About

Hannah Tierney joined the UC Davis Department of Philosophy in 2020 as an Associate Professor. Prior to her appointment at UC Davis, she was a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 2018 to 2020, where she is currently an honorary associate. She also held the position of Stanford H. Taylor postdoctoral associate in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University from 2016 to 2018. She completed her PhD in philosophy at the University of Arizona in 2016. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics, cognitive science, and metaphysics, with particular emphasis on issues related to free will, moral responsibility, and personal identity. She teaches courses in ethics and cognitive science, contributing to the department's academic offerings in these areas.

Research topics

• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Political Science
• Theology
• Law
• Psychoanalysis
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• The Risky Business of Forgiveness

  2026-05-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract There is a noted tension between two independently plausible features of forgiveness: (R) Forgiveness is reasoned: it is something that agents do for reasons, and (E) Forgiveness is elective: it is not something that agents can be required to do or refrain from doing. It has recently been argued that, if something is done for reasons, then those reasons can, at least sometimes, generate a requirement for an agent to do that thing. So, those who wish to defend both (R) and (E) must deny that reasons to forgive can be requiring. This chapter aims to do exactly this. By drawing on the distinction between synchronic and diachronic blameworthiness, and focusing on the ways in which forgiveness is risky, this chapter presents an account of forgiveness that is both reasoned and elective.

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• Real Forgiveness

  Australasian Journal of Philosophy · 2025-09-29

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Do conspiracy-theory interventions rest on a mistake?

  Synthese · 2025-09-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In this paper we argue that the problem of conspiracy theories circulating through specific social groups runs deeper than is appreciated. The epistemic networks involved in the propagation of conspiracy theories cannot always be deemed to be irrational, with motivated reasoning at their heart. There are, after all, rational epistemic bubbles—those that rightly ignore unreliable information sources. We provide a rational reconstruction of conspiratorial thinking, which suggests that, under such a characterisation, many interventions aimed at reducing conspiracy belief are no longer tenable. In particular, we argue that popular competence and containment strategies discussed in the philosophical and psychological literatures and pursued by governments and social media corporations are not fit for purpose.

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• Forgetting to Un-Forgive

  Revista de Estudios Sociales · 2023-10-26

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Much of the literature on forgiveness is dedicated to understanding the reasons to forgive and what changes in attitude are required to do so. But philosophers have been much less attentive to what happens after agents forgive. This is a serious oversight, since the reasons to forgive do not always retain their force and it is not always possible, or advisable, to maintain the changes in attitudes that forgiveness requires. Fortunately, Monique Wonderly has begun to fill this lacuna in the literature with her recent work on un-forgiveness. According to the author, un-forgiveness involves altering our attitudes, by either reinhabiting an adversarial stance towards an agent for their wrongdoing and/or returning one’s relationship with them to the state it was in prior to forgiveness taking place. While Wonderly’s account of un-forgiveness is both novel and illuminating, it is incomplete. In this paper, we argue that one can also un-forgive by forgetting that the wrong in question occurred and/or that the previously forgiven agent was the perpetrator of the wrong. We contend that not only is it possible to un-forgive by forgetting, but doing so can be both justified and morally important. We defend our view by considering the objection that un-forgiveness by forgetting can negatively impact victims’ relationships with wrongdoers as well as addressing the concern that agents cannot exercise their agency over their memories in order to un-forgive by forgetting.

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• Freedom, moral responsibility, and the failure of universal defeat

  Philosophical Issues · 2023-08-27 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2022, 2023) found that people's judgments were sensitive to manipulation scope: people judged that an agent was less free and responsible when a manipulation was existential (impacting at least one but not all agents) than when the manipulation was universal (impacting every agent). This study examines people's judgements about existential and universal manipulation cases that involve both intentional and non‐intentional outcomes. We found that manipulation scope also affects people's free will and responsibility judgments in manipulation cases involving both intentional and non‐intentional outcomes. Interestingly, we also found that manipulation type influences the effect that manipulation scope has on people's free will judgments but not their moral responsibility judgments, which indicates that people's free will and responsibility judgments can come apart. This puts pressure on the prevalent assumption that judgments about free will and moral responsibility are conceptually bound together.

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• Moral Responsibility, Praise, and Blame

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Cruel Intentions and Evil Deeds

  Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy · 2023-03-31

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What it means for an action to have moral worth, and what is required for this to be the case, is the subject of continued controversy. Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right. Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right. These theorists, though they oppose one another, share something important in common. They focus almost exclusively on the moral worth of right actions. But there is a negatively valenced counterpart that attaches to wrong actions, which we will call moral counterworth. In this paper, we explore the moral counterworth of wrong actions in order to shed new light on the nature of moral worth. Contrary to theorists in both camps, we argue that more than one kind of motivation can affect the moral worth of actions.

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• Moving ego versus moving time: investigating the shared source of future-bias and near-bias

  Synthese · 2023-09-06 · 27 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract It has been hypothesized that our believing that, or its seeming to us as though, the world is in some way dynamical partially explains (and perhaps rationalizes) future-bias. Recent work has, in turn, found a correlation between future-bias and near-bias, suggesting that there is a common explanation for both. Call the claim that what partially explains our being both future- and near-biased is our believing/it seeming to us as though the world is dynamical, the dynamical explanation. We empirically test two versions of the dynamical explanation. The first is the moving ego explanation —according to which it is our belief that the ego moves, or our phenomenology as of the ego moving, that jointly (partially) explains future- and near-bias. The second is the moving time explanation —according to which it is our belief that time robustly passes, or our phenomenology as of robust passage, which jointly (partially) explain future- and near-bias. We found no evidence in favour of either explanation.

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• The Future of the Causal Quest

  2023-06-12 · 3 citations

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  1) If S is manipulated in manner X to A, then S does not A of her own free will and is therefore not morally responsible for A'ing.(2) An agent manipulated in manner X to A is no different in any relevant respect from any normally functioning agent determined to do A from (CAS) [the compatibilist-friendly agential structure].(3) Therefore, if S is a normally functioning agent determined to A from CAS, she does not A on her own free will and therefore is not morally responsible for A'ing (McKenna 2008, p. 143).Deery and Nahmias use a case drawn from Alfred Mele's manipulation argument (2013) to develop their response.First, imagine Danny.One evening in 1986, Danny's parents made love, hoping to conceive a child.They got lucky.A zygote was formed (at time t 1 ), and nine months later Danny was born.Thirty years later, Danny is walking down a deserted street and he finds a wallet with the owner's ID in it and $500.Danny takes himself to have good reasons for keeping the money, but also for returning the wallet.He deliberates for a while, and in the end he decides to keep the money, and he does so (at time t 30 ).Assume that this occurs in a deterministic universe -that is, a universe in which, for each event E, the laws of nature and some set of events that occurred prior to E are such that these events cause E to occur with probability 1.If determinism is true, then some set of events prior to Danny's act of stealing the wallet at t 30 are (together with the laws) such that they cause his deliberating and acting in that way, at that time, with probability 1. (Deery and Nahmias 2017, p. 1257) Compare this to a different case:[A] powerful Goddess, Diana, has the power to know what will happen in the future and to act in ways that ensure that specific events occur in the distant future.Diana has these abilities in part because she exists in a deterministic universe and is able to get enough information about events occurring in it (e.g., at t 1 ) to deduce exactly what she needs to do at that time to ensure that a particular event occurs thirty years later.In this case, Diana assembles atoms in a specific way at t 1 so as to create a zygote that develops into a child, grows up, finds a wallet thirty years later, and at t 30 decides to keep the money it contains.For some reason, Diana wants to ensure that this event occurs at t 30 , and she possesses the power to alter events at t 1 precisely so that she ensures that it does occur.

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• Making Amends

  2022-10-20 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract On one popular approach to blameworthiness, an agent is the fitting target of blame in virtue of culpably doing wrong. But this view faces a puzzle. If an agent culpably performs a wrong action, then this fact will always be true of them, and so they will be the fitting target of blame forever. But this seems counter-intuitive—we typically judge that it is not fitting to blame culpable wrongdoers in perpetuity. So, there must be more to being blameworthy over time than culpable wrongdoing. This chapter defends a reparative account of blameworthiness over time, according to which blameworthy agents have reparative obligations to their victims and remain the fitting target of blame until these obligations are fulfilled.

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Frequent coauthors

• Andrew J. Latham

  Aarhus University

  7 shared

• Kristie Miller

  University of Sydney

  4 shared

• Christian Tarsney

  The University of Texas at Austin

  3 shared

• Somogy Varga

  Aarhus University

  2 shared

• Eyal Tal

  Brandeis University

  1 shared

• James Norton

  University of Tasmania

  1 shared

• Trevor Kvaran

  Georgia State University

  1 shared

• Daniel Telech

  Lund University

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D, Philosophy

  University of Arizona

  2016

Awards & honors

• Shortlisted for the Annette Baier Prize