My research has focused on understanding the deliberative point of view in practical reason to shed light on fundamental questions related to legal philosophy and private law theory. I am interested in how we think about what is valuable at the collective, political, and individual level, as well as how our collective and individual thinking shapes our desires about what is worth pursuing and what is good. I rely on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Aristotle, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Plato, Murdoch, John Finnis, Joseph Raz, and Bernard Williams to better understand how we grasp the good and how we fail to engage with it.
My monograph Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective and Civic Maturity (OUP, 2025) aims to illuminate a number of puzzles about responsibility for negligence in both ethics and law.
Negligent or inadvertent action in both law and ethics is a matter of agency. The pre-theoretical and philosophical views agree that we are responsible for things that we do intentionally, but it is less clear whether we are responsible for inadvertent or negligent actions. The law of negligence in tort law attributes responsibility for inadvertent acts, while in ethics there is deep and serious scepticism about the responsibility for negligent or inadvertent action. How can we be responsible for things that happen beyond the realm of our knowledge or control?
Positioned at the intersection of law and ethics, Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective and Civic Maturity responds to these fundamental questions by advancing the idea that the underpinning feature of negligent or inadvertent acts is the phenomenon of akrasia - the lack of integration of character and intelligent thinking. When we act akratically, we are acting contrary to our deliberated intention, due to an uneven development of character and thoughts about what is right, dutiful, and good. Using an Aristotelian-inspired model of deliberation, the book illustrates how legal decisions in negligence invite citizens to adopt a deliberative-aspirational perspective. This perspective encourages them to reshape, redescribe, and rethink their duties of care to meet the aspirational standard of the reasonable person. Consequently, the book argues that the purpose of negligence law is to promote values of citizen engagement and civic maturity. Combining tort law theory, Aristotelian conceptions of deliberation, and theories of practical rationality, responsibility, and action, this book invites us to rethink private law's purpose and methodology.
I am also writing a monograph on the question of the good, and common good and its relationship to responsibility at legal, moral, and political levels (contracted by CUP). Finally, I am editing a volume on Bernard Williams’s legal philosophy and methodology (contracted by Hart).
I have published a book , which argues that the classical model of intentional action in terms of the ‘guise of the good’ model a) provides the framework for a sound understanding of the normative and authoritative character of law and b) gives the theoretical grounds to dissolve the paradox of legal authority. The title of the monograph is Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good.
My publications on meta-ethics and legal theory aim to advance a better understanding of the relationship between legal and moral objectivity. I am also interested in, and have written on, the methodological problems in legal theory, i.e. the distinction between normative and descriptive jurisprudence, the nature of conceptual analysis, the search for an adequate formulation of the idea of paradigm in law.