Department of Philosophy

Marcia Baron's research focuses on moral philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophy of law (more specifically, philosophical issues in criminal law). Topics she has written on include impartiality in ethics, and the apparent conflicts between loyalty, patriotism, friendship and love, and impartiality; manipulativeness; self-defense; the "heat of passion" defense; mens rea issues, including whether negligence should be considered a sufficient mens rea, and more broadly, to what standards of self-control and reasonableness people should be held (for the purposes of criminal law); rape and sexual consent; justifications and excuses; the moral significance of appearances; 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.