•  11
    Thinking How to Live
    Philosophical Quarterly 57 (227): 308-311. 2007.
  •  20
    Free riding
    In 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.
  •  10
    Impartiality
    In 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.
  •  15
    Charity
    In 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
  •  19
    Aid, Ethics of
    In 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.
  •  3
    The 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.
  •  51
    Climate Harms
    The 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
  •  2
    Book ReviewsElijah Millgram
    Ethics 119 (3): 581-585. 2009.
  •  33
    Demandingness, 'ought', and self-shaping
    In van Ackeren Marcel & Kühler Michael (eds.), The Limits of Moral Obligation, Routledge. 2016.
    Garrett Cullity.
  •  71
    Exceptions in Nonderivative Value
    Philosophy 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
  • Ethics and Practical Reason
    with Berys Gaut
    Mind 108 (431): 570-575. 1999.
  •  240
    Ethics and practical reason (edited book)
    with Berys Nigel Gaut
    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
  •  40
    Conference on ethics and practical reason
    with Berys Gaut
    Journal of Value Inquiry 30 (4): 573-577. 1996.
  •  36
    The 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
  •  267
    Stupid Goodness
    In 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
  •  525
    Weighing reasons
    In 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
  •  439
    Moral Virtues and Responsiveness for Reasons
    In Noell Birondo & S. Stewart Braun (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
  •  345
    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
  •  59
    Concern, Respect, and Cooperation
    Oxford 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
  •  212
    The Moral, the Personal and the Political
    In Igor Primoratz (ed.), Politics and morality, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 54-75. 2007.
    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
  •  2
    Agency and Policy
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (1): 317-327. 2004.
    The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.
  •  66
    The Context-Undermining of Practical Reasons
    Ethics 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
  •  27
    Book 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.
  •  101
    Moral Free Riding
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1): 3-34. 1995.
    This paper presents a moral philosophical account of free riding, specifying the conditions under which failing to pay for nonrival goods is unfair. These conditions do not include the voluntary acceptance of the goods: this controversial claim is supported on the strength of a characterization of the kind of unfairness displayed in paradigm cases of free riding. Thus a "Principle of Fairness" can potentially serve as a foundation for political obligations. The paper also discusses the relatio…Read more
  •  289
    Decisions, Reasons and Rationality
    Ethics 119 (1): 57-95. 2008.
    What difference do our decisions make to our reasons for action and the rationality of our actions? There are two questions here, and good grounds for answering them differently. However, it still makes sense to discuss them together. By thinking about the relationships that reasons and rationality bear to decisions, we may be able to cast light on the relationship that reasons and rationality bear to each other.