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Discriminate VirtueAustralasian Philosophical Review 6 (2): 180-188. 2022.ABSTRACT Glen Pettigrove’s ‘What Virtue Adds to Value’ maintains that sometimes virtue is fundamental in the order of value, and that we should reject the general thesis that the value of our responses depends on their proportionality to the value of the objects toward which they are directed. He argues that this view is needed to account for the moral phenomena surrounding love, forgiveness and ambition. I object that his view is unable to explain the forms of discrimination that distinguish th…Read more
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Weighing ReasonsIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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41Another Shake of the Bag: Stefansson and Willners on Offsetting and Risk ImpositionEthics, Policy and Environment. forthcoming.There is a difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to who is harmed, and worsening someone’s prospect. This difference is relevant to debates about the ethics of offsetting, since it means that showing that emitting-and-offsetting has the first feature is not a way of showing that it has the second feature. In an earlier paper, we illustrate this difference with an example of a lottery in which you shake the bag from which a ball will be drawn to determine the identit…Read more
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329Neutral and relative valueIn J. Olson & I. Hirose (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 96-116. 2015.This Handbook focuses on value theory as it pertains to ethics, broadly construed, and provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary debates pertaining not only to philosophy but also to other disciplines-most notably, political theory...
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Stupid GoodnessIn Karen Jones & François Schroeter (eds.), The many moral rationalisms, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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151Participatory Moral Reasons: Their Scope and StrengthJournal of Practical Ethics. forthcoming.A familiar part of ordinary moral thought is this idea: when other people are doing something worthwhile together, there is a reason for you to join in on the same terms as them. Morality does not tell you that you must always do this; but it exerts some pressure on you to join in. Suppose we take this idea seriously: just how should it be developed and applied? More particularly, just which groups and which actions are the ones with respect to which you have participatory moral reasons? And jus…Read more
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The moral, the personal and the politicalIn Igor Primoratz (ed.), Politics and morality, Palgrave-macmillan. 2007.
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Deliberative restriction and professional rolesIn Tim Dare & Christine Swanton (eds.), Perspectives in Role Ethics: Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation, Routledge. 2019.
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405Do We Impose Undue Risk When We Emit and Offset? A Reply to StefanssonEthics, Policy and Environment 25 (3): 242-248. 2022.ABSTRACT We have previously argued that there are forms of greenhouse gas offsetting for which, when one emits and offsets, one imposes no risk. Orri Stefansson objects that our argument fails to distinguish properly between the people who stand to be harmed by one’s emissions and the people who stand to be benefited by one’s offsetting. We reply by emphasizing the difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to the distribution of harm and acting in a way that worsen’s so…Read more
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23Précis: Concern, Respect, and CooperationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2): 489-494. 2022.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 489-494, March 2022.
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32Foundations, Derivations, Applications: Replies to Bykvist, Arpaly, Steele, and TenenbaumPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2): 519-533. 2022.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 519-533, March 2022.
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48Moral Disagreement, Self-Trust, and ComplacencyEthical Theory and Moral Practice 1-15. 2021.For many of the moral beliefs we hold, we know that other people hold moral beliefs that contradict them. If you think that moral beliefs can be correct or incorrect, what difference should your awareness of others’ disagreement make to your conviction that you, and not those who think otherwise, have the correct belief? Are there circumstances in which an awareness of others’ disagreement should lead you to suspend a moral belief? If so, what are they, and why? This paper argues that three prin…Read more
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35Liberty, Security, and FairnessThe Journal of Ethics 25 (2): 141-159. 2021.What constraints should be imposed on individual liberty for the sake of protecting our collective security? A helpful approach to answering this question is offered by a theory that grounds political obligation and authority in a moral requirement of fair contribution to mutually beneficial cooperative schemes. This approach encourages us to split the opening question into two—a question of correctness and a question of legitimacy—and generates a detailed set of answers to both subsidiary quest…Read more
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163Offsetting and Risk ImpositionEthics 132 (2): 352-381. 2022.Suppose you perform two actions. The first imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but the second reduces the risk of harm by a corresponding amount. By pairing the two actions together to form a set of actions that is risk-neutral, can you thereby make your overall course of conduct permissible? This question is theoretically interesting, because the answer is apparently: sometimes Yes, sometimes No. It is also practically important, because it bears on the moral status of …Read more
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28Review of Russell Hardin: One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict (review)Ethics 107 (2): 361-363. 1997.
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20Free ridingIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley. pp. 2220-227. 2022.“Free riding,” used as a descriptive term, refers to taking a jointly produced benefit without contributing towards its production. Used as a term of criticism, it refers to the wrongful failure to contribute towards the joint production of benefits that one receives. On either usage, the central interest of moral philosophy in free riding is the same: to specify the conditions under which not contributing towards the joint production of benefits that one receives is wrong, and to explain why.
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19Aid, Ethics ofIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley. pp. 178-184. 2022.Aid, in the sense of coordinated, voluntary material assistance provided by well‐off groups to address the needs of the less well off, can be divided into two broad categories.
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10ImpartialityIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley. pp. 2560-2566. 2022.Impartiality is primarily a feature of normative or evaluative deliberation – deliberation about what ought to be done or about something's goodness or badness. An initial description is this: such deliberation is impartial when it is not unduly influenced by the deliberator's own interests, preferences, or loyalties. Derivatively, impartiality can be attributed to actions that are guided by deliberation with this feature, or persons who characteristically deliberate or act in this way.
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15CharityIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley. pp. 738-744. 2022.In the tradition of Western ethical thought, “charity” refers to two ideas. Although now distinguishable, they are historically connected. The first is an attitude: the attitude of selfless love which is treated in the Christian tradition as the most fundamental of the virtues. The second is a kind of action: the action of rendering material assistance to those who need it. Derivative from this second idea is the current use of “a charity” to refer to an organization through which such assistanc…Read more
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3The Limits of Kindness, by Caspar Hare: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. xi + 229, £25.00 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 791-794. 2014.
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51Climate HarmsThe Monist 102 (1): 22-41. 2019.How should we think of the relationship between the climate harms that people will suffer in the future and our current emissions activity? Who does the harming, and what are the moral implications? One way to address these questions appeals to facts about the expected harm associated with one’s own individual energy-consuming activity, and argues that it is morally wrong not to offset one’s own personal carbon emissions. The first half of the article questions the strength of this argument. The…Read more
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34Mancilla, Alejandra. The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Pp. 140. $90.00 ; $29.95 (review)Ethics 128 (1): 260-264. 2017.Garrett Cullity.
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33Demandingness, 'ought', and self-shapingIn Marcel van Ackeren & Michael Kühler (eds.), The Limits of Moral Obligation, Routledge. 2016.Garrett Cullity.
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90Exceptions in Nonderivative ValuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1): 26-49. 2019.According to most substantive axiological theories – theories telling us which things are good and bad – pleasure is nonderivatively good. This seems to imply that it is always good, even when directed towards a bad object, such as another person’s suffering. This implication is accepted by the Mainstream View about misdirected pleasures: it holds that when someone takes pleasure in another person’s suffering, his being pleased is good, although his being pleased by suffering is bad. This view g…Read more