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470What Do we See in Museums?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 217-240. 2016.I address two related questions. First: what value is there in visiting a museum and becoming acquainted with the objects on display? For art museums the answer seems obvious: we go to experience valuable works of art, and experiencing valuable works of art is itself valuable. In this paper I focus on non-art museums, and while these may house aesthetically valuable objects, that is not their primary purpose, and at least some of the objects they house might not be particularly aesthetically val…Read more
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75What's wrong?: applied ethicists and their critics (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2004.What's Wrong?: Applied Ethicists and Their Critics is a thorough and engaging introduction to applied ethics that covers virtually all of the issues in the field. Featuring more than ninety-five articles, it addresses standard topics--such as abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, world hunger, and animal rights--and also delves into cutting-edge areas like cloning, racial profiling, same-sex marriage, prostitution, and slave reparations. The volume includes seminal essays by prominent philos…Read more
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19The Unity of TheoriesIn Fred D'Agostino & I. C. Jarvie (eds.), Freedom and Rationality, Reidel. pp. 343--368. 1989.
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3The moral case for the legalization of voluntary euthanasiaVictoria University of Wellington Law Review 28 207-24. 1998.
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Reduction: varieties ofIn N. J. Smelser & B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, . pp. 12. 2001.
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344Moral realism, moral relativism and moral rules (a compatibility argument)Synthese 117 (2): 251-274. 1998.
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Control, consequence and compatibilismIn T. Childers (ed.), Between Words and Worlds, Filosofia. pp. 143-56. 2000.
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267Conditionalization, cogency, and cognitive valueBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (4): 533-541. 1997.Why should a Bayesian bother performing an experiment, one the result of which might well upset his own favored credence function? The Ramsey-Good theorem provides a decision theoretic answer. Provided you base your decision on expected utility, and the the experiment is cost-free, performing the experiment and then choosing has at least as much expected utility as choosing without further ado. Furthermore, doing the experiment is strictly preferable just in case at least one possible outcome …Read more
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38The core of the truthmaker research program is that true propositions are made true by appropriate parts of the actual world. This idea seems to give realists their best shot at capturing a robust account of the dependence of truth on the world. For a part of the world to be a truthmaker for a particular it must suffice for, or necessitate, the truth of the proposition. There are two extreme and unsatisfactory truthmaker theories. At one extreme any part of the world (up to and including the who…Read more
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2Truthlikeness and ValueIn Pihlstrom S. (ed.), Approaching Truth: Essays in Honour of Ilkka Niiniluoto, College Publications. pp. 225-40. 2008.
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12Is Science Progressive (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2): 272-276. 1987.
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142Harmony, purity, truthMind 103 (412): 451-472. 1994.David Lewis has argued against the thesis he calls "Desire as Belief", claiming it is incompatible with the fundamentals of evidential decision theory. I show that the argument is unsound, and demonstrate that a version of desire as belief is compatible with a version of causal decision theory.
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A decision theoretic argument against human embryo experimentationIn M. Fricke (ed.), Essays in honor of Bob Durrant, University of Otago Press. pp. 111-27. 1986.
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498Moral uncertainty and human embryo experimentationIn K. W. M. Fulford, Grant Gillett & Janet Martin Soskice (eds.), Medicine and Moral Reasoning, Cambridge University Press. pp. 3--144. 1994.Moral dilemmas can arise from uncertainty, including uncertainty of the real values involved. One interesting example of this is that of experimentation on human embryos and foetuses, If these have a moral stauts similar to that of human persons then there will be server constraitns on what may be done to them. If embryous have a moral status similar to that of other small clusters of cells, then constraints will be motivated largely by consideration for the persons into whom the embryos may dev…Read more
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218Fitting attitudes, finkish goods, and value appearancesIn Russ Shafer Landau & Russ Shafer-Landau (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics (Volume 11), Oxford University Press. pp. 74-101. 2016.According to Fitting Attitude theorists, for something to possess a certain value it is necessary and sufficient that it be fitting (appropriate, or good, or obligatory, or something) to take a certain attitude to the bearer of that value. The idea seems obvious for thick evaluative attributes, but less obvious for the thin evaluative attributes—like goodness, betterness, and degrees of value. This paper is an extended argument for the thesis that the fitting response to the thin evaluative at…Read more
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67Act and MaximPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1): 71-92. 1993.Suppose that the value of each act of compliance with some maxim is lower than the value of each act of non-compliance, even though maxim-compliance overall would be best for the agent. In such a case we have what I will call value-discrepancy between act and maxim. While the value of overall maxim-compliance is high, no particular act of compliance with the maxim seems to be worth it. Consequentialism is the thesis that the rightness of an option is determined by the comparative value of that o…Read more
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39Value RealismIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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