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999More Seriously Wrong, More Importantly RightJournal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (1): 41-58. 2019.Common-sense morality divides acts into those that are right and those that are wrong, but it thinks some wrong acts are more seriously wrong than others, for example murder than breaking a promise. If an act is more seriously wrong, you should feel more guilt about it and, other things equal, are more blameworthy for it and can deserve more punishment; more serious wrongs are also more to be avoided given empirical or moral uncertainty. This paper examines a number of different views about what…Read more
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601A Surprisingly Common DilemmaJournal of Moral Philosophy 16 (1): 74-84. 2019.This paper discusses a dilemma that’s arises for a surprising number of ethical views and that's generated by a thesis they share: they all hold that it's a necessary condition for a thing to have an ethical property like rightness or goodness that it be accompanied by the belief that it has that property (see e.g. Kant (on one reading), Dworkin, Kymlicka, Sidgwick, Sumner, Dorsey). If the required belief is read one way, these views make it necessary, for a thing to be right or good, that it be…Read more
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311Right Act, Virtuous MotiveMetaphilosophy 41 (1-2): 58-72. 2010.The concepts of right action and virtuous motivation are clearly connected, in that we expect people with virtuous motives to at least often act rightly. Two well-known views explain this connection by defining one of the concepts in terms of the other. Instrumentalists about virtue identify virtuous motives as those that lead to right acts; virtue-ethicists identify right acts as those that are or would be done from virtuous motives. This paper outlines a rival explanation, based on the “higher…Read more
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172Indirect Perfectionism: Kymlicka on Liberal NeutralityJournal of Political Philosophy 3 (1): 36-57. 1995.
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17Review of Gabriele Taylor, Deadly Vices (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (4). 2007.
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478More seriously wrongJournal of the American Philosophical Association 5 41-58. 2019.Common-sense morality divides acts into those that are right and those that are wrong, but it thinks some wrong acts are more seriously wrong than others, for example murder than breaking a promise. If an act is more seriously wrong, you should feel more guilt about it and, other things equal, are more blameworthy for it and can deserve more punishment; more serious wrongs are also more to be avoided given empirical or moral uncertainty. This paper examines a number of different views about what…Read more
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278Value and friendship: A more subtle viewUtilitas 18 (3): 232-242. 2006.T. M. Scanlon has cited the value of friendship in arguing against a ‘teleological’ view of value which says that value inheres only in states of affairs and demands only that we promote it. This article argues that, whatever the teleological view's final merits, the case against it cannot be made on the basis of friendship. The view can capture Scanlon's claims about friendship if it holds, as it can consistently with its basic ideas, that (i) friendship is a higher-level good consisting in app…Read more
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795The Speech Act Fallacy FallacyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (3): 509-526. 1982.John Searle has charged R.M. Hare's prescriptivist analysis of the meaning of ‘good,’ ‘ought’ and the other evaluative words with committing what he calls the ‘speech act fallacy.’ This is a fallacy which Searle thinks is committed not only by Hare's analysis, but by any analysis which attributes to a word the function of indicating that a particular speech act is being performed, or that an utterance has a particular illocutionary force. ‘There is a condition of adequacy which any analysis of t…Read more
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108A Kantian Theory of Welfare?Philosophical Studies 130 (3): 603-617. 2006.Two main foundations have been proposed for the side-constraints that deontologists think make it sometimes wrong to do what will have the best effects. Thomist views agree with consequentialism that the bearers of value are always states of affairs, but hold that alongside the duty to promote good states are stronger duties not to choose against them.1 Kantian views locate the relevant values in persons, saying it is respect for persons rather than for any state that makes it wrong to kill, lie…Read more
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36Kamm on Intention and Proportionality in WarJournal of Moral Philosophy 11 (4): 411-427. 2014.This paper discusses the novel versions of the right intention and proportionality conditions in the ius ad bellum proposed in Chapter 3 of Frances Kamm’s Ethics for Enemies. It argues that Kamm is right to weaken the right intention condition to require, not positively intending a war’s just cause, but only having that cause’s presence be a necessary condition for war, but wrong to place no limits on why one makes a just cause necessary. It then argues that the weakening she proposes of Jeff Mc…Read more
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39The differences between journalism and scholarly writingThe Chesterton Review 18 (2): 284-285. 1992.
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59The Grasshopper - Third Edition: Games, Life and UtopiaBroadview Press. 2014.In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. “Nonsense,” said the sensible Bernard Suits: “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Through the jocular voice of Aesop's Grasshopper, a “shiftless but thoughtful practitioner of …Read more
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71Satisficing theories, whether of rationality or morality, do not require agents to maximize the good. They demand only that agents bring about outcomes that are, in one or both of two senses, “good enough.” In the first sense, an outcome is good enough if it is above some absolute threshold of goodness; this yields a view that I will call absolute-level satisficing. In the second sense, an outcome is good enough if it is reasonably close to the best outcome the agent could bring about; this lead…Read more
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Common Themes from Sidgwick to EwingIn Underivative duty: British moral philosophers from Sidgwick to Ewing, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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37On Judged SportsJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 42 (3): 317-325. 2015.Whereas Bernard Suits argued that judged sports such as diving and figure skating are aesthetic performances rather than games, I argue that they’re simultaneously performances and games. Moreover, their two aspects are connected, since their prelusory goal is to dive or skate beautifully and the requirement to do somersaults or triple jumps makes achieving that goal more difficult. This analysis is similar to one given by Scott Kretchmar, but by locating these sports’ aesthetic side in their go…Read more
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49The Well-Rounded LifeJournal of Philosophy 84 (12): 727-46. 1987.This paper discusses the idea, which arises within perfectionist theories of the good, that there can be special value in a well-rounded life, one that contains a balance of different intrinsic goods, e.g. knowledge and achievement, rather than specializing narrowly on just one. It uses the economists' device of indifference graphs to 1) formulate the view the well-roundedness is other things equal a good, and 2) to combine that view with empirical theses about the (at times) instrumental benefi…Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |