Alexander Pruss's Blog

Combine these two rather Stoic theses: No one can make the fully virtuous person worse off Doing what is morally wrong always makes you w...

Here are three plausible theses: You’re only culpable for a morally wrong choice determined by a relevantly abnormal mental state if you a...

It is widely held that if you do wrong in culpable ignorance (ignorance that you are blameworthy for), you are culpable for the wrong you do...

If you pressure someone to act against their deeply-set moral beliefs, then your pressure is an action which, if successful, results in: t...

Discussion of my previous post has made me realize that, it seems, we’re more apt to be skeptical about the culpability of someone whose ev...

If you have always done the morally best you could, you are not culpable for anything. If determinism is true, you have always done the on...

Suppose that the captain impersonates an admiral and yells: “Turn hard to starboard!” The sailors ought to turn hard to starboard and the ca...

It is widely thought that: If you act wrongly in an irrational state, but you are responsible for being in the irrational state, then the ...

I rarely take myself to know that someone is culpable for some particular wrongdoing. There are three main groups of exception: my own wro...

Here’s an interesting double-counting problem for wrongdoing. Alice stands to inherit a lot of money from a rich uncle in Australia. Bob thi...

Bob has the belief that there are infinitely many people in a parallel universe, and that they wear numbered jerseys: 1, 2, 3, …. He also be...

It is a common intuition, especially among Christians, that attempts at immoral actions—say, attempted murder or attempted adultery—are just...

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “ x should know that s ”. (There is probably a literature on this, but blogging just wouldn’t be as muc...

Case 1: Petr shoots and kills Anna while hiking, thinking that Anna is a dangerous bear (she was wearing a fur coat). Case 2: Ivan the NKVD ...

It is widely held that: Doing the wrong thing while inculpably ignorant that it's wrong is itself inculpable. Doing the wrong thing whil...

It is plausible that we have duties of conscience arising from inculpable mistakes about what we should do. I shall assume this and argue th...

One of the toughest problems is what to do about cases of mistaken conscience. Let's say Samantha has a justified false belief th...

It's time to defend something like Anselm's idea of infinite culpability.  I once expressed a hope that I'd eventually do so, bu...

It is a common view that if Fred could not have been reasonably expected to know that what he is doing is wrong, if his ignorance...