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134Noncognitivism about rationality: Benefits, costs, and an alternativePhilosophical Issues 4 36-51. 1993.
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129Moral learning: Psychological and philosophical perspectivesCognition 167 (C): 1-10. 2017.The past 15 years occasioned an extraordinary blossoming of research into the cognitive and affective mechanisms that support moral judgment and behavior. This growth in our understanding of moral mechanisms overshadowed a crucial and complementary question, however: How are they learned? As this special issue of the journal Cognition attests, a new crop of research into moral learning has now firmly taken root. This new literature draws on recent advances in formal methods developed in other do…Read more
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121The Critical Project Today (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1): 201-209. 2012.
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120Moral factualismIn James Lawrence Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, Blackwell. pp. 6--201. 2006.
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119Humean theory of practical rationalityIn David Copp (ed.), The Oxford handbook of ethical theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 265--81. 2006.David Hume famously criticized rationalist theories of practical reason, arguing that reason alone is incapable of yielding action, and that some passionate element must be supplied. Contemporary theories of Humean inspiration develop a causal-explanatory model of action in terms of the joint operation of two distinct mental states: beliefs and desires, one inert and representational, the other dynamic. Such neo-Humean theories claim that since desires, unlike beliefs, are not subject to direct …Read more
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101Preliminary draft of November 2010—please do not circulate without permission.
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93A priori rules: Wittgenstein on the normativity of logicIn Paul Artin Boghossian & Christopher Peacocke (eds.), New Essays on the A Priori, Oxford University Press. pp. 170--96. 2000.
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92Explanation and metaphysical controversyIn Philip Kitcher & Wesley Salmon (eds.), Scientific Explanation, Univ of Minnesota Pr. pp. 13--220. 1989.
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72Toward an Ethics that Inhabits the WorldIn Brian Leiter (ed.), The Future for Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 265--284. 2004.
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71Made in the shade: Moral compatibilism and the aims of moral theoryCanadian Journal of Philosophy 25 (sup1): 79-106. 1995.
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70Normative Guidance, Evaluative Guidance, and SkillAnalyse & Kritik 43 (1): 235-252. 2021.At least since Aristotle, practical skill has been thought to be a possible model for individual ethical development and action. Jonathan Birch’s ambitious proposal is that practical skill and tool-use might also have played a central role in the historical emergence and evolution of our very capacity for normative guidance. Birch argues that human acquisition of motor skill, for example in making and using tools, involves formation of an internal standard of correct performance, which serves as…Read more
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68On Richard Brandt’s “The Science of Man and Wide Reflective Equilibrium”Ethics 125 (4): 1136-1141. 2015.
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61Rationalization of emotion is also rationalBehavioral and Brain Sciences 43. 2020.Cushman seeks to explain rationalization in terms of fundamental mental processes, and he hypotheses a selected-for function: information exchange between “rational” and “non-rational” processes in the brain. While this is plausible, his account overlooks the importance – and information value – of rationalizing the emotions of ourselves and others. Incorporating such rationalization would help explain the effectiveness of rationalization and its connection with valuation, as well as raise a cha…Read more
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61Author Reply: Affect, Value, Uncertainty, and ActionEmotion Review 9 (4): 354-355. 2017.Value and uncertainty are the critical components of decision and action. To think of the affective system as at the core of action is to draw attention to the role of affect in representing and combining these two dimensions, and orchestrating a wide range of mental capacities—attention, perception, memory, inference, motivation, and monitoring—in light of these evaluative representations. The commentators have helpfully enriched our appreciation of the various ways in which affect can contribu…Read more
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57Broadening the base for bringing cognitive psychology to bear on ethicsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1): 27-28. 1994.
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56Commitment and Reasons – A Comment on Ruth Chang, ‘Three Dogmas of Normativity’Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (2): 220-230. 2023.Ruth Chang has argued convincingly that we must recognize that some choices will not involve strict, univocal comparison of options. How, then, can such choices be made well? Chang suggests that commitment is a fundamental way of ‘putting one's very self’ behind a normative consideration, thereby ‘endow[ing] that consideration with the normativity of a reason’. This view challenges what Chang deems to be three dogmas of normativity, and the current comment critically assesses the relation of her…Read more
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40Practical competence and fluent agencyIn David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge University Press. pp. 81--115. 2009.
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39Comment on Susanna Siegel, The Rationality of PerceptionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3): 735-754. 2020.In Susanna Siegel’s compelling presentation of the case for the rationality of perception, a “significant part of the constructive defense” is played by the idea that there are “inferential routes to perceptual experience” (Siegel 2017, p. 94). Inferences, after all, are epistemically evaluable and bear on the rational standing of their conclusions. She argues that an obstacle to accepting this idea is a “Reckoning Model” of inference, and shows by example that we recognize as inferences various…Read more
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38Homo ProspectusOxford University Press. 2016.NINE Morality and Prospection -- TEN Prospection Gone Awry: Depression -- ELEVEN Creativity and Aging: What We Can Make With What We Have Left -- Afterword -- Author Index -- Subject Index.
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37Moral Relativism and Moral ObjectivityPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 175-182. 1998.
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37Darwinian building blocksJournal of Consciousness Studies 7 (1-2): 1-2. 2000.Although the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and the is/ought distinction have often been invoked as definitive grounds for rejecting any attempt to bring evolutionary thought to bear on ethics, they are better interpreted as warnings than as absolute barriers. Our moral concepts themselves -- e.g. the principle that ‘ought implies can’ -- require us to ask whether human psychology is capable of impartial empathetic thought and motivation characteristic of normative systems that could count as moral. As …Read more
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35Experientialism and the Quality of a LifeAnalysis 83 (1): 146-158. 2023.The value of a life for the person living it has been conceptualized in various ways. One might begin by asking what intrinsically matters to a person, and then.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |