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14Ethics 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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3The 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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262Stupid 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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522Weighing 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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436Moral Virtues and Responsiveness for ReasonsIn 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
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368Compromised 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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387Demandingness 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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18Decisions, Reasons and RationalityEthics 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.
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10Moral 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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12As 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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11The 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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212IntroductionIn Garrett Cullity & Berys Nigel Gaut (eds.), Ethics and practical reason, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-27. 1997.
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17Public goods and fairnessAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (1). 2008.To what extent can we as a community legitimately require individuals to contribute to producing public goods? Most of us think that, at least sometimes, refusing to pay for a public good that you have enjoyed can involve a kind of 'free riding' that makes it wrong. But what is less clear is under exactly which circumstances this is wrong. To work out the answer to that, we need to know why it is wrong. I argue that when free riding is wrong, the reason is that it is unfair. That is not itself a…Read more
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82Bernard WilliamsIn Brown Stuart (ed.), Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers, Vol. 2, Thoemmes Continuum. pp. 1132-8. 2005.Garrett Cullity.
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9Virtue ethics, theory, and warrantEthical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (3): 277-294. 1999.Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This virtue ethical claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a …Read more
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3Aretaic CognitivismAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 32 (4). 1995.This paper defends the claim that there is deontic knowledge - knowledge of rightness and wrongness - which can be inferred from aretaic knowledge - knowledge of the possession of virtue-attributes. In doing so, it seeks to address two forceful objections, identified at the outset. The first is that the only way of making the claim appear plausible is by assuming a practice of virtue-ascription which actually makes the reverse inference. The second objection is that there is that "aretaic cognit…Read more
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4Review of Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.), The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (8). 2005.Garrett Cullity
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18Particularism and moral theory: Particularism and presumptive reasons: Garrett CullityAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1). 2002.Weak particularism about reasons is the view that the normative valency of some descriptive considerations varies, while others have an invariant normative valency. A defence of this view needs to respond to arguments that a consideration cannot count in favour of any action unless it counts in favour of every action. But it cannot resort to a global holism about reasons, if it claims that there are some examples of invariant valency. This paper argues for weak particularism, and presents a fram…Read more
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44Equality and globalizationIn Keith Horton and Haig Patapan (eds), Reconceiving Equality in a More Global World, Routledge. pp. 6-22. 2007.Garrett Cullity.
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1Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James GriffinAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (4): 538-540. 2002.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.
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1161BeneficenceIn Richard Ashcroft Angus Dawson & Heather Draper John McMillan (eds.), Principles of Health Care Ethics, Wiley. pp. 19-26. 2007.Garrett Cullity.
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22The Moral Demands of AffluenceOxford University Press on Demand. 2004.Given that there is a forceful case for thinking that the affluent are morally required to devote a substantial proportion of what they have to helping the poor, Garrett Cullity examines, refines and defends an argument of this form. He then identifies its limits.
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251Demandingness, "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