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104Procedural and substantive practical rationalityIn Piers Rawling & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 57--74. 2003.This chapter surveys the debate between philosophers who claim that all practical rationality is procedural and philosophers who claim that some practical rationality is substantive.
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4The Meaning of Life: Subjectivism, Objectivism, and Divine SupportIn Samantha Vice & Nafsika Athanassoulis (eds.), The Moral Life: Essays in Honour of John Cottingham, Palgrave-macmillan. 2008.
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14Contractualism, spare wheel, aggregationCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 53-76. 2002.
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110Moral particularism and the real worldIn Mark Norris Lance, Matjaž Potrč & Vojko Strahovnik (eds.), Challenging Moral Particularism, Routledge. pp. 12--30. 2007.The term ‘moral particularism’ has been used to refer to different doctrines. The main body of this paper begins by identifying the most important doctrines associated with the term, at least as the term is used by Jonathan Dancy, on whose work I will focus. I then discuss whether holism in the theory of reasons supports moral particularism, and I call into question the thesis that particular judgements have epistemological priority over general principles. Dancy’s recent book Ethics without Pri…Read more
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79The demands of consequentialism, by Tim Mulgan. Oxford: Clarendon press, 2001, 313 pp. + VI, ??35, $49.95 (hbk). ISBN 0-1-825093- (review)Philosophy 78 (2): 289-307. 2003.
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95Acts or rules? The fine tuning of utilitarianismIn John Perry (ed.), God, the Good, and Utilitarianism: Perspectives on Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press. pp. 125-138. 2014.
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24Scanlon versus Moore on goodnessIn T. Horgan & M. Timmons (eds.), Metaethics after Moore, Oxford University Press. pp. 149-168. 2006.
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43Rationality, rules, and utility: new essays on the moral philosophy of Richard B. Brandt (edited book)Westview Press. 1994.Scholars of ethics, and of human behavior more generally, will find this book consistently stimulating and rewarding.
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46Griffin on Human RightsOxford Journal of Legal Studies 30 (1): 193-205. 2010.This review article considers James Griffin's book On Human Rights, which is an immensely important contribution to moral and political thought. The review article starts by explaining why Griffin thinks that the term ‘human right’ suffers from an unacceptable indeterminateness of sense, and then summarizes Griffin's objections to various prominent accounts of human rights. An outline of Griffin's own account of human rights follows. His theory grounds human rights in ‘personhood’ and practicali…Read more
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65Rule-Consequentialism, Incoherence, FairnessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95. 1995.Brad Hooker; II*—Rule-Consequentialism, Incoherence, Fairness1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 19–36, https://d.
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76Rule-consequentialism and obligations toward the needyPacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1). 1998.Most of us believe morality requires us to help the desperately needy. But most of us also believe morality doesn't require us to make enormous sacrifices in order to help people who have no special connection with us. Such self-sacrifice is of course praiseworthy, but it isn't morally mandatory. Rule-consequentialism might seem to offer a plausible grounding for such beliefs. Tim Mulgan has recently argued in _Analysis and _Pacific Philosophical Quarterly that rule-consequentialism cannot do so…Read more
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241Williams' Argument against External ReasonsAnalysis 47 (1). 1987.A critical account arguing that Williams did not succeed in undermining the possibility of external reasons. Hooker takes Williams’s conception of reason to be instrumentalistic in a problematic way.
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30Dancy on How Reasons Are Related to OughtsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 114-120. 2003.
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1012Rule-consequentialismMind 99 (393): 67-77. 1990.The theory of morality we can call full rule - consequentialism selects rules solely in terms of the goodness of their consequences and then claims that these rules determine which kinds of acts are morally wrong. George Berkeley was arguably the first rule -consequentialist. He wrote, “In framing the general laws of nature, it is granted we must be entirely guided by the public good of mankind, but not in the ordinary moral actions of our lives. … The rule is framed with respect to the good of …Read more
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41Up and Down with AggregationSocial Philosophy and Policy 26 (1): 126-147. 2009.This paper starts by addressing some objections to the very idea of aggregate social good. The paper goes on to review the case for letting aggregate social good be not only morally relevant but also sometimes morally decisive. Then the paper surveys objections to letting aggregate social good determine personal or political decisions. The paper goes on to argue against the idea that aggregate good is sensitive to desert and the idea that aggregate good should be construed as incorporating agent…Read more
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49Parfit's arguments for the present-aim theoryAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (1). 1992.This paper has been about the question of what there is most reason to doin situations in which either there are no moral considerations to be takeninto account or the moral considerations to be taken into account are equally balanced. I have assessed all Parfit's arguments for concluding that the Present-aim Theory is right and the Self-interest Theory wrong aboutthis question. In § III, I showed how Parfit's argument from personal identity leads not to the abandonment of the Self-interest Theo…Read more
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61Mark Overvold’s Contribution to PhilosophyJournal of Philosophical Research 16 333-344. 1991.The prevailing theory of self-interest (personal utility or individual welfare) holds that one’s Iife goes well to the extent that one’s desires are fulfilled. In a couple of seminal papers, Overvold raised a devastating objection to this theory---namely that the theory (added to commonsensical beliefs about the nature of action) makes self-sacrifice logically impossible. He then proposed an appealing revision of the prevailing theory, one which provided adequate logical space for self-sacrifice…Read more
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3Scanlon's Contractualism, the Spare Wheel Objection, and Aggregation'In Matt Matravers (ed.), Scanlon and Contractualism, Frank Cass. 2003.
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149Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin (edited book)Clarendon Press. 2000.An international line-up of fourteen distinguished philosophers present new essays on topics relating to well-being and morality, prominent themes in contemporary ethics and particularly in the work of James Griffin, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, in whose honour this volume has been produced. Professor Griffin offers a fascinating development of his own thinking on these topics in his replies to the essays.
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128Brink, Kagan, Utilitarianism and Self-SacrificeUtilitas 3 (2): 263. 1991.Act-utilitarianism claims that one is required to do nothing less than what makes the largest contribution to overall utility. Critics of this moral theory commonly charge that it is unreasonably demanding. Shelly Kagan and David Brink, however, have recently defended act-utilitarianism against this charge. Kagan argues that act-utilitarianism is right, and its critics wrong, about how demanding morality is. In contrast, Brink argues that, once we have the correct objective account of welfare an…Read more
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65When is impartiality morally appropriate?In Brian Feltham & John Cottingham (eds.), Partiality and impartiality: morality, special relationships, and the wider world, Oxford University Press. pp. 26-41. 2010.
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