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332Freedom in belief and desireJournal of Philosophy 93 (9): 429-449. 1996.People ordinarily suppose that there are certain things they ought to believe and certain things they ought not to believe. In supposing this to be so, they make corresponding assumptions about their belief-forming capacities. They assume that they are generally responsive to what they think they ought to believe in the things they actually come to believe. In much the same sense, people ordinarily suppose that there are certain things they ought to desire and do and they make corresponding assu…Read more
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16Reason and Value: Themes From the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (edited book)Clarendon Press. 2004.Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute to an enhanced appreciati…Read more
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92Review: Posted 10/5/99 (review)JP argue that expressivists must admit that becoming competent with ethical utterances involves learning to make them only when one believes one has the relevant attitude. For expressivists hold that communicating our attitudes is the function of ethical utterances, in which case sincerity demands that we not utter an ethical sentence unless we believe we have the relevant attitude. So (b) is false, as long as we suppose that this commitment, as reflected in well-entrenched and clear-cut (hencef…Read more
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129An epistemic free-riding problem?In Philip Catton & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals, Routledge. pp. 128-158. 2004.One of the hallmark themes of Karl Popper’s approach to the social sciences was the insistence that when social scientists are members of the society they study, then they are liable to affect that society. In particular, they are liable to affect it in such a way that the claims they make lose their validity. “The interaction between the scientist’s pronouncements and social life almost invariably creates situations in which we have not only to consider the truth of such pronouncements, but als…Read more
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808Ethical particularism and patternsIn Brad Hooker & Margaret Olivia Little (eds.), Moral particularism, Oxford University Press. pp. 79--99. 2000.
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933The Truth in DeontologyIn R. Jay Wallace (ed.), Reason and value: themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford University Press. 2004.
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Freedom and harmonyIn Chenyang Li & Dascha Düring (eds.), The Virtue of Harmony, Oxford University Press. 2022.
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Republican freedom, social justice, and democracyIn James Dominic Rooney & Patrick Zoll (eds.), Beyond Classical Liberalism: Freedom and the Good, Routledge Chapman & Hall. 2024.
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6An epistemic free-riding problem?In Philip Catton & Cynthia Macdonald (eds.), Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals, Routledge. pp. 128-158. 2004.
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157Social Contract Theory.Political Argument: A Reissue with a New Introduction.Rawls: `A Theory of Justice' and its Critics.Contemporary Political Philosophy: An IntroductionPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (168): 375-378. 1992.
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308Practical unreasonMind 102 (405): 53-79. 1993.Some contemporary theories treat phenomena like weakness of will, compulsion and wantonness as practical failures but not as failures of rationality: say, as failures of autonomy or whatever. Other current theories-the majority see the phenomena as failures of rationality but not as distinctively practical failures. They depict them as always involving a theoretical deficiency: a sort of ignorance, error, inattention or illogic. They represent them as failures which are on a par with breakdowns …Read more
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15Global ConsequentialismIn Brad Hooker, Elinor Mason, Dale E. Miller, D. W. Haslett, Shelly Kagan, Sanford S. Levy, David Lyons, Phillip Montague, Tim Mulgan, Philip Pettit, Madison Powers, Jonathan Riley, William H. Shaw, Michael Smith & Alan Thomas (eds.), Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 121--133. 2000.
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12External ReasonsIn Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), McDowell and His Critics, Blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains section titled: Williams's Analysis of Internal Reasons Williams's Claim that All Reasons are Internal Reasons McDowell's Analysis of External Reasons.
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246Backgrounding desirePhilosophical Review 99 (4): 565-592. 1990.Granted that desire is always present in the genesis of human action, is it something on the presence of which the agent always reflects? I may act on a belief without coming to recognize that I have the belief. Can I act on a desire without recognizing that I have the desire? In particular, can the desire have a motivational presence in my decision making, figuring in the background, as it were, without appearing in the content of my deliberation, in the foreground? We argue, perhaps unsurprisi…Read more
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40Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2000.What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. Th…Read more
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29Reply to Critics of The Birth of EthicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.The critiques of The Birth of Ethics (henceforth BE) that my co-symposiasts have provided are of the very highest quality and I have benefitted enormously from thinking about them and considering h...
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20Precis of The Birth of EthicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.ABSTRACT“The Birth of Ethics”, which is summarized here, argues that creatures like us who lacked prescriptive concepts of a kind with desirability and responsibility would be robustly likely to develop practices of mutual commitment that would prompt the evolution of such concepts, giving them access to corresponding properties. That development and evolution would be explicable without reliance on prescriptive concepts, supporting a form of naturalistic realism about ethics.
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49A Morality Fit for HumansInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 32 (1): 132-145. 2023.There are a number of assumptions made in our accepted psychology of moral decision-making that consequentialism seems to violate:: value connectionism, pluralism and dispositionalism. But consequentialism violates them only on a utilitarian or similar theory of value, not on the rival sort of theory that is sketched here.
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111Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social RealityRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2003.Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers to the basic questions of social metaphysics, from a broad array of voices. It will interest all philosophers and social scientists concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory.
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30The State: A Response to Four InterlocutorsJournal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (2): 225-230. 2023.
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111On the many as one: A reply to Kornhauser and SagerPhilosophy and Public Affairs 33 (4). 2005.In a recent paper on ‘The Many as One’, Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory. How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind? How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity? We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense. But should we expect integration among the many in the legislature, for example, or among the many …Read more
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138Episteme symposium on group agency: replies to Gaus, Cariani, Sylvan, and BriggsEpisteme 9 (3): 293-309. 2012.Discussion Christian List, Philip Pettit, Episteme, FirstView Article
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952Aggregating sets of judgments: Two impossibility results comparedSynthese 140 (1-2). 2004.The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. A…Read more
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793Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility resultEconomics and Philosophy 18 (1): 89-110. 2002.Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that difficulty illustrates…Read more
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522Deliberation and DecisionIn Constantine Sandis & Timothy O'Connor (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: The Decision ‐ Theoretic Picture The Decision ‐ plus ‐ Deliberation Picture A Common Mistake References.
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8Analytical PhilosophyIn Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit & Thomas Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell. 2017.Analytical philosophy is philosophy in the mainstream tradition of the Enlightenment. Specifically, it is philosophy pursued in the manner of Hume and Kant, Bentham and Frege, Mill and Russell. What binds analytical figures together is that they endorse, or at least take seriously, the distinctive assumptions of the Enlightenment.
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7Rawls's PeoplesIn Rex Martin & David A. Reidy (eds.), Rawls's Law of Peoples, Blackwell. 2006-01-01.This chapter contains section titled: Rawls's Anti‐Cosmopolitanism Rawls's Ontology of Peoples Reconstructing Rawls's Rejection of Cosmopolitanism Acknowledgments Notes.
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |