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228Ethics and practical reason (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1997.These thirteen new, specially written essays by a distinguished international line-up of contributors, including some leading contemporary moral philosophers, give a rich and varied view of current work on ethics and practical reason. The three main perspectives on the topic, Kantian, Humean, and Aristotelian, are all well represented. Issues covered include: the connection between reason and motivation; the source of moral reasons and their relation to reasons of self-interest; the relation of …Read more
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36The term ‘moral judgement’ can refer to an activity, a state, a state-content, a capacity or a virtue. The activity of moral judgement is that of thinking about whether something has a moral attribute. The thing assessed might be an action, person, institution or state of affairs, and the attribute might either be general (such as rightness or badness) or specific (such as loyalty or injustice). If I engage in this activity and make up my mind, then the result will be the formation of a psycholo…Read more
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255Stupid GoodnessIn Karen Jones & François Schroeter (eds.), The Many Moral Rationalisms, Oxford Univerisity Press. 2018.In Paradise Lost, Satan’s first sight of Eve in Eden renders him “Stupidly good”: his state is one of admirable yet inarticulate responsiveness to reasons. Turning from fiction to real life, I argue that this is an important moral phenomenon, but one that has limits. The essay examines three questions about the relation between having a reason and saying what it is – between normativity and articulacy. Is it possible to have and respond to morally relevant reasons without being able to articulat…Read more
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515Weighing reasonsIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. 2018.What is involved in weighing normative reasons against each other? One attractive answer offers us the following Simple Picture: a fact is a reason for action when it bears to an action the normative relation of counting in its favour; this relation comes in different strengths or weights; the weights of the reasons for and against an action can be summed; the reasons for performing the action are sufficient when no other action is more strongly supported, overall; the reasons are decisive when …Read more
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432Moral Virtues and Responsiveness for ReasonsIn Stewart Braun & Noell Birondo (eds.), Virtue's Reasons: New Essays on Virtue, Character, and Reasons, Routledge. pp. 11-31. 2017.Moral discourse contains judgements of two prominent kinds. It contains deontic judgements about rightness and wrongness, obligation and duty, and what a person ought to do. As I understand them, these deontic judgements are normative: they express conclusions about the bearing of normative reasons on the actions and other responses that are available to us. And it contains evaluative judgements about goodness and badness. Prominent among these are the judgements that evaluate the quality of our…Read more
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361Compromised humanitarianismIn Keith Horton & Chris Roche (eds.), Ethical Questions and International NGOs: An Exchange between Philosophers and NGOs, Springer. pp. 157-73. 2010.The circumstances that create the need for humanitarian action are rarely morally neutral. The extremes of deprivation and want that demand a humanitarian response are often themselves directly caused by acts of war, persecution or misgovernment. And even when the direct causes lie elsewhere—when suffering and loss are caused by natural disaster, endemic disease or poverty of natural resources—the explanations of why some people are afflicted, and not others, are not morally neutral. It is those…Read more
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380Demandingness and Arguments from PresuppositionIn Timothy Chappell (ed.), The Problem of Moral Demandingness: New Philosophical Essays, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 8-34. 2009.Garrett Cullity.
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59Concern, Respect, and CooperationOxford University Press. 2018.Three things often recognized as central to morality are concern for others’ welfare, respect for their self-expression, and cooperation in worthwhile collective activity. When philosophers have proposed theories of the substance of morality, they have typically looked to one of these three sources to provide a single, fundamental principle of morality – or they have tried to formulate a master-principle for morality that combines these three ideas in some way. This book views them instead as th…Read more
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2Williams, B.-Making Sense of HumanityPhilosophical Books 39 91-104. 1998.This critical notice discusses five main themes of Williams's collection: (1) The “morality system” and blame: our ethical thought both misconceives and overemphasizes the practice of blaming. (2) The theorist’s predicament: how can a theorist of human practice coherently relate her theory to her own practice? (3) Psychological realism: a central constraint on a defensible ethical outlook is that it takes account of us as we are. (4) Culture and explanation: there is no culturally neutral fo…Read more
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77Many writers have followed Peter Singer in drawing an analogy between assisting needy people at a distance and saving someone’s life directly. Arguments based on this analogy can take either a subsumptive or a non-subsumptive form. Such arguments face a serious methodological challenge.
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260Beneficence, rights and citizenshipAustralian Journal of Human Rights 9 85-105. 2006.What are we morally required to do for strangers? To answer this question – a question about the scope of requirements to aid strangers – we must first answer a question about justification: why are we required to aid them (when we are)? The main paper focuses largely on answering the question about justification, but does so in order to arrive at an answer to the question about scope. Three main issues are discussed. First, to what extent should requirements of beneficence – requirements to be…Read more
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2Agency and PolicyProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (1): 317-327. 2004.The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.
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25Review of 'What's Wrong With Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment', by David Stove, edited by Andrew Irvine (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1). 2013.Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-3, Ahead of Print
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173Public GoodsIn Lawrence C. Becker Charlotte B. Becker (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, Vol. III, Routledge. pp. 1413-16. 2007.Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
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208The Moral, the Personal and the PoliticalIn Igor Primoratz (ed.), Politics and Morality, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 54-75. 2008.What is the relation between moral reasons and reasons of “political necessity”? Does the authority of morality extend across political decision-making; or are there “reasons of state” which somehow either stand outside the reach of morality or override it, justifying actions that are morally wrong? This chapter argues that attempts to claim a contra-moral justification for political action typically suffer from a fundamental confusion – a confusion about the nature and expression of practical …Read more
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36Describing rationalityPhilosophical Studies 173 (12): 3399-3411. 2016.This critical study of John Broome’s Rationality Through Reasoning raises some questions about the various requirements of rationality Broome formulates, pointing out some apparent gaps and counterexamples; proposes a general description of rationality that is broadly consistent with Broome’s requirements while providing them with a unifying justification, filling the gaps, and removing the counterexamples; and presents two objections to the book’s broader argument concerning the nature and impo…Read more
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52As you were? Moral philosophy and the aetiology of moral experiencePhilosophical Explorations 9 (1). 2006.What is the significance of empirical work on moral judgement for moral philosophy? Although the more radical conclusions that some writers have attempted to draw from this work are overstated, few areas of moral philosophy can remain unaffected by it. The most important question it raises is in moral epistemology. Given the explanation of our moral experience, how far can we trust it? Responding to this, the view defended here emphasizes the interrelatedness of moral psychology and moral episte…Read more
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66The Context-Undermining of Practical ReasonsEthics 124 (1): 8-34. 2013.Can one fact deprive another of the status of a reason for action—a status the second fact would have had, but for the presence of the first? Claims of this kind are often made, but they face substantial obstacles. This article sets out those obstacles but then argues that there are at least three different ways in which this does happen
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247Demandingness, "Ought", and Self-ShapingIn Michael Kuhler Marcel van Ackeren (ed.), The Limits of Moral Obligation: Moral Demandingness and Ought Implies Can, Routledge. pp. 147-62. 2016.Morality, it is commonly argued, cannot be extreme in the demands it makes of us, because “ought” implies “can”, and normal human psychology places limits on the extent to which most of us are capable of devoting our lives to the service of others. To evaluate this argument, we need to distinguish different uses of “ought” and “can”. Having distinguished these uses, we find that there is more than one defensible version of the principle that “ought” implies “can”. However, these distinctions can…Read more
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27Book Information Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin. Edited by Roger Crisp and Brad Hooker. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2000. Pp. xii + 316. Hardback, £35.
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10I—Garrett Cullity: Particularism and Presumptive ReasonsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 169-190. 2002.
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84Moral Character and the Iteration ProblemUtilitas 7 (2): 289. 1995.Moral evaluation is concerned with the attribution of values whose distinction into two broad groups has become familiar. On the one hand, there are the most general moral values of lightness, wrongness, goodness, badness, and what ought to be or to be done. On the other, there is a great diversity of more specific moral values which these objects can have: of being a theft, for instance, or a thief; of honesty, reliability or callousness. Within the recent body of work attempting to restore to …Read more
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250International aid and the scope of kindnessEthics 105 (1): 99-127. 1994.This paper argues that it is morally wrong for the affluent not to contribute money or time to famine relief. It begins by endorsing an important methodological line of objection against the most prominent philosophical advocate of this claim, Peter Singer. This objection attacks his strategy of invoking a principle the acceptability of which is apparently based upon its conformity with "intuitive" moral judgements in order to defend a strongly counterintuitive conclusion. However, what follows …Read more
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41The 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.Garrett Cullity.
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33Book Reviews:Ethics Done Right: Practical Reasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory (review)Ethics 119 (3): 581-585. 2009.