Gary L. Watson

Active contributor to philosophical debates about responsibility and its relevance to moral and legal assessment. For over three decades work led to breakthroughs on a set of related topics including agency, free action, responsibility, practical reason, addiction, and other forms of diminished capacity. Influential writings-including Free Agency (1975), Skepticism about Weakness of the Will (1977), Free Action and Free Will (1987), The Primacy of Character (1990), Two Faces of Responsibility (1996), Disordered Appetites (1999), and Excusing Addition (1999)-are often cited, frequently reprinted, and are routinely assumed to be required reading for both students and other scholars. In addition to illuminating everyday concepts of responsibility, his writing tracks their nuanced engagement with pressing social problems-a point illustrated by his discussion in Responsibility and the Limits of Evil (1987) of our ambivalence about the influence of childhood deprivation on responsibility for later objectionable behavior, and his interpretation in The Trouble with Psychopaths (2011) of the moral significance of the different ways in which the practical reasoning of psychopaths is dysfunctional. Work continues with The Insanity Defense (2012) and Psychopathy and the Failure of Diachronic Agency (2013).