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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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50The 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
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161Two kinds of organic unityThe Journal of Ethics 2 (4): 299-320. 1998.This paper distinguishes two interpretations of G. E. Moore''s principle of organic unities, which says that the intrinsic value of a whole need not equal the sum of the intrinsic values its parts would have outside it. A holistic interpretation, which was Moore''s own, says that parts retain their values when they enter a whole but that there can be an additional value in the whole as a whole that must be added to them. The conditionality interpretation, which has been defended by Korsgaard, sa…Read more
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1Griffin, J., "Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance" (review)Mind 97 (n/a): 463. 1988.
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207The best things in life: a guide to what really mattersOxford University Press. 2011.Feeling good: four ways -- Finding that feeling -- The place of pleasure -- Knowing what's what -- Making things happen -- Being good -- Love and friendship -- Putting it together.
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131Right act, virtuous motiveIn Heather D. Battaly (ed.), Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 58-72. 2010.Abstract: The concepts of virtue and right action are closely 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 essay outlines a rival explanation, based on the "higher-le…Read more
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50Vinit Haksar, Equality, Liberty and Perfectionism (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press1979). Pp. 311 (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3): 449-470. 1983.
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71Proportionality and necessityIn Larry May (ed.), War: Essays in Political Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 2008.to appear in Larry May, ed., War and Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
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104Virtue as Loving the GoodSocial Philosophy and Policy 9 (2): 149. 1992.In a chapter of The Methods of Ethics entitled “Ultimate Good”, Henry Sidgwick defends hedonism, the theory that pleasure and only pleasure is intrinsically good, that is, good in itself and apart from its consequences. First, however, he argues against the theory that virtue is intrinsically good. Sidgwick considers both a strong version of this theory — that virtue is the only intrinsic good — and a weaker version — that it is one intrinsic good among others. He tries to show that neither vers…Read more
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17Making Sense of Human Rights: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human RightsPhilosophical Books 30 (1): 54-56. 1987.
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111Aristotle on Virtue: Wrong, Wrong, and WrongIn Julia Peters (ed.), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective, Routledge. pp. 9-26. 2012.In his chapter ‘Aristotle on Virtue: Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong’, Thomas Hurka advances penetrating criticisms of some of the core theses of the Aristotelian approach to virtue. Hurka challenges the Aristotelian tendency to blur the distinction between the good and the right by making the virtues, which are constitutive of a person’s goodness, objects of praise or blame. He puts into question the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean and the idea that vice can always be explained in terms of either exc…Read more
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44Liability and Just CauseEthics and International Affairs 21 (2): 199-218. 2007.This paper is a response to Jeff McMahan's "Just Cause for War". It defends a more permissive, and more traditional view of just war liability against McMahan's claims.
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The Grasshopper: Games, Life and UtopiaBroadview Press. 2005.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," says 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. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing ga…Read more
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182Sidgwick on Consequentialism and Deontology: A CritiqueUtilitas 26 (2): 129-152. 2014.InThe Methods of EthicsHenry Sidgwick argued against deontology and for consequentialism. More specifically, he stated four conditions for self-evident moral truth and argued that, whereas no deontological principles satisfy all four conditions, the principles that generate consequentialism do. This article argues that both his critique of deontology and his defence of consequentialism fail, largely for the same reason: that he did not clearly grasp the concept W. D. Ross later introduced of a p…Read more
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93Rights and Capital PunishmentDialogue 21 (4): 647-660. 1982.Discussions of the morality of capital punishment, and indeed discussions of the morality of punishment in general, usually assume that there are two possible justifications of punishment, a deterrence justification associated with utilitarianism and other consequentialist moral theories, and a retributive justification associated with deontological moral theories. But now that rights-based theories are attracting the increasing attention of moral philosophers it is worth asking whether these th…Read more
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185Value theoryIn David Copp (ed.), The Oxford handbook of ethical theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 357--379. 2006.This chapter surveys a variety of views about which states of affairs are intrinsically good, that is, in themselves or apart from their consequences. It considers the claims to intrinsic value of such states of individuals as pleasure, the fulfillment of desire, knowledge, achievement, moral virtue, and personal relationships; the different ways such goods can be compared and aggregated both within and across individual lives; and the possibility, given a principle of “organic unities,” of good…Read more
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48Desert: Individualistic and holisticIn Serena Olsaretti (ed.), Desert and justice, Oxford University Press. pp. 45--45. 2003.Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.
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59I became interested in normative ethics in my last term as a philosophy undergraduate at the University of Toronto. Influenced by a traditional conception of the discipline, I’d till then studied mostly history of philosophy, with a special interest in, of all things, Hegel. But seeing the value of a balanced philosophy program, I enrolled in an ethics seminar in the winter of 1975. I’d studied the ethics of Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, and others in my history courses, but this was my first exposure …Read more
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68Underivative duty: British moral philosophers from Sidgwick to Ewing (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.These ten new essays by leading contemporary philosophers constitute the first collective study of a group of British moral philosophers active between the ...
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |