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132Laws of natureA Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. 2010.A short piece on laws of nature, focusing on "Australian" contributions to the topic, such as the views of Armstrong, Tooley, Lewis, and Ellis.
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116Dispositions and causes (edited book)Clarendon Press ;. 2009.In recent decades, the analysis of causal relations has become a topic of central importance in analytic philosophy. More recently, dispositional properties have also become objects of intense study. Both of these phenomena appear to be intimately related to counterfactual conditionals and other modal phenomena such as objective chance, but little work has been done to directly relate them. This collection contains ten essays by scholars working in both metaphysics and in philosophy of science, …Read more
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90Regulating Social Media as a Public Good: Limiting Epistemic SegregationSocial Epistemology. forthcoming.ABSTRACT The rise of social media has correlated with an increase in political polarization, which many perceive as a threat to public discourse and democratic governance. This paper presents a framework, drawing on social epistemology and the economic theory of public goods, to explain how social media can contribute to polarization, making us collectively poorer, even while it provides a preferable media experience for individual consumers. Collective knowledge and consensus is best served by …Read more
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83Humanitarian Intervention and the Modern State SystemThe Oxford Handbook of Ethics and War. 2015.This chapter argues that, because humanitarian intervention typically involves the military of one state attempting to overthrow another state ’s government, it gives rise to different moral questions from simple cases of interpersonal defensive violence. State sovereignty not only protects institutions within a society that contribute to the satisfaction of individuals’ interests and that cannot be easily restored once overthrown; it also plays a role in the constitution of those interests, whi…Read more
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67We present a probabilistic extension to active path analyses of token causation. The extension uses the generalized notion of intervention presented in : we allow an intervention to set any probability distribution over the intervention variables, not just a single value. The resulting account can handle a wide range of examples. We do not claim the account is complete --- only that it fills an obvious gap in previous active-path approaches. It still succumbs to recent counterexamples by Hiddles…Read more
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60Two of a kind: Are norms of honor a species of morality?Biology and Philosophy 34 (3): 39. 2019.Should the norms of honor cultures be classified as a variety of morality? In this paper, we address this question by considering various empirical bases on which norms can be taxonomically organised. This question is of interest both as an exercise in philosophy of social science, and for its potential implications in meta-ethical debates. Using recent data from anthropology and evolutionary game theory, we argue that the most productive classification emphasizes the strategic role that moral n…Read more
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57Honor and ViolenceHuman Nature 29 (4): 371-389. 2018.We present a theory of honor violence as a form of costly signaling. Two types of honor violence are identified: revenge and purification. Both types are amenable to a signaling analysis whereby the violent behavior is a signal that can be used by out-groups to draw inferences about the nature of the signaling group, thereby helping to solve perennial problems of social cooperation: deterrence and assurance. The analysis shows that apparently gratuitous acts of violence can be part of a system o…Read more
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49Resolutions provide reasons or: “how the Cookie Monster quit cookies”Synthese 199 (1-2): 4829-4840. 2021.Why should we typically act in accordance with our resolutions when faced with the temptation to do otherwise? A much-maligned view suggests that we should do so because resolutions themselves provide us with reasons for action. We defend a version of this view, on which resolutions provide second-order reasons. This account avoids the objections typically taken to be fatal for the view that resolutions are reasons, including the prominent bootstrapping objections.
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42Active dispositionsDissertation, Monash University. 2003.This thesis examines the relationship between dispositional properties (such as solubility and fragility) and causation. It is argued that dispositions are best explained in terms of causal processes. The resulting explanation avoids violating Humean strictures that prohibit necessary connections between distinct existences. It also gives rise to a novel account of the distinction between dispositional and categorical properties.
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37Egalitarianism about Expected UtilityEthics 128 (3): 603-611. 2018.Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey have developed a novel theory of distributive ethics, which incorporates a concern for inequality in both outcomes and life chances. This article demonstrates that their attempt to measure life chances is problematic for two reasons. First, it cannot be generalized to variable population cases without inheriting the problems of average utilitarianism. Second, it does not consistently respect the very ideas that were used to motivate the proposal.
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34Green beards and signaling: Why morality is not indispensableBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
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20Explaining costly religious practices: credibility enhancing displays and signaling theoriesSynthese 200 (3): 1-32. 2022.This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays. Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks is unclear, and research which engages bo…Read more
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17Review of Gerald F. Gaus: The Open Society and its Complexities (review)Ethics 134 (1): 131-136. 2023.