In this reply, I seek to summarize fairly the criticisms advanced by each of my four critics, Jonathan Schaffer, Gideon Yaffe, John Gardner, and Carolina Sartorio. That there is so little overlap either in the aspects of the book on which they focus or in the arguments they advance about those issues has forced me to reply to each of them separately. Schaffer focuses much of his criticisms on my view that absences cannot serve as causal relata and argues that (...) this commits me to the view that double preventions cannot be causal of events such as deaths. I deny that double preventions such as beheadings are not causal, while admitting that other double preventions are not causal but denying that this latter conclusion is unwelcome in its implications. Yaffe criticizes my view that a person substantially causing some harm H is sufficient for that person having performed the activity of H-ing, whereas I affirm that causing H is sufficient for doing the action of H-ing even if it is not sufficient for intentionally H-ing. Gardner takes issue with my “experiential argument” for the relevance of causation to moral blame; he urges that we cannot infer that we are more guilty from either the psychological fact that we feel more guilty or from the moral fact that it is virtuous to feel such heightened guilt, because it is viciously circular: we feel such guilt only because we have already judged that we are more guilty, and it is virtuous to feel such guilt only because we in fact are more guilty. I deny such circularity exists. Sartorio takes issue with my thesis that in omissive overdetermination cases neither omitter is morally responsible for the harm. I trade intuitions with Sartorio about a range of related cases that we each think bears on the issue. (shrink)

The 2016, the UK Supreme Court case of Jogee confirmed a long-standing convention in English law. In cases where D is assisting or encouraging P to commit an offence, D will only be liable as an accessory for that offence if she intentionally assists or encourages P and if she knows the essential features of the offence. In this paper, I discuss and develop some of the arguments from Sanford Kadish’s 1996 article “Reckless Complicity.” I argue that a special sub-category (...) of complicity, namely ‘enabling’, can be done recklessly, and is sufficiently blameworthy to ground criminal liability. (shrink)

Complicity marks out a way that one person can be liable to sanctions for the wrongful conduct of another. After describing the concept and role of complicity in the law, I argue that much of the motivation for presenting complicity as a separate basis of criminal liability is misplaced; paradigmatic cases of complicity can be assimilated into standard causation-based accounts of criminal liability. But unlike others who make this sort of claim I argue that there is still room for genuine (...) complicity in the law and in morality. In defending this claim, I sketch an approach to complicity which grounds our liability for what others do not in our causal relation to their actions but in our “agency-relations” with others. In such cases, one agent can be liable for the wrongs of second agent to the extent that first authorizes the second to act at her behest. This approach fills the gap where standard causation-based accounts of complicity fail – especially in where several agents cooperatively contribute to an overdetermined harm. (shrink)

My Ph.D. thesis œImpossibilità nel diritto€ [Impossibility in the Legal Domain] is devoted to the systematic analyses of what are called, at least prima facie, €œlegal impossibilities. My dissertation defines and isolates an area of studies - impossibility in the law - that has never been put organically together. In my work I present some case studies of normative impossibilities and discuss them from a philosophical point of view: impossible laws, impossible norms in a prescriptive theory of norms (ch. 2), (...) conflicting norms and legal gaps (metanormative impossibility - ch. 3), impossible obligations (ch. 4), impossible crimes (ch. 5), impossible legal proofs (ch. 6). I organize my research along the distinction -€“ introduced in ch. 1 -€“ between impossibility of norms (i.e. impossible norms and impossible normative acts) and impossibility from norms (i.e. impossibility due to a norm or a set of norms); the distinction between the impossibility of a norm conceived as a single entity and the impossibility of a norm conceived as part of a legal system; and the distinction of two uses of impossibilities in general, as impossibility can be both the object of a modal qualification and a modality itself. I propose four new contributions to the study of impossibility in the legal domain (ch. 7). Firstly, I reconstruct two different functions of the impossibility in the legal domain (exculpatory and invalidating); secondly, I put forward a triadic model for describing impossibility in the legal domain (in which, roughly, a set of sources of impossibilities is qualified by a function for the assumption of impossibility in the actual and concrete legal system); thirdly, I define and investigate the relationship of creation, assumption and presupposition between impossibility and a legal system; fourthly, I critically list and review all the different kinds of things that are called €˜impossibilities€™ inside a legal system, showing how sometimes the use of the concept of impossibility is not carefully justified. As an appendix (ch. 8), I outline a logic for impossibilities in the legal domain that allows to investigate the phenomena discussed in the work by breaking down the equivalence between being impossible (in the legal domain) and being logically contradictory. (shrink)