- Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 1982
- B.A., Oberlin College, 1976
Marcia Baron
Rudy Professor Emeritus, Philosophy
- mbaron@iu.edu
- Office Hours
Education
About Marcia Baron
Marcia Baron's research focuses on moral philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophy of criminal law. Topics she has written on include impartiality in ethics, and the apparent conflicts between on the one hand, loyalty, patriotism, friendship and love, and on the other, impartiality; manipulativeness; self-defense; the provocation defense; mens rea issues, including whether negligence should suffice for criminal liability; sexual consent; justifications and excuses; the value of acting from duty (and just how acting from duty should be understand); and virtue ethics. She is interested in the history of ethics, and has written extensively on Kant's ethics and less extensively on Hume's; she also has an interest in liberalism and political philosophy more generally. She is currently working on a book on self-defense and the reasonable belief requirement.
Selected publications
“Excuses and Exemptions: Is it Really a Mistake to Understand the Category of Excuses to Include Exemptions?” Criminal Law and Philosophy (2026).
“Recklessness and Negligence in the Criminal Law,” Routledge International Handbook on Criminal Responsibility, edited by Thomas Crofts, Louise Kennefick, and Arlie Loughnan (Routledge, 2024).
"Mens Rea,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Punishment, ed. Jesper Ryberg (OUP, 2024).
"Negligence, Mens Rea, and What We Want the Element of Mens Rea to Provide." Criminal Law and Philosophy (2020).
“Sexual Consent, Reasonable Mistakes, and the Case of Anna Stubblefield,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (2018).
"Shame and Shamelessness." Philosophia (2018).
"Rethinking ‘One Thought Too Many’." Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (2017).
"A Kantian Take on the Supererogatory," Journal of Applied Philosophy (2016).
“Rape, Seduction, Purity, and Shame in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” in Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel, edited by Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum (OUP, 2013).
Three Methods of Ethics (with Philip Pettit and Michael Slote), Blackwell, 1997.
Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology (Cornell, 1995).
The College of Arts