Alexander Sarch

What's Wrong With Megalopsychia?

This paper looks at two accounts of Aristotles views on the virtue of megalopsychia. The first, defended by Christopher Cordner, commits Aristotle to two claims about the virtuous person that might seem unpalatable to modern readers. The second account, defended by Roger Crisp, does not commit Aristotle to these claims. Some might count this as an advantage of Crisps account. However, I argue that Cordners account, not Crisps, is actually the better interpretation of Aristotle. Nonetheless, this does not ultimately spell trouble for Aristotle, since, as I argue, the claims that Cordners account commits Aristotle to are, on closer inspection, not really problematic.

Equal Culpability and the Scope of the Willful Ignorance Doctrine

Courts commonly allow willful ignorance to satisfy the knowledge element of a crime. The traditional rationale for this doctrine is that willfully ignorant misconduct is just as culpable as knowing misconduct. But it is not obvious that this “equal culpability thesis” holds across the board. Is it true in all cases of willful ignorance or only some? This is the question I investigate here. Specifically, I argue against several common versions of the equal culpability thesis before defending my own restricted version. First, I argue that the broadest version of the thesis, adopted by many courts, is overinclusive. Then I argue against several restricted versions of the thesis offered by legal theorists including Doug Husak, David Luban, and Deborah Hellman. My own account, by contrast, is premised on a duty of reasonable investigation. If my account is on the right track, the widely employed willful ignorance doctrine stands in need of reform.

Willful Ignorance, Culpability and the Criminal Law

According to the willful ignorance doctrine, when conviction of a crime requires knowledge of some fact, the defendant’s willful ignorance may be allowed to satisfy the relevant knowledge requirement. However, there is a circuit split concerning what, precisely, being willfully ignorant involves. According to the restricted motive approach endorsed by the Eighth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits, the defendant has to have deliberately remained in ignorance in order to preserve a defense against liability in the event of prosecution. However, according to the unrestricted approach championed by the Ninth Circuit and endorsed by a number of other circuits, no particular motive for remaining in ignorance is required. This Article argues that both of these approaches are in tension with the courts’ “traditional rationale” for the willful ignorance doctrine. The traditional rationale is premised on the idea that acting in willful ignorance is just as culpable as acting knowingly — the so-called “equal culpability thesis.” However, this Article argues that the equal culpability thesis does not hold across the board, only in a limited set of circumstances. Appreciating this fact shows that the unrestricted approach is overinclusive in that it sometimes permits willful ignorance to substitute for knowledge even when the equal culpability thesis does not hold. Similarly, the restricted motive approach proves to be underinclusive in that it sometimes fails to allow willful ignorance to substitute for knowledge even when the equal culpability thesis does hold. These defects threaten the normative underpinnings of both approaches.To arrive at a more normatively justified approach to the willful ignorance doctrine, a systematic account is needed of the conditions in which the equal culpability thesis holds. The task is even more important because the thesis is rarely defended explicitly. This Article attempts to fill this gap by defending a version of the thesis that more accurately captures the conditions under which acting in willful ignorance is as culpable as acting knowingly. This appropriately restricted version of the thesis is then used as the basis for offering a more justified approach to the willful ignorance doctrine — one that avoids the overinclusiveness of the unrestricted approach and the underinclusiveness of the restricted motive approach, while also remaining practically implementable by courts.

Desire Satisfactionism and Time

In this article, I aim to clarify how Actual Desire Satisfactionism should accommodate the ways in which desire and time are connected. In particular, I argue that Weak Concurrentism represents the most promising way for the Desire Satisfactionist to capture the temporal nature of desire. I consider the Desire Satisfactionists other main options, but argue that none succeeds. This leaves Weak Concurrentism looking attractive. However, Weak Concurrentism might also be thought to have some implausible consequences of its own. Nonetheless, I argue that, on closer inspection, these consequences are not implausible at all – at least by the lights of the Desire Satisfactionist. I do not offer a full-blown defence of Weak Concurrentism, but rather aim to defend only a conditional conclusion: in so far as one is committed to Actual Desire Satisfactionism, Weak Concurrentism represents the best way to tackle the problems raised by the temporal nature of desires.

HAUSMAN AND MCPHERSON ON WELFARE ECONOMICS AND PREFERENCE SATISFACTION THEORIES OF WELFARE: A CRITICAL NOTE

Hausman and McPherson defend welfare economics by claiming that even if welfare does not consist in preference satisfaction, preferences still provide good, if fallible, evidence of welfare. I argue that this strategy does not yet fully solve the problems for welfare economics stemming from the preference satisfaction theory of welfare. More work is needed to show that our self-interested preferences are sufficiently reliable, or in some other sense our best, evidence of well-being. Thus, my aim is to identify the challenges that remain and clarify what additional work is needed before Hausman and McPhersons defence of welfare economics succeeds.

Blameworthiness and Time

Reactive emotion accounts hold that blameworthiness should be analyzed in terms of the familiar reactive emotions. However, despite the attractions of such views, we are not persuaded that blameworthiness is ultimately a matter of correctly felt reactive emotion. In this paper, we draw attention to a range of little-discussed considerations involving the moral significance of the passage of time that drive a wedge between blameworthiness and the reactive emotions: the appropriateness of the reactive emotions is sensitive to the passage of time in ways that attributions of blameworthiness are not. There are a number of ways in which reactive emotion accounts might at-tempt to accommodate the moral significance of time, however. We consider the most important of these but ultimately find them wanting. Accordingly, we conclude that the prospects for the reactive emotion accounts are bleak. Our argument, if successful, has a range of implications for legal theory, most importantly in providing a novel moral basis for statutes of limitations and in shedding light on new avenues in the theory of criminal law generally.

Bealer and the autonomy of philosophy

George Bealer has provided an elaborate defense of the practice of appealing to intuition in philosophy. In the present paper, I argue that his defense fails. First, I argue that Bealer’s theory of determinate concept possession, even if true, would not establish the “autonomy” of philosophy. That is, even if he is correct about what determinate concept possession consists in, it would not follow that it is possible to answer the central questions of philosophy by critical reflection on our intuitions. Furthermore, I argue that Bealer’s account of determinate concept possession in fact faces serious problems. Accordingly, I conclude that Bealer does not succeed in vindicating the appeal to intuition in philosophy.