Dr David Edward Campbell

I am an Associate Research Fellow on the ERC funded 'Roots of Responsibility' project which I hold concurrently with a Visiting Researcher position at the Department of Philosophy, UCL. I also hold a stipendiary lectureship in Law at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. I have conducted my PhD research at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin where I was co-convenor of the Irish Jurisprudence Society. I have also been called to the Bar of Ireland.

My current research straddles moral and legal philosophy and focuses on determining necessary conditions under which blame and/or responsibility may legitimately be ascribed and how such ascriptions may find expression in criminal law and the law of torts. My research is conducted through the Roots of Responsibility project. The project seeks to advance the traditional philosophical debates about responsibility and free will by exploring the network of human capacities responsibility involves and the social, institutional and interpersonal contexts in which questions about responsibility arise.

Roots of Responsibility draws on legal theory, which contains a rich literature on the relationships between responsibility, liability and culpability; biological systems theory, which has shown how the activity of more complex systems can harness stochasticity in the activity of the less complex systems of which they are composed; and the philosophy of action, in which the physical, psychological, ethical and intellectual dimensions of human agency are now more clearly articulated and better understood. The Roots of Responsibility will draw on all of these resources, cutting across traditional boundaries between metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of law.

I teach Criminal Law, Jurisprudence and Foundation Year law courses at LMH.