Rodriguez-Blanco's Website

My research begins from the deliberative point of view: the standpoint from which we ask not merely what happens, but what is worth doing; not merely what the law commands, but how law speaks to us as agents capable of judgment, aspiration, failure, and renewal. I am interested in the ways in which we come to understand value at the collective, political, and individual levels, and in how our shared and personal forms of thought shape our desires about what is worth pursuing and what can properly be called good.

This inquiry has led me to a tradition of philosophical reflection in which practical reason is not a detached calculation, but a living activity of the person. I draw on Elizabeth Anscombe, Aristotle, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Plato, Iris Murdoch, John Finnis, Joseph Raz, and Bernard Williams in order to illuminate how we grasp the good, how we lose sight of it, and how our failures of attention, character, and understanding become visible in law, ethics, and political life.

In Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law: Aspiration, Perspective and Civic Maturity, I address a puzzle that lies at the heart of both ethics and law. We ordinarily think that responsibility attaches most clearly to what we do intentionally. Yet many of the most important failures for which law holds us responsible are not fully intentional at all. They are negligent, inadvertent, inattentive, careless, or insufficiently responsive to the claims of others. Tort law attributes responsibility for such failures, while moral philosophy has often regarded responsibility for inadvertent action with deep scepticism. How, then, can we be responsible for what lies beyond the immediate realm of knowledge or control?

The book answers this question by treating negligent action as a matter of agency. Its central claim is that the deepest feature of negligence is a form of akrasia: a lack of integration between character, attention, and intelligent thought about what is right, dutiful, and good. When we act akratically, we do not simply make an external mistake. We reveal a fracture within practical reason itself — a failure to bring our deliberated commitments, our perception of the situation, and our settled dispositions into proper relation.

Using an Aristotelian-inspired model of deliberation, I argue that legal decisions in negligence invite citizens to redescribe their conduct and rethink their duties of care in light of the aspirational standard of the reasonable person. On this view, the law of negligence is not only a mechanism of correction or compensation. It is also a public practice through which citizens are encouraged to cultivate forms of attention, judgment, and responsiveness appropriate to a shared civic world. The purpose of negligence law, therefore, is tied to the promotion of citizen engagement and civic maturity.

My broader work extends this concern with agency and value into the question of the good and the common good. I am currently writing a two-volume monograph on the relationship between the good, the common good, and Socratic autonomy at legal, moral, and political levels. This project asks how responsibility changes when we understand ourselves not as isolated choosers, but as participants in shared forms of life whose goods are partially constituted by common practices, institutions, and relationships. What I call 'Socratic Autonomy' is at the heart of a plausible answer.

I have recently edited a volume on Bernard Williams’s legal philosophy and methodology. Williams’s work offers a powerful resource for thinking about truthfulness, political realism, and the limits of moral theory. Bringing his insights into conversation with jurisprudence opens new ways of understanding legal methodology, legal authority, and the moral psychology of legal thought.

In Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good, I argue that the classical model of intentional action under the guise of the good provides a framework for understanding the normative and authoritative character of law. The book contends that legal authority becomes less paradoxical when we see law not as an alien force imposed upon agency, but as a practical orientation that can present itself to action as intelligible, choice-worthy, and good-dependent.

My publications in meta-ethics and legal theory pursue related questions about legal and moral objectivity. I have written on the methodological problems of jurisprudence, including the distinction between normative and descriptive legal theory, the nature of conceptual analysis, and the search for an adequate understanding of paradigms in law. Across these projects, the guiding concern remains constant: to understand how law forms, reflects, and sometimes distorts our practical grasp of what matters.