:S1 (2017), pp. 128-145. (penultimate draft) (published version)
We respond to Conor McHugh's claim that an evaluative account of the normative relation between belief and truth is preferable to a prescriptive account. We claim that his arguments fail to establish this. We then draw a more general sceptical conclusion: we take our arguments to put pressure on any attempt to show that an evaluative account will fare better than a prescriptive account.
Book Chapters
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"Legal Epistemology", forthcoming. This will be a chapter in The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, edited by Kurt Sylvan.
A critical survey of the recent literature – in legal theory and applied epistemology – on legal standards of proof and what role, if any, statistical evidence can play in meeting those standards.
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"Concept Empiricisms, Ancient and Modern". In Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition: Cognition and Conceptualization, edited by Christina Thomsen-Thörnqvist and Juhana Toivanen (Brill, 2022). (penultimate draft) (published version)
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"Constitutive about Epistemic Normativity" (with Christopher Cowie), for Metaepistemology: Realism and Anti-Realism, Palgrave MacMillan (2018), pp. 173-196. (penultimate draft)
Suppose that you possess strong, perhaps decisive, evidence for a proposition that you’re considering. It is natural to think that that you thereby possess a reason to believe that proposition. What explains this? Why is there such a connection between evidence for (or against) propositions and reasons for believing them? What, in other words, are the grounds of epistemic normativity? One answer to this question is constitutivism about epistemic normativity, the view that epistemic reasons are grounded in the nature of belief. This view promises to provide a happy middle-ground between extreme versions of metanormative realism about epistemic normativity and extreme versions of anti-realism. In this paper, we reject this view, principally by focusing on the arguments that have been given in defence of it. The claim that belief is constitutively normative has been alleged to explain a number of distinctive psychological features of belief. We argue that arguments of this kind fail for a common reason: they either rely on an implausible claim about following prescriptions, or they don’t best explain the psychological feature of belief in question.
Book Reviews
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Review of Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What We Don’t, Alexander Sarch, OUP, 2019, in Journal of Moral Philosophy 18(3) (2021): 299–332. (published version)
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Review of Philosophy of Action from Suarez to Anscombe, Constantine Sandis (ed.), Routledge, 2018 (with Lucy Campbell), in Metapsychology Online 23:35 (2019). (published version)
Work in Progress
Please email for drafts
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"Culpability, Consciousness, and Carrying on Regardless"
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"‘What Does That Say About Me?’ Raz and Hart on Responsibility for Negligence".