•  15
    Consequentialism and Content
    American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1). 1992.
  •  11
    Perfectionism
    Philosophical Quarterly 45 (178): 115-117. 1995.
  •  255
    Value and friendship: A more subtle view
    Utilitas 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
  •  107
    A 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
  •  729
    The Speech Act Fallacy Fallacy
    Canadian 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
  •  29
    Kamm on Intention and Proportionality in War
    Journal 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
  •  37
    The differences between journalism and scholarly writing
    The Chesterton Review 18 (2): 284-285. 1992.
  •  53
    The Grasshopper - Third Edition: Games, Life and Utopia
    with Bernard Suits and Frank Newfeld
    Broadview 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
  • From the Editorial Board
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (3): 5-5. 1999.
  •  71
    Satisficing 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
  •  10
    Value... and What Follows
    Philosophical Review 110 (2): 281. 2001.
  • Bart Schultz, ed., Essays on Henry Sidgwick Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 12 (5): 356-359. 1992.
  •  34
    On Judged Sports
    Journal 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
  •  44
    The Well-Rounded Life
    Journal 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
  •  76
    Many Faces of Virtue
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2): 496-503. 2014.
  •  143
    Two kinds of organic unity
    The 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
  •  195
    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.
  •  1
    Virtue, Vice and Value
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 194 (3): 351-351. 2004.
  •  44
    Equality, Liberty and Perfectionism (review)
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3): 449-470. 1983.
  •  128
    Right act, virtuous motive
    In Heather 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
  •  71
    Proportionality and necessity
    In Larry May & Emily Crookston (eds.), War: Essays in Political Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 2008.
    to appear in Larry May, ed., War and Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
  •  96
    Virtue as Loving the Good
    Social 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
  •  82
    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
  •  3
    Éticas teleológicas
    Critica -. 2008.