Helen's research interests lie mainly in the the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, and in the metaphysical and ontological issues which bear on these areas (e.g. causation, supervenience, levels of explanation, the event/state distinction).
The metaphysics of free will is a particular interest, and her new book 'A Metaphysics for Freedom' (OUP) was published in March 2012. This book argues for a distinctive version of incompatibilism, based on the idea that there is a conflict not only between determinism and free human action, but also between determinism and the activities of a wide variety of animals.
Recently, Helen has turned her attention to work on the category of process, and in particular its relevance to agency, for which she was awarded a British Academy Research Development Award in 2010-11. Future plans include the further development of this work on processes, as well as the wider investigation of the philosophical implications of a full-blown recognition (for personal identity, emotions, embodied experience, etc.) of the animality of human beings.
Helen is an associate editor for the journal Philosophical Explorations and a member of the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society. She is currently also Director of Student Education in the School of Humanities in Leeds.
ABSTRACT OF BUDAPEST TALK:
There is a long-standing debate in the literature on moral responsibility about the general idea that there is some sort of control condition on our assignment of blameworthiness to agents. In this paper, I try to defend the claims of a very ordinary, everyday locution to offer the best means of formulating a version of the control principle that stands some chance of fitting with our ethical intuitions. The locution whose merits I intend to champion is the ‘can’t help it’ locution, as used in the phrase ‘I can’t help it’, I couldn’t help it’, ‘I can’t help that’, etc.. Because the locution is in a certain sense colloquial, it tends to be avoided in philosophical discussion when getting down to precise details – though it often appears in initial, stage-setting statements of the philosophical problems surrounding the issue of control and blame. My claim here will be that none of the commonly utilised locutions with which it tends to be replaced is able properly to express the sorts of things we can express by saying, for example, ‘I couldn’t help it’. Being able to help it, I shall argue, is a distinctive and important power, and for a number of significant reasons, no other way of saying what kind of control is needed for blameworthiness will do as well.