Research

Publications:

‘Causality, Determination and Necessitation in Free Human Action’ Synthese (2022). Available here.

‘Created, Changeable, and Yet Acausal?’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2019).  Available here.

PhD: Movers and Makers

When we act intentionally, changes and states in the world come about, and they come about as a result of our intentional actions. We bear a particular kind of responsibility for those changes and states, which I call agential responsibility. What more can be said about what it is to be agentially responsible for some change or state? It is argued here that, contrary to a wide variety of contemporary views, it is not an essential part of what it is to be agentially responsible for a change or state that the agent causes that change or state. It is put forward that agential responsibility is a primitive form of responsibility, not to be accounted for fully in terms of causal responsibility. Agential responsibility is fully accounted for only in terms of explanation — which may include non-causal explanation — by intentional action.