KELLY ANNE MCCORMICK Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University

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1 CONTACT INFORMATION: KELLY ANNE MCCORMICK Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University Website: ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS: Assistant Professor, Texas Christian University (2014-present) Visiting Assistant Professor, Washington & Jefferson College ( ) EDUCATION: 2013 PhD Syracuse University 2006 BA Colgate University AREA OF SPECIALIZATION: Free Will & Moral Responsibility AREAS OF COMPETENCE: Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic, Moral Psychology, Applied Ethics (Environmental) PUBLICATIONS: A Dilemma for Morally Responsible Time Travelers, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies Why We Should(n t) be Discretionists About Free Will, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies Desert and the Appropriateness of Blame, forthcoming chapter in The Wiley Companion to Free Will, Joseph Keim Campbell (ed.) Revisionism, forthcoming chapter in The Routledge Companion to Free Will, Neil Levy, Meghan Griffith, & Kevin Timpe (eds.) Companions in Innocence: Defending a New Methodological Assumption for Responsibility Theorizing, (2015) Philosophical Studies (172:2): Holding Responsibility Hostage: Moral Responsibility, Justification, and the Compatibility Question (2014) The Journal of Value Inquiry (48:4): Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility (2013) The Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (7:3): 1-19 BOOK REVIEWS: Review of K.E. Boxer s Rethinking Responsibility (2016) Journal of Moral Philosophy (13): 131-1

2 134 Review of D. Justin Coates & Neal A. Tognazzini s (eds.) Blame: Its Nature and Norms (2014) Social Theory & Practice (40:3): PRESENTATIONS: 2016 Comments on Tamler Sommer s Philosophical Busybodies, Society for Philosophy of Agency Group Session, Pacific APA "A Dilemma for Morally Responsible Time Travelers." Free Will Workshop, Southern Methodist University, November Comments on Seth Shabo s Sourcehood and Self-determination: Revisiting an Argument for Incompatibilism, William Alston Lecture Series, Syracuse University, September Critic in Author Meets Critics: Shaun Nichols, Bound, Pacific APA Comments on Sommer Hodson s Causation, Personal Identity, and Moral Responsibility, Junior Metaphysics Workshop, Grand Valley State University, April Companions in Innocence: Defending a New Methodological Assumption for Responsibility Theorizing, Pacific APA, Comments on Dan Padgett s Molinism and the Ersatz Red Line, Central APA, February A Dilemma for Morally Responsible Time Travelers, Western Michigan Metaphysics Workshop (WMMW), Western Michigan University, November Companions in Innocence: Defending a New Methodological Assumption for Responsibility Theorizing, presented in the Ethics Working Papers Group, Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium (PAPC), Washington & Jefferson College, September Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility, University of San Francisco Free Will Conference, Reference, Conceptual Change, and Free Will, August Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility, Creighton Club: New York Philosophical Association Meetings, November Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility, ABD Workshop, Syracuse University Philosophy Department, October A Causal Integrationist Response to Pereboom, Rocky Mountain Philosophy Conference, March

3 REFEREE WORK: Scholarly presses: MIT Press Oxford University Press Journals: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy Ergo Ethical Theory & Moral Practice Journal of Philosophical Research Philosophical Quarterly Res Publica South African Journal of Philosophy TEACHING EXPERIENCE: TCU PHIL 40303: Moral Psychology (Spring 2016) PHIL 10433: Freshman Seminar: Introduction to Ethics (Spring 2016) PHIL 30403: Environmental Philosophy (Fall 2015) PHIL 30443: Free Will & Moral Responsibility (Spring 2015) PHIL 10003: Philosophy One, The Meaning of Life (Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015) W&J: PHL 231: Environmental Ethics (Spring 2014) PHL 130: Moral Philosophy (Spring 2014) PHL 270: Free Will & Moral Responsibility (Fall 2013) PHL 101: Introduction to Philosophy (Fall 2013) Syracuse: PHI 383 (online): Free Will (Summer 2013) PHI 192: Introduction to Moral Theory (Spring 2013) PHI 251: Introduction to Logic (Fall 2010, 2011, 2012, Sumer 2012) PHI 109: Introduction to Philosophy, Honors (Spring 2012) PHI 107: Theories of Knowledge and Reality (Fall 2009, Summer 2010, 2011, 2012, Spring 2011) HONORS & AWARDS: 2015 Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant (TCU) 2013 Departmental Summer Research Fellowship (Syracuse) 2011 Graduate Student Paper Award, Creighton Club: New York Philosophical Association Meetings 2011 Outstanding TA Award (Syracuse) 2011 Departmental Summer Research Fellowship (Syracuse) 2009 Departmental Summer Research Fellowship (Syracuse) 3

4 2008 Departmental Summer Research Fellowship (Syracuse) 2006 M. Holmes Hartshorne Memorial Award for Excellence in Philosophy (Colgate) PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY & SERVICE: 2016 Chair at the Pacific APA for Derk Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, Author Meets Critics Session, April Organizer, Junior Metaphysics Workshop, TCU March Search Committee, Department of Philosophy, TCU ( ) 2015 Search Committee, Honors Program, TCU ( ) 2013 Curriculum development, Onondaga Community College; consultant on grant proposal and syllabus construction for PHI 108 (Environmental Ethics), as part of the Sustainability Program (with Dave Bzdack and Patrick Denny) 2012 Graduate student organizer for SPAWN (Syracuse Philosophy Annual Workshop and Network), Normative Realism, August Chair at the Pacific APA for Stephen Morris, Vargas-style Revisionism and the Problem of Desert, Comments by Joseph Campbell Philosophy Department Representative, Syracuse University Graduate Student Organization 2010 Co-organizer, Women in Philosophy Group, Syracuse University Philosophy Department (with Kirsten Egerstrom and Sarah Morales) Graduate Student President, Syracuse University Philosophy Department 2009 Co-organizer, Syracuse University Philosophy Graduate Conference, April 2009 (with Aaron Wolf) DISSERTATION ABSTRACT: Revisionism is the view that we would do well to distinguish between what we think about moral responsibility and what we ought to think about it, that the former is in some important sense implausible and conflicts with the latter, and so we should revise our concept of moral responsibility accordingly. There are three main challenges for a successful revisionist account of moral responsibility. It must meet (i) the diagnostic challenge of identifying our folk concept and provide good reason to think that significant features of this concept are implausible, (ii) the motivational challenge and explain why, in light of this implausibility, our folk concept ought to be revised rather than eliminated, and (iii) the prescriptive 4

5 challenge and provide an account of how, all things considered, we ought to revise our thinking about moral responsibility. While the first of these three challenges is primarily concerned with the nature of our concepts, the latter two move to questions about whether or not, to use Dennett s terms, we can defend and accept an account of moral responsibility worth wanting. Revisionists must provide a naturalistically plausible, normatively adequate prescriptive account of responsibility free of the putatively error-ridden features of our folk concept, and capable of justifying our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. In my dissertation I raise a new problem for revisionism, the normativity-anchoring problem. The heart of this problem is that the methodological commitments used to motivate revisionism and distinguish the view from conventional theorizing about moral responsibility make it uniquely difficult for revisionists to justify our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. Following Manuel Vargas, who has thus far developed and defended the view most rigorously, revisionists endorse the following skeptical claim: it is possible that our intuitions fail to inform us about what responsibility is, and furthermore we lack good epistemic reasons for thinking that they ever do. For conventional theorists, the fact that a particular account of responsibility best aligns with our refined intuitions, beliefs, and theoretical commitments is reason enough, ceteris paribus, to endorse that view. But revisionists who endorse the skeptical claim must find some alternative method. One alternative, suggested by Vargas himself, is to show that the prescriptive account in question justifies our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming, and preserves the "work of the concept." However, I argue that Vargas' own claim that the prescriptive account he offers promotes an independently valuable form of agency fails to bridge the gap between axiological claims about value and normative claims about how we should treat responsible agents. Moreover, bridging this gap looks to be a serious problem for any form of revisionism which shares the methodological commitments used to motivate the view thus far. So, further development of revisionism requires having a solution to the normativity-anchoring problem in hand. I go on to develop a new revisionist strategy capable of avoiding the normativity-anchoring problem. I propose and defend a new methodological assumption that I argue revisionists can and should accept, capable of preserving the skeptical spirit of revisionism while identifying a particular class of intuitions about moral responsibility as having a relatively uncontroversial epistemic status. In particular, I argue that revisionists can and should accept that widespread judgments about responsibility generated by concrete cases which elicit a strong affective response in the person making the judgment have adequate epistemic standing to constrain our responsibility theorizing. My arguments in support of this assumption depend on an analogy between the responsibility judgments in question and the kinds of paradigmatic judgments which constrain our ethical theorizing more generally. Having established this analogy I then offer a series of companions-in-guilt style arguments for the claim that the epistemic status of these two kinds of judgments should stand and fall together. I conclude that the responsibility judgments in question should ultimately share the same uncontroversial status as similar ethical judgments. The assumption I defend therefore preserves the motivating skeptical spirit of revisionism, while still leaving revisionists with a class of relatively uncontroversial intuitions that can be used to constrain and potentially normatively anchor the prescriptive account of moral responsibility they endorse. 5

6 In addition to the research program described above I have broader interests in free will, metaphysics, ethics, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy. I am currently extending the line of research pursued in my dissertation, focusing on the methodological issues raised in the final chapter in particular. I am also working on two new independent projects. The first examines whether or not new Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities which appeal to time travel (recently put forth by Joshua Spencer) can in fact deliver the advantages they claim to over more traditional cases. I argue that they cannot, and furthermore that the very features of the case which provide some advantages over traditional cases actually leave the new case particularly susceptible to a dilemma objection. Second, I am currently pursuing research on the nature of moral blame. I am especially interested in defending a view that takes our blaming practices to be essentially communicative, and to explore the implications of this view for broader issues in work on moral responsibility and ethics. 6