This essay provides a short overview, written for an interdisciplinary volume, of a theme I’ve pursued in previous work. A number of influential schools of thought converge on the view that human beings are self-creating. This constructive view of the self presents our normative systems, primarily those of morality and law, with an additional task: not only to guide us in what to do but also to shape who we are. Consequently, when devising behavior-guiding norms we must ask: what subjects will emerge from the practices and activities generated by a particular set of norms? And what considerations bear on the construction of selves through our normative engagements? I sketch some preliminary steps toward exploring this largely uncharted terrain.

This paper explores the relationship between moral luck and personal identity. Focusing on the notion of constitutive luck, I argue that although fortuitous circumstances often define our identity, our identity is nonetheless immune to luck. The argument revolves around the notion of regret. Bad luck is regrettable. But one cannot coherently regret the occurrence of constitutive circumstances and wish them to be otherwise, because this would amount to wishing to be someone else: conditions of personal identity set the limits on the counter-factuals about ourselves that we can intelligibly entertain.

The question of corporate criminal liability should be split into (at least) two questions: (1) Should corporations be subject to criminal sanctions? (2) Should these sanctions be subject to the same substantive, procedural, and evidentiary constraints as those that apply in the case of individual defendants? I argue for a positive answer to the first question, and a negative answer to the second.

The value of ownership is ordinarily thought to derive from the benefits that objects offer, and from the rights to those benefits in which ownership is thought to consist. This dominant view leaves important aspects of ownership unexplained: the value collectors attach to owning worthless objects, pride of ownership, the per se wrongfulness of trespass, and others. As a solution to these puzzles the paper argues that property's relationship to the self resembles the body's: both fall within the scope of "I", thus licensing the use of the possessive pronoun "my" to describe the relationship. Consequently, like the body, property too can activate values and attitudes, such as autonomy, dignity, and pride, that have an individual human being as their target.

In this lecture, presented at a German-Israeli conference on Dignity and the Criminal Law held in Jerusalem in January 2009, I track the idea of human dignity to its two main sources, the Old Testament notion of Imago Dei and Kant’s doctrine of the noumenal self. I then draw some implications that the provenance of dignity, so understood, has on the use of this concept in a number of contemporary debates.

How do the practices listed in the subtitle manage to forestall negative reactive attitudes, such as resentment and guilt, and render them no longer appropriate? I argue that these “revisionary practices” redraw the self’s temporal boundary to exclude the wrongful act, thus releasing the wrongdoer from continuing to bear responsibility for that act.

Can one person's mental states, such as intentions or emotions, affect others even in the absence of any action or expression on that person's part? Contrary to a widely shared assumption, I argue for a positive answer. The assumption, I claim, rests on the view that a person's thoughts are by themselves neither knowable by others nor do they have causal efficacy with regard to them. The assumption can be refuted, accordingly, by recognizing other cases in which a person will be said to be affected by an event about which he knows not and in the absence of a causal link. Our willingness to acknowledge that a disaster befell a father whose son was killed in an accident, unbeknownst to him, provides such an example. The account of this case I propose highlights the fact that being a father is a relational property: it is defined in terms of the father's relation to the son, whom I call "the relational term." The accident can be said to have affected the father despite the absence of a causal link because it did causally affect the relational term, i.e., the son. The crucial step in the argument is to recognize that one person's mental state can also be the relational term that defines another's relational property, thus providing a medium for non-causal effects on the latter. The argument has wide normative implications, illustrated by a discussion of the legal treatment of hate speech, and broader philosophical ramifications, concerning "externalist" views of the mind and their bearing on the limits of individualism.

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