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37Ensuring a Future for Open-Access PublishingJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (1). 2017.
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279When Beliefs WrongPhilosophical Topics 46 (1): 115-127. 2018.Most philosophers find it puzzling how beliefs could wrong, and this leads them to conclude that they do not. So there is much philosophical work to be done in sorting out whether I am right to say that they do, as well as how this could be so. But in this paper I will take for granted that beliefs can wrong, and ask instead when beliefs wrong. My answer will be that beliefs wrong when they falsely diminish. This answer has three parts: that beliefs wrong only when they are false, that beliefs w…Read more
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4841Doxastic WrongingIn Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 181-205. 2019.In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of raci…Read more
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48Book Reviews Horty , John F . Reasons as Defaults . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 272. $65.00 (cloth)Ethics 123 (1): 162-167. 2012.
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186Getting Perspective on Objective ReasonsEthics 128 (2): 289-319. 2018.This article considers two important problems for the idea that what we ought to do is determined by the balance of competing reasons. The problems are distinct, but the object of the article is to explore how they admit of a single solution. It is a consequence of this solution that objective reasons—facts that count in favor—are in an important sense less objective than they have consistently been assumed to be. This raises but does not answer the question as to what evidence we ever had that …Read more
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37The Epistemic Consequences of Forced ChoiceLogos and Episteme 8 (3): 365-374. 2017.In “Stakes, Withholding, and Pragmatic Encroachment on Knowledge,” I used a variety of cases, including cases of forced choice, to illustrate my explanation of how and why some pragmatic factors, but not others, can affect whether an agent knows. In his recent contribution, Andy Mueller argues that cases of forced choice actually pose a dilemma for my account. In this paper I reply.
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46Being for: Evaluating the semantic program of expressivism * by mark Schroeder * clarendon press, 2008. XVI + 198 pp. 27.50: Summary (review)Analysis 70 (1): 101-104. 2010.My project in Being For is both constructive and negative. The main aim of the book is to take the core ideas of meta-ethical expressivism as far as they can go, and to try to develop a version of expressivism that solves many of the more straightforward open problems that have faced the view without being squarely confronted. In doing so, I develop an expressivist framework that I call biforcated attitude semantics, which I claim has the minimal structural features required in order to solve so…Read more
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69Slaves of the passions * by mark SchroederAnalysis 69 (3): 574-576. 2009.Like much in this book, the title and dust jacket illustration are clever. The first evokes Hume's remark in the Treatise that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’ The second, which represents a cross between a dance-step and a clinch, links up with the title and anticipates an example used throughout the book to support its central claims: that Ronnie, unlike Bradley, has a reason to go to a party – namely, that there will be dancing at the party – because Ronnie, unlike…Read more
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60Ought, Agents, and ActionsPhilosophical Review 119 (3): 1-41. 2010.According to a naive view sometimes apparent in the writings of moral philosophers, 'ought' often expresses a relation between agents and actions—the relation that obtains between an agent and an action when that action is what that agent ought to do. It is not part of this naive view that 'ought' always expresses this relation—adherents of the naive view are happy to allow that 'ought' also has an evaluative sense, on which it means, roughly, that were things ideal, some proposition would be th…Read more
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84Cudworth and Normative ExplanationsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (3): 1-28. 2005.Moral theories usually aspire to be explanatory – to tell us why something is wrong, why it is good, or why you ought to do it. So it is worth knowing how moral explanations differ, if they do, from explanations of other things. This paper uncovers a common unarticulated theory about how normative explanations must work – that they must follow what I call the Standard Model. Though the Standard Model Theory has many implications, in this paper I focus primarily on only one. It plays a crucial ro…Read more
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190Being for: evaluating the semantic program of expressivismOxford University Press. 2008.Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic commitment…Read more
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226Slaves of the passionsOxford University Press. 2007.Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record straight, by advancing a…Read more
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Normative Ethics and MetaethicsIn Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 674-686. 2017.
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378The hypothetical imperative?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (3). 2005.According to the standard view, Kant held that hypothetical imperatives are universally binding edicts with disjunctive objects: take-the-means-or-don't-have-the-end. But Kant thought otherwise. He held that they are edicts binding only on some - those who have an end.
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475Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and VicesEthics 119 (2): 257-309. 2009.This paper is a survey of recent ‘hybrid’ approaches to metaethics, according to which moral sentences, in some sense or other, express both beliefs and desires. I try to show what kinds of theoretical issues come up at the different choice points we encounter in developing such a view, to raise some problems and explain where they come from, and to begin to get a sense for what the payoff of such views can be, and what they will need to do in order to earn that payoff.
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568Showing How to Derive Knowing How (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (3): 746-753. 2012.Jason Stanley's Know How aims to offer an attractive intellectualist analysis of knowledge how that is compositionally predicted by the best available treatments of sentences like 'Emile knows how to make his dad smile.' This paper explores one significant way in which Stanley's compositional treatment fails to generate his preferred account, and advocates a minimal solution.
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528Michael Ridge claims to have ‘finessed’ the Frege-Geach Problem ‘on the cheap’. In this short paper I explain a couple of the reasons why this thought is premature.
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513Précis of Slaves of the Passions (review)Philosophical Studies 157 (3): 431-434. 2012.Précis of Slaves of the Passions Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9658-1 Authors Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
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83Being for: Evaluating the semantic program of expressivism * by mark Schroeder * clarendon press, 2008. XVI + 198 pp. {pound}27.50: Summary (review)Analysis 70 (1): 101-104. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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203Knowledge Based on SeeingLogos and Episteme 7 (1): 101-107. 2016.In Epistemological Disjunctivism, Duncan Prichard defends his brand of epistemological disjunctivism from three worries. In this paper I argue that his responses to two of these worries are in tension with one another.
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227Weighting for a plausible Humean theory of reasonsNoûs 41 (1). 2007.This paper addresses the two extensional objections to the Humean Theory of Reasons—that it allows for too many reasons, and that it allows for too few. Although I won’t argue so here, manyof the other objections to the Humean Theoryof Reasons turn on assuming that it cannot successfully deal with these two objections.1 What I will argue, is that the force of the too many and the too few objections to the Humean Theorydepend on whether we assume that Humeans are committed to a thesis about the w…Read more
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89Deontic Modality Today: IntroductionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4): 421-423. 2014.Introduction to a special issue of PPQ of papers from a conference on deontic modality held at USC in 2013.
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218How to be an expressivist about truthIn Cory D. Wright & Nikolaj Pedersen (eds.), New Waves in Truth, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 282--298. 2010.In this paper I explore why one might hope to, and how to begin to, develop an expressivist account of truth – that is, a semantics for ‘true’ and ‘false’ within an expressivist framework. I do so for a few reasons: because certain features of deflationism seem to me to require some sort of nondescriptivist semantics, because of all nondescriptivist semantic frameworks which are capable of yielding definite predictions rather than consisting merely of hand-waving, expressivism is that with which…Read more
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101This style of argument comes up everywhere in the philosophy of practical reason, leveled against theories of the norm of means-end coherence on intention, against Humean theories of reasons, and many other places. It comes up in normative moral theory – for example, in arguments against buck-passing. It comes up in epistemology, in discussions of how to account for the rational connection between believing the premises of a valid argument and believing its conclusion. And it comes up in politic…Read more
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547Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledgePhilosophical Studies 160 (2). 2012.Several authors have recently endorsed the thesis that there is what has been called pragmatic encroachment on knowledge—in other words, that two people who are in the same situation with respect to truth-related factors may differ in whether they know something, due to a difference in their practical circumstances. This paper aims not to defend this thesis, but to explore how it could be true. What I aim to do, is to show how practical factors could play a role in defeating knowledge by defeati…Read more
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45Review of Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency: Essays (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (5). 2007.
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20Expressing Our Attitudes: Explanation and Expression in EthicsOxford University Press UK. 2015.Expressing Our Attitudes pulls together over a decade of work by Mark Schroeder, one of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. Two new and seven previously published papers weave treatments of propositions, truth, and the attitudes together with detailed development of competing alternative expressivist frameworks and discussion of their relative advantages. A substantial new introduction both offers new arguments of its own, and provides a map to reading these essays as a unified argum…Read more
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239Not so promising after all: Evaluator-relative teleology and common-sense moralityPacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (3). 2006.Douglas Portmore has recently argued in this journal for a "promising result" – that combining teleological ethics with "evaluator relativism" about the good allows an ethical theory to account for deontological intuitions while "accommodat[ing] the compelling idea that it is always permissible to bring about the best available state of affairs." I show that this result is false. It follows from the indexical semantics of evaluator relativism that Portmore's compelling idea is false. I also try …Read more
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
History of Western Philosophy, Misc |