•  981
    Virtue Ethics and the Demands of Social Morality
    In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 236-260. 2011.
    Building on work by Steve Darwall, I argue that standard virtue ethical accounts of moral motivation are defective because they don't include accounts of social morality. I then propose a virtue ethical account of social morality, and respond to one of Darwall's core objections to the coherence of any such (non-Kantian) account.
  •  28
    Character
    In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
    A general discussion of what character is and why having character, or good character, might be thought to increase an agent's well-being.
  •  74
    NDPR: Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (by Christian Miller) (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2014 (2.7). 2014.
    Review of Christian Miller's "Moral Character: An Empirical Theory." I question Miller's criteria for overall judgements about the vice and vice of people's character traits, and sketch an alternative framework.
  •  355
    Summary of Nussbaum's book. Raises worries about the political neutrality of her psychoanalytic assumptions and about whether her compassion promoting policies can adequately mitigate problems like racism, selfishness, and partiality.
  •  324
    According to Aristotelian virtue ethicists, virtue is a great moral good that contributes to, but cannot be reduced to, an agent's welfare. In addition, they hold that the value of virtue is different from, and in some sense greater than, the agent-neutral intrinsic goodness that consequentialists attribute to states of affair. According to Thomas Hurka (1998, 2003, 2011), these fundamental Aristotelian views are indefensible. In this paper, I rebuff Hurka's skepticism and identify an Aristote…Read more
  •  685
    Dispositions, Character, and the Value of Acts
    In Christian B. Miller, R. Michael Furr, Angela Knobel & William Fleeson (eds.), Character: New Perspectives in Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology, Oxford University Press. pp. 233-250. 2015.
    This paper concerns the central virtue ethical thesis that the ethical quality of an agent's actions is a function of her dispositional character. Skeptics have rightly urged us to distinguish between an agent's particular intentions or occurrant motives and dispositional facts about her character, but they falsely contend that if we are attentive to this distinction, then we will see that the virtue ethical thesis is false. In this paper I present a new interpretation and defense of the virtu…Read more
  •  153
    Two-Level Eudaimonism and Second-Personal Reasons
    Ethics 122 (4): 773-780. 2012.
    In “Virtue Ethics and Deontic Constraints,” Mark LeBar claims to have discovered a two-level eudaimonist position that coheres with the claim that moral obligations are “real” and have “nonderivative normative authority.” In this article, I raise worries about how “real” second-personal reasons are on LeBar’s account, and then argue that second-personal reasons ramify up from the first to the second level in a way that LeBar denies. My argument is meant to encourage philosophers in the Aristotel…Read more