'Apologising for negligence' An actor fails to remember, notice or anticipate what she should have remembered, noticed or anticipated, and thereby directly causes avoidable, unjustified harm. She knows and consents to the fact that she should have remembered or noticed or anticipated some key fact (perhaps due to her freely-accepted role). She is morally serious, and wants to apologise to the victim. I argue that because she did not intend the harm, because she did not intentionally disregard a known risk of causing the harm, she therefore only has 'shallow' ownership over the act and over the ensuing harm. As a result her apology can only be 'shallow'. Importantly, this is not an excuse, and the 'shallow' apology is still sincere and morally valuable.
‘Understanding another’s moral impossibility’ Although there has been some discussion about what moral impossibility is and what it presupposes, I will take the paradigm as follows. An agent declares "I would find it impossible to perform action X." I then want to focus on another person in the scene, a friend who knows the agent fairly well, and I want to examine the particular problem for this friend of trying to understanding the agent's declared moral impossibility, especially in the case where she herself would not find it impossible to perform X.
The Philosophy of Private Law. Textbook, to be co-written with Daniel Gilligan (Trinity College Dublin). This book would be based loosely on a course I taught several times, called 'Philosophy of Private Law' -- see the 'teaching' page of this website for the course outline. By 'private law' I mean the three substantive legal areas of tort, property and contracts, together with examples from medical law, family law, and employment law. As far as we know, the philosophical issues have not been brought together in a single textbook, designed to be accessible to both undergraduate law students and philosophy students. This would be a companion volume to my book The Philosophy of Criminal Law (with Nicola Padfield)), published in February 2024.