Passivity is the opposite of activity. And yet in order to do something intentionally, one must be passive in certain respects. In this essay, I identify three forms of passivity that are necessary conditions of intentional action, contrast these forms of passivity with a fourth form that is incompatible with intentional action, and explore the relationships among all four. In so doing, I call attention to the complex relationship between our capacity to will and our capacity to reason.

Deprivationism is the label given to the rather intuitive view that death is bad for the deceased because it deprives them of future goods. This paper considers two versions of this view, the one typically found in the literature and the one originally offered by Thomas Nagel. After laying out the key differences between them, it is argued that we have good reasons to prefer Nagel’s deprivationism to the typical version. Along the way, consideration is given to how all of this relates to the debate between deprivationists and Epicureans.

In “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson argued that our responsibility practices reflect a distinctive and natural way we’re oriented toward other people: the participant attitude. This idea has been influential. However, it is also widely acknowledged that Strawson’s account of the participant attitude is at best incomplete. In this paper, I argue that the lacuna in Strawson’s thought corresponds to a lacuna in the wider literature on the moral psychology of responsibility. This lacuna, I hold, limits our understanding of both our responsibility practices and what it means to be responsible. I then develop a more determinate account of the participant attitude, one that, I argue, promises to fill this lacuna and provide a unifying and illuminating framework for thinking about the moral psychology of responsibility.

An agent’s actions or omissions will bear a causal/explanatory relation to the outcomes for which the agent is morally responsible. I rely on this observation in assisting John Martin Fischer in his response to an argument from Philip Swenson. Fischer’s response depends on the claim that responsibility for omissions requires the ability to do otherwise while responsibility for actions does not. I offer support for this claim of Fischer’s. After this, I consider some observations of Fischer’s that I construe as suggesting an important distinction between blameworthiness and responsibility for outcomes. I develop these observations into the claim that resolving the questions about responsibility discussed in the first half of this paper is a matter of surprisingly little moral urgency. This last point is supported by my argument that the connections between agent and outcome necessary for establishing moral responsibility for an outcome are irrelevant for assessing an agent’s blameworthiness.

Skepticism about moral freedom appears to be on the rise. This essay attempts to blunt the force of the recent growth of free will skepticism by appealing to a form of rational faith in free will. With a compelling account of the nature of faith (borrowed from Lara Buchak), we can see that even someone convinced by Pereboom-style skeptical arguments could nevertheless rationally accept and act on the claim that we enjoy moral freedom. Given an underappreciated aspect of P.F. Strawson’s famous paper “Freedom and Resentment,” this result should be less surprising than we might have thought. Further, this faith in free will should be especially appealing to those who have been moved by the resilience intuition that animates John Martin Fischer’s influential Semincompatibilism.

The ‘Frankfurt View’ (FV) alleges that the ‘principle of alternate possibilities’ (PAP) is undermined by ‘Frankfurt cases,’ cases in which the agent could not have done otherwise and yet is morally responsible for what he or she has done. In this paper I provide a partial defense of PAP—partial because it applies only to responsibility for acts and omissions; I endorse FV’s claim that PAP fails with regard to responsibility for decisions. But I accept FV’s claim that Frankfurt agents are responsible for their decisions, acts, and omissions; I argue not merely that my proposed version of PAP for acts and omissions is compatible with this claim, but that by including an appeal to PAP so construed we can provide a defense of this claim that is superior to those standardly provided by FV’s supporters. I argue further that the account presented does a superior job of defending intuitively correct results in related cases, such as Fischer and Ravizza’s ‘Penned-In Sharks’ case and McIntyre’s ‘Princess’ case.

Quarrels and wisecracks are essential features of interpersonal life. Quarrels are conflicts that typically take place only between friends, family, and those with whom we are personally engaged and whose attitudes toward us matter. Wisecracks are bits of improvised wit—banter, teasing, mockery, and ball busting—that also typically take place only in interpersonal life (note the following odd but revealing comment: “I can’t tease her like that; I barely even know her!”). Quarrels and cracks are, though, mutually exclusive. People know their quarrel is basically over once they start being amused by each others’ wisecracks again, and if you’re enjoying wisecracks with each other, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to quarrel at the same time. Why is this and what does it mean for interpersonal conflict? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question via a deep dive into the nature of wisecracking humor to explore the unrecognized—and valuable—role it plays in our interpersonal lives. In particular, there is a type of wisecracking humor that has a distinctive sort of interpersonal power, the power to dissolve the anger in quarrels in a surprising and productive way.

Standard reasons-responsiveness theories, such as Fischer’s and Ravizza’s (1998), tell us to look to other possible worlds in order to determine whether an agent is appropriately responsive to reasons. Carolina Sartorio (2018) has given a powerful critique of such counterfactual accounts of reasons-responsiveness, what she calls the “demarcation problem,” and has given an alternative way of characterizing reasons-responsiveness, one that allegedly avoids the demarcation problem. While we agree with Sartorio that the demarcation problem is a serious one for standard counterfactual accounts of reasons-responsiveness, we argue that her own characterization of reasons-responsiveness faces a serious demarcation problem of its own. We conclude by sketching a characterization of reasons-responsiveness that, although inspired by Sartorio’s account, promises to avoid any demarcation problem.