Short abstracts of some articles that I am currently working on. For full drafts, please send me an email. My email address is my first name followed by my surname followed by @outlook.com. (I am not sure if this (now) common trick will keep a data mining algorithm from figuring out my email address, though.)

[Moral Responsibility without Moral Agency]

Most philosophical analyses (explicitly or implicitly) assume that moral responsibility entails agency in the following sense: for an entity (E) to be morally responsible for an action/outcome (x), it is necessary that E is an agent. Call this the ‘Agential’ view of moral responsibility. I will provide two arguments for rejecting the Agential view. One, the concept of ‘agency’ is a rich notion: agents are thought to possess mental states, have some degree of causal efficacy, a capacity to be guided by reasons/sentiments, have freedom and interests etc. By requiring morally responsible entities to be agents, the Agential view puts a stronger requirement on the concept of ‘moral responsibility’ than is warranted. Two, it is well recognized that responsibility can have different ‘faces’ e.g., accountability, answerability, attributability. I will argue that it is implausible that a single notion of agency can be the locus of all these distinct types of responsibility.

[What’s Left of Rigidity?]

This article argues that given some plausible assumptions about natural language and philosophical methodology, the following theses about names cannot be true together: (a) the same (‘proper’) name can be borne by distinct objects/individuals, and (b) names of natural language are rigid designators but definite descriptions are not. The main assumptions that the argument appeals to are: (i) fragments of language (e.g., names) do not themselves refer, but can be used to refer, and (ii) every assumption involved in assessing whether names are (or are not) rigid designators must be preserved in the corresponding assessment for definite descriptions.

[Title Suppressed]

In recent years, some hitherto ignored uses of proper names — particularly, uses of names other than their use to refer to objects — have received increased attention from semantic theorists. However, the lack of a principled basis for drawing the distinction between uses that a semantic theory of names must account for (‘literal’ uses) and uses that are not relevant for semantic theorizing about names (‘non-literal’ uses) represents an important deficiency in the debate. A prominent objection (‘Sceptic’s Challenge’) raised by some theorists against semantic views that take the predicative uses of names (e.g., uses like the use of the name ‘Alfred’ in ‘Some Alfreds are crazy’) to be relevant in semantic theorizing exemplifies the kind of problem that can result from this deficiency. This article proposes a general manner of drawing the line between literal and non-literal uses of names and by doing so, also provides a response to the Sceptic’s Challenge.

[Title Suppressed]

Metalinguistic views of proper names are sometimes written off on the ground that such views are ‘blatantly circular’ (Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 72). This article exonerates metalinguistic views from the charge of circularity. I begin by distinguishing a word from its associated form: while words have semantic properties, forms—which are types of sounds, inscriptions, or signs—do not. Quotation marks can be used to form a quote-name of either a word or its associated form. I argue that the impression of circularity in metalinguistic views results from the decision to resolve the ambiguity of quotation in the metalinguistic specification of the meaning of a proper name in one way rather than the other—i.e., by taking quotation as forming quote-names of words. Metalinguistic views, however, are not committed to this understanding of quotation.