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Victoria McGeer

Senior Research Scholar, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University; Senior Research Fellow, School of Philosophy, Australian National University

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

April−June 2016

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Making responsible. An Ethics for Co-reactive Minds«

Project outline:

My project is about the nature of responsible agency, specifically the kind of responsibility that makes individuals appropriate targets of praise and blame; punishment and reward. I argue that such agency depends on having certain kinds of capacities - capacities that a person might (culpably) fail to exercise. But capacity-dependent accounts of responsibility face the »hard problem« of explaining what it means to have a capacity that one (culpably) fails to exercise. While at this institute, I focus on developing a more general account of capacities, especially capacities exercised in a social context, that has the resources to address this problem. (For an initial sketch of the general line I will be taking, see The hard problem of responsibility, written in collaboration with Philip Pettit). (Victoria McGeer)

Funding of the stay:

»Justitia Amplificata. Rethinking Justice − Applied and Global«

Scholarly profile of Victoria McGeer

Victoria McGeer has received her PhD in philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis was entitled »The Meaning of Living Languages«. In 2004 she was appointed Research Scholar at the University Center for Human Values and Lecturer in the Dept. of Philosophy at Princeton University, receiving tenure in 2007. At present she is Senior Research Fellow an der School of Philosophy, Australian National University.

Main areas of research:

Philosophy of mind; moral psychology; developmental psychology; autism; Völkerpsychologie

Selected publications:

Mind in Time: A developmental approach to human intentionality, MIT Press (in preparation).
(with Friederike Funk), »Are ›optimistic‹ theories of criminal justice psychologically feasible? The probative case of civic republicanism», in: Criminal Law and Philosophy, published online 9th October 2015.
(with Philip Pettit), »The desirability and feasibility of restorative justice«, in: Raisons Politiques, vol. 57 (2015) (Republished with modest revisions in: Restorative Justice: An International Journal, vol. 3 (2015).
»Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility«, in: Philosophical Explorations, vol. 18:2 (2015), pp. 259-281.
»Building a better theory of moral responsibility: Response to Manuel Vargas«, in: Philosophical Studies, published online April 2015.
(with Philip Pettit), »The hard problem of responsibility«, in: Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 3, ed. D. Shoemaker, Oxford University Press 2015.
(with F. Funk and M. Gollwitzer, »Get the Message: Punishment is Satisfying if the Transgressor Responds to its Communicative Intent«, in: Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 40:8 (2014), pp. 986-997.
»PF Strawson’s Consequentialism«, in: Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 2, eds. D. Shoemaker and N. Tognazzini, Oxford University Press 2014.
»Civilizing Blame«, in: Blame: Its nature and norms, eds. D. Justin Coates and Neal A. Tognazzini, Oxford University Press 2013.
»Co-reactive attitudes and the making of moral community«, in: Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds. C. MacKenzie and R. Langdon, Macquarie monographs in Cognitive Science, Psychology Press 2012.

Homepage:
Please find more information about Victoria McGeer here.

Victoria McGeer

Scholarly profile of Victoria McGeer

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