•  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.
  •  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.
  •  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
  •  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
  •  25
    Ethics and Practical Reason
    with Berys Gaut
    Philosophical Quarterly 49 (197): 537-539. 1999.
  •  19
    Conflicts of interest in divisions of general practice
    with N. Palmer, A. Braunack-Mayer, W. Rogers, and C. Provis
    Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (12): 715-717. 2006.
    Community-based healthcare organisations manage competing, and often conflicting, priorities. These conflicts can arise from the multiple roles these organisations take up, and from the diverse range of stakeholders to whom they must be responsive. Often such conflicts may be titled conflicts of interest; however, what precisely constitutes such conflicts and what should be done about them is not always clear. Clarity about the duties owed by organisations and the roles they assume can help iden…Read more
  •  263
    Beneficence, rights and citizenship
    Australian 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
  •  20
    The Moral Demands of Affluence
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 67 (3): 598-600. 2005.
    Garrett Cullity.
  •  42
    Agency and policy
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (3). 2004.
    The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com
  •  9
    Sympathy, Discernment, and Reasons
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1): 37-62. 2004.
    According to “the argument from discernment”, sympathetic motivation is morally faulty, because it is morally undiscriminating. Sympathy can incline you to do the right thing, but it can also incline you to do the wrong thing. And if so, it is no better as a reason for doing something than any other morally arbitrary consideration. The only truly morally good form of motivation–because the only morally non‐arbitrary one–involves treating an action's lightness as your reason for performing it. Th…Read more
  •  10
    Practical Theory
    In Garrett Cullity & Berys Nigel Gaut (eds.), Ethics and practical reason, Oxford University Press. pp. 101--24. 1997.
    Garrett Cullity