Hannah Tierney

1 /The Risky Business of Forgiveness

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, provisionally forthcoming

There is a noted tension between two independently plausible features of forgiveness: (1) Forgiveness is reasoned: it is something that agents do for reasons, and (2) Forgiveness is elective: it is not something that agents can be required to do. As Per-Erik Milam (2018) has recently argued, if something is done for reasons, then those reasons can, at least sometimes, generate a requirement for an agent to do that thing. So, those who wish to defend both (1) and (2) must deny that reasons to forgive can be requiring. In this paper, I attempt to do just this. By drawing on the distinction between synchronic and diachronic blameworthiness, and focusing on the ways in forgiveness is risky, I argue that forgiveness is both reasoned and elective.

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2/Don't Burst My Blame Bubble 

Philosophers' Imprint, forthcoming 

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Blame abounds in our everyday lives, perhaps no more so than on social media. With the rise of social networking platforms, we have access to more information about others’ blameworthy behaviour and larger audiences to whom we can express our blame. But these audiences, while large, are typically not diverse. Social media tends to create what I call “blame bubbles”: systems in which expressions of blame are shared amongst agents with similar moral outlooks while dissenting views are excluded. Many have criticised the blame expressed on social media, arguing that it is often unfitting, excessive, and counterproductive. In this talk, I’ll argue that while blame bubbles can be guilty of these charges, they are also well placed to do important moral work. I’ll then attempt to identify the causal source of these bad-making features and explore potential structural interventions that can make blame bubbles better at performing their moral function and less likely to generate harmful consequences.

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3/Forgetting to Un-Forgive 

Revista de Estudios Sociales, 2023

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Much of the literature on forgiveness is dedicated to understanding the reasons to forgive and what changes in attitude are required to do so. But philosophers have been much less attentive to what happens after agents forgive. This is a serious oversight, since the reasons to forgive do not always retain their force and it is not always possible, or advisable, to maintain the changes in attitudes that forgiveness requires. Fortunately, Monique Wonderly has begun to fill this lacuna in the literature with her recent work on un-forgiveness. According to the author, un-forgiveness involves altering our attitudes, by either reinhabiting an adversarial stance towards an agent for their wrongdoing and/or returning one’s relationship with them to the state it was in prior to forgiveness taking place. While Wonderly’s account of un-forgiveness is both novel and illuminating, it is incomplete. In this paper, we argue that one can also un-forgive by forgetting that the wrong in question occurred and/or that the previously forgiven agent was the perpetrator of the wrong. We contend that not only is it possible to un-forgive by forgetting, but doing so can be both justified and morally important. We defend our view by considering the objection that un-forgiveness by forgetting can negatively impact victims’ relationships with wrongdoers as well as addressing the concern that agents cannot exercise their agency over their memories in order to un-forgive by forgetting.

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4/Moving Ego Versus Moving Time: Investigating the Shared Source of Future-Bias and Near-Bias

Synthese, 2023

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It has been hypothesized that our believing that, or its seeming to us as though, the world is in some way dynamical partially explains (and perhaps rationalizes) future-bias. Recent work has, in turn, found a correlation between future-bias and near-bias, suggesting that there is a common explanation for both. Call the claim that what partially explains our being both future- and near-biased is our believing/it seeming to us as though the world is dynamical, the dynamical explanation. We empirically test two versions of the dynamical explanation. The first is the moving ego explanation—according to which it is our belief that the ego moves, or our phenomenology as of the ego moving, that jointly (partially) explains future- and near-bias. The second is the moving time explanation—according to which it is our belief that time robustly passes, or our phenomenology as of robust passage, which jointly (partially) explain future- and near-bias. We found no evidence in favour of either explanation.

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5/Freedom, Moral Responsibility, and the Failure of Universal Defeat 

Philosophical Issues, 2023

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Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2022, 2023) found that people's judgments were sensitive to manipulation scope: people judged that an agent was less free and responsible when a manipulation was existential (impacting at least one but not all agents) than when the manipulation was universal (impacting every agent). This study examines people's judgements about existential and universal manipulation cases that involve both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. We found that manipulation scope also affects people's free will and responsibility judgments in manipulation cases involving both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. Interestingly, we also found that manipulation type influences the effect that manipulation scope has on people's free will judgments but not their moral responsibility judgments, which indicates that people's free will and responsibility judgments can come apart. This puts pressure on the prevalent assumption that judgments about free will and moral responsibility are conceptually bound together.

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6/Moral Responsibility, Praise, and Blame 

Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics, 2023

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Moral responsibility, praise, and blame are interconnected in a number of ways, but precisely how, and the extent to which, these concepts are related will depend on the details of one’s philosophical account. On some views, the connection between moral responsibility, praise, and blame is quite tenuous—it’s possible to theorize about one of these concepts without reference to the others. For example, sceptics about free will and moral responsibility will often defend views of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness that do not require agents to be morally responsible in order to be the appropriate target of certain forms of praise and blame (Pereboom 2017, 2021). Still others think that we can hold responsible without blaming (Pickard 2011, 2017). And some theorists take blameworthy and praiseworthy actions to differ along more dimensions than mere valence. As Susan Wolf and Dana Nelkin have argued, agents must have the ability to do otherwise if they are to be blameworthy for performing wrong actions, but do not need this ability in order to be praiseworthy for performing right actions (Wolf 1980, 1990; Nelkin 2011; Brink and Nelkin 2013). But on other views, there is a much tighter conceptual relationship between moral responsibility, praise, and blame—theorizing about one requires theorizing about the others. This is particularly true of Strawsonian views, those that build on P. F. Strawson’s work in “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) and analyse being morally responsible in terms of the praising and blaming practices we engage in to hold agents responsible. On these approaches, it is impossible to make sense of what it is to be morally responsible without reflecting on our practices of praising, blaming, and holding agents responsible, and vice versa. In this chapter, we will explore Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility, praise, and blame, focusing on what these views stand to gain by conceiving of these concepts as so closely connected and what they risk in doing so.

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7/Cruel Intentions and Evil Deeds

Ergo, 2023 

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What it means for an action to have moral worth, and what is required for this to be the case, is the subject of continued controversy. Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right. Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right. These theorists, though they oppose one another, share something important in common. They focus almost exclusively on the moral worth of right actions. But there is a negatively valenced counterpart that attaches to wrong actions, which we will call moral counterworth. In this paper, we explore the moral counterworth of wrong actions in order to shed new light on the nature of moral worth. Contrary to theorists in both camps, we argue that more than one kind of motivation can affect the moral worth of actions.

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8/Making Amends: How to Alter the Fittingness of Blame

Fittingness, 2023 

On one popular approach to blameworthiness, an agent is the fitting target of blame in virtue of culpably doing wrong. But this view faces a puzzle. If an agent culpably performs a wrong action, then this fact will always be true of them, and so they will be the fitting target of blame forever. But this seems counterintuitive—we typically judge that it is not fitting to blame culpable wrongdoers in perpetuity. So, there must be more to being blameworthy over time than culpable wrongdoing. In this paper, I defend a reparative account of blameworthiness over time, according to which blameworthy agents have reparative obligations to their victims and remain the fitting target of blame until these obligations are fulfilled.

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9/Bias Towards the Future

Philosophy Compass, 2022

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All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-neutralists contend, rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future-biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future-bias.

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10/Robust Passage Phenomenology Probably Does Not Explain Future-Bias

Synthese, 2022

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People are ‘biased toward the future’: all else being equal, we typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. Several explanations have been suggested for this pattern of preferences. Adjudicating among these explanations can, among other things, shed light on the rationality of future-bias: For instance, if our preferences are explained by unjustified beliefs or an illusory phenomenology, we might conclude that they are irrational. This paper investigates one hypothesis, according to which future-bias is (at least partially) explained by our having a phenomenology that we describe, or conceive of, as being as of time robustly passing. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found no evidence in its favour. Our results present a puzzle, however, when compared with the results of an earlier study. We conclude that although robust passage phenomenology on its own probably does not explain future-bias, having this phenomenology and taking it to be veridical may contribute to future-bias.

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11/Belief in Robust Temporal Passage (Probably) Does Not Explain Future-Bias

Philosophical Studies, 2022

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Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our (tacit) beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias.

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12/Defusing Existential and Universal Threats to Compatibilism: A Strawsonian Dilemma for Manipulation Arguments

The Journal of Philosophy, 2022 

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Many manipulation arguments against compatibilism rely on the claim that manipulation is relevantly similar to determinism. But we argue that manipulation is nothing like determinism in one relevant respect. Determinism is a “universal” phenomenon: its scope includes every feature of the universe. But manipulation arguments feature cases where an agent is the only manipulated individual in her universe. Call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents “existential manipulation.” Our responsibility practices are impacted in different ways by universal and existential phenomena. And this is a relevant difference, especially on Strawsonian approaches to moral responsibility, which take facts about our responsibility practices to be deeply connected to the nature of responsibility itself. We argue that Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility are immune to manipulation arguments and no attempt to modify the scope of manipulation or determinism featured in these arguments will help incompatibilists secure their desired conclusion.

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13/The Four-Case Argument and the Existential/Universal Effect 

Erkenntnis, 2021 

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One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all agents within a universe. We propose that we find agents in Pereboom’s manipulation cases less free and morally responsible in part because they are the target of existential manipulation. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found that people’s free will and moral responsibility judgments were sensitive to the scope of manipulation: people judged existentially manipulated agents significantly less free and responsible than universally manipulated agents.

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14/Don't Suffer in Silence: A Self-Help Guide to Self-Blame

Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility, 2022

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There are better and worse ways to blame others. Likewise, there are better and worse ways to blame yourself. And though there is an ever-expanding literature on the norms that govern our blaming practices, relatively little attention has been paid to the norms that govern expressions of self-blame. In this essay, I argue that when we blame ourselves, we ought not do so privately. Rather, we should, ceteris paribus, express our self-blame to those we have wronged. I then explore how this norm can contribute to our understanding of the ethics of self-blame as well as the nature of blameworthiness itself.

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15/Hypercrisy and Standing to Self-blame

Analysis, 2021

 

Lippert-Rasmussen (2020) argues that the moral equality account of the hypocrite’s lack of standing to blame fails. To object to this account, Lippert-Rasmussen considers the contrary of hypocrisy: hypercrisy. In this article, I show that if hypercrisy is a problem for the moral equality account, it is also a problem for Lippert-Rasmussen’s own account of why hypocrites lack standing to blame. I then reflect on the hypocrite’s and hypercrite’s standing to self-blame, which reveals that the challenge hypercrisy poses for accounts of standing is different than the challenge Lippert-Rasmussen articulates.

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16/Guilty Confessions

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, 2021

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Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This paper focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect.

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17/Expanding Moral Understanding

Australasian Philosophical Review, 2021

 

In “Forgiveness: An Ordered Pluralism,” Miranda Fricker argues that the function of forgiveness is to liberate the forgiver from redundant blame-feeling. Blame is rendered redundant when it can no longer serve its purpose, so to understand the function of forgiveness, we must first understand the function of blame. For Fricker, the paradigmatic form of blame is Communicative Blame, and its function is to “inspire remorse in the wrongdoer as a matter of aligning both parties’ moral understanding” (p. 8). When this alignment of moral understanding through remorse is achieved, or when blame-feelings cannot accomplish this task, the victim’s blame-feelings are rendered redundant, and the victim can free herself from them through forgiveness. In this essay, I argue that Fricker’s view of blame, which provides the foundation for her view of forgiveness, requires revision.

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18/Desperately Seeking Sourcehood

Philosophical Studies, 2020

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In a recent essay, Deery and Nahmias (Philos Stud 174(5):1255–1276, 2017) utilize interventionism about causation to develop an account of causal sourcehood in order to defend compatibilism about free will and moral responsibility from manipulation arguments. In this paper, we criticize Deery and Nahmias’s analysis of sourcehood by drawing a distinction between two forms of causal invariance that can come into conflict on their account. We conclude that any attempt to resolve this conflict will either result in counterintuitive attributions of moral responsibility or will undermine their response to manipulation arguments.

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19/The Subscript View: A Distinct View of Distinct Selves

Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, 2020

 

Pluralism about personal identity has been understudied and underdeveloped in the literature. It merits greater attention, especially in light of recent work by philosophers and psychologists, which illuminates the great number of our evaluative practices that presuppose personal identity. It's unlikely that traditional monistic approaches to personal identity can ground or explain all of these practices and concerns. If we take our philosophical theories to be telling us anything about the commonsense conception of personal identity, then we ought to take this empirical work seriously. In this essay, I propose my own pluralist account of personal identity—the Subscript View. On this view, there typically exist (at least) two individuals whenever we once thought there was only one, a psychological individual and a biological individual. I argue that the Subscript View can better account for our many identity-related practical concerns than traditional monistic approaches to persistence.

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20/Quality of Reasons and Degrees of Moral Responsibility 

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2019

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Traditionally, theories of moral responsibility feature only the minimally sufficient conditions for moral responsibility. While these theories are well-suited to account for the threshold of responsibility, it’s less clear how they can address questions about the degree to which agents are responsible. One feature that intuitively affects the degree to which agents are morally responsible is how difficult performing a given action is for them. Recently, philosophers have begun to develop accounts of scalar moral responsibility that make use of this notion of difficulty [Coates and Swenson 2013; Nelkin 2016]. In this paper, I argue that these accounts, although innovative, are incomplete. The degree to which agents are morally responsible is determined not only by the difficulty agents face but also by the quality of reasons for which they act.

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21/The Comparative Nonarbitrariness Norm of Blame

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2019

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Much has been written about the fittingness, epistemic, and standing norms that govern blame. In this paper, we argue that there exists a norm of blame that has yet to receive adequate philosophical discussion and without which an account of the ethics of blame will be incomplete: a norm proscribing comparatively arbitrary blame. By reflecting on the objectionableness of comparatively arbitrary blame, we stand to elucidate a substantive, and thus far overlooked, norm governing our attributions of responsibility. Accordingly, our aim in this paper is to develop a comparative nonarbitrariness condition on blame that can enrich our understanding of the ethics of blame.

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22/The Future of the Causal Quest

Blackwell Companion to Free Will, 2023 (accepted 2017)

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In this chapter, I will look at three recent attempts to draw lessons about free will from the causation literature: Oisín Deery and Eddy Nahmias’ (2017) account of interventionist causation and manipulation arguments, Carolina Sartorio’s (2016) actual causal sequence account of free will, and Sara Bernstein’s (forthcoming) analysis of the relationship between causal proportionality and moral responsibility. What follows is far from an exhaustive analysis of the current work on causation and free will and in focusing on these particular views I’ve ignored many others. What I find compelling about these particular views is that though they represent three very different ways of incorporating work on causation into discussions of free will, they all face real challenges about how best to conceive of the relationship between the metaphysical and ethical questions regarding the nature of free will. And by reflecting on the different ways those working on free will can utilize the research on causation, and on the questions about the interplay between metaphysics and ethics that these approaches raise, we can reveal new and interesting avenues for future research not only on the relationship between causation and free will but on the metaphysics of free will more generally.

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23/Nonconciliation in Peer Disagreement: Its Phenomenology and Its Rationality

Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2017

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The authors argue in favor of the “nonconciliation” (or “steadfast”) position concerning the problem of peer disagreement. Throughout the paper they place heavy emphasis on matters of phenomenology—on how things seem epistemically with respect to the net import of one’s available evidence vis-a-vis the disputed claim p, and on how such phenomenology is affected by the awareness that an interlocutor whom one initially regards as an epistemic peer disagrees with oneself about p. Central to the argument is a nested goal/sub-goal hierarchy that the authors claim is inherent to the structure of epistemically responsible belief-formation: pursuing true beliefs by pursuing beliefs that are objectively likely given one’s total available evidence; pursuing this sub-goal by pursuing beliefs that are likely true (given that evidence) relative to one’s own deep epistemic sensibility; and pursuing this sub-sub-goal by forming beliefs in accordance with one’s own all-in, ultima facie, epistemic seemings.

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24/A Pilgrimage through John Martin Fischer's Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2016

 

​John Martin Fischer's most recent collection of essays, Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value, is both incredibly wide-ranging and impressively detailed. Fischer manages to cover a staggering amount of ground in the free will debate, while also providing insightful and articulate analyses of many of the positions defended in the field. In this collection, Fischer focuses on the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. In the first section of his book, Fischer defends Frankfurt cases as an important and useful tool in rejecting the necessity of regulative control for moral responsibility. In the second section, Fischer turns his attention to his own account of guidance control. In this essay, I first focus on Fischer's defense of Frankfurt cases, specifically his response to the argument that the assumption of determinism in such cases is question-begging. I then analyze two objections to Fischer's account of guidance control. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the metaphor of the pilgrimage, which Fischer introduces in the opening essay of his collection.

 

25/Tackling it Head On: How Best to Handle the Modified Manipulation Argument

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2014​

 

Patrick Todd's article, "A New Approach to Manipulation Arguments," has spurred considerable discussion in the literature. In his essay, Todd attempts to reframe how manipulation arguments function dialectically by arguing that the incompatibilist need only claim that manipulation mitigates responsibility. In a recent paper, Andrew Khoury attempts to defuse Todd's modified manipulation argument by presenting a competing compatibilist version of the argument. In this paper, I argue that, though creative, Khoury cannot defuse the modified manipulation argument. Rather, the best way to respond to Todd's argument is to tackle it head on by generating doubt about the veracity of its premises.

 

 

26/How Many of Us Are There?

Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, 2014

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​In trying to chart the contours of our folk conceptions, philosophy often proceeds with an assumption of monism. One attempts to provide a single account of the notion of free will, reference, or the self. The assumption of monism provides an important constraint for theory building. And it is a sensible starting assumption. However, it's possible that for some philosophically interesting notions, people operate with multiple different notions. We will argue that in the case of personal identity, monism does not capture folk commitments concerning personal identity. Many of our identity-related practical concerns seem to be grounded in distinct views of what is involved in personal identity. Furthermore, both empirical evidence and philosophical thought experiments indicate that judgments about personal identity are regimented by two (or more) different criteria. In the second half of the paper, we will consider reasons for thinking that the folk commitment to pluralism should be rejected or overhauled. We will offer a tentative case in favor of a pluralist philosophical view about personal identity.

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27/A Maneuver around the Modified Manipulation Argument

Philosophical Studies, 2013

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In the recent article "A new approach to manipulation arguments," Patrick Todd seeks to reframe a common incompatibilist form of argument often leveraged against compatibilist theories of moral responsibility. Known as manipulation arguments, these objections rely on cases in which agents, though they have met standard compatibilist conditions for responsibility, have been manipulated in such a way that they fail to be blameworthy for their behavior. Traditionally, in order to get a manipulation argument off the ground, an incompatibilist must illustrate that a manipulated agent is not at all responsible for her behavior. Todd argues that this is an unnecessarily heavy burden; the incompatibilist need only show that the presence of manipulation mitigates ascriptions of responsibility. Though innovative, Todd fails to present his modified manipulation argument in a way that poses a true threat to the compatibilist. In fact, by introducing a scalar conception of moral responsibility, Todd gives the compatibilist the tools necessary to better handle the incompatibilist's original manipulation argument.

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28/Keith Lehrer on the Basing Relation

Philosophical Studies, 2012

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In this paper, we review Keith Lehrer's account of the basing relation, with particular attention to the two cases he offered in support of his theory, Raco (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge, 1990; Theory of knowledge, (2nd ed.), 2000) and the earlier case of the superstitious lawyer (Lehrer, The Journal of Philosophy, 68, 1971). We show that Lehrer's examples succeed in making his case that beliefs need not be based on the evidence, in order to be justified. These cases show that it is the justification (rather than the belief) that must be based in the evidence. We compare Lehrer's account of basing with some alternative accounts that have been offered, and show why Lehrer's own account is more plausible.