Dr Alexander Greenberg
About
Biography
Alexander joined the Surrey Law School in 2025 as a Lecturer in Law. He has previously had positions at Southampton, UCL, Birkbeck, Oxford, Cambridge, and Gothenburg. His research background was in philosophy, but he became interested in the law (especially criminal law) at a postdoctoral stage. He has a PhD and MPhil from Cambridge, a BA from UCL, and a GDL from Oxford Brookes.
His work has been published in The Cambridge Law Journal, Criminal Law and Philosophy, The Philosophical Quarterly, European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and Synthese.
ResearchResearch interests
Alexander's research is at the intersection of philosophy and law (especially criminal, but increasingly tort). He is interested in the role of mental concepts in rules for determining legal responsibility, concepts like intention, awareness, belief, knowledge, and foreseeability. His research looks at discussions of these mental concepts in philosophy of mind and action can both inform – and be informed by – legal debates featuring those concepts. He has written about the justifiability of criminalizing negligence and blaming for culpable ignorance, on the significance of the recklessness/negligence distinction, and on legal standards of proof. Before his research took a legal turn, he mainly worked in epistemology and philosophy of mind.
Research interests
Alexander's research is at the intersection of philosophy and law (especially criminal, but increasingly tort). He is interested in the role of mental concepts in rules for determining legal responsibility, concepts like intention, awareness, belief, knowledge, and foreseeability. His research looks at discussions of these mental concepts in philosophy of mind and action can both inform – and be informed by – legal debates featuring those concepts. He has written about the justifiability of criminalizing negligence and blaming for culpable ignorance, on the significance of the recklessness/negligence distinction, and on legal standards of proof. Before his research took a legal turn, he mainly worked in epistemology and philosophy of mind.
Publications
Could you have taken precautions against a risk you were unaware of? This question lies at the heart of debates in ethics and legal philosophy concerning whether it's justifiable to blame or punish those who cause harm inadvertently or out of ignorance. But the question is crucially ambiguous, depending on what is understood to be inside or outside the scope of the 'could'. And this ambiguity undermines a number of arguments purporting to show that inadvertent wrongdoers cannot justifiably be blamed or punished. While not all opposition to blaming or punishing inadvertent wrongdoers rests on this ambiguity, some certainly does. And getting clear on this ambiguity is important if we're to sort good arguments against blaming and punishing inadvertent wrongdoers – if there are any – from bad ones.