•  27
    Backgrounding desire
    Philosophical 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
  •  15
    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
  •  29
    Reply to Critics of The Birth of Ethics
    Inquiry: 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...
  •  23
    Precis of The Birth of Ethics
    Inquiry: 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.
  •  21
    A Morality Fit for Humans
    International 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.
  •  18
    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.
  •  6
    The State: A Response to Four Interlocutors
    Journal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (2): 225-230. 2023.
  •  22
    On the many as one: A reply to Kornhauser and Sager
    Philosophy 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
  •  18
  •  119
    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
  •  118
    Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility result
    Economics 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
  •  7
    Responses to 'in defense of relativism'
    with Robert Ackermann, Brian Baigrie, Harold I. Brown, Michael Cavanaugh, Paul Fox-Strangways, Gonzalo Munevar, Stephen David Ross, Paul Roth, Frederick Schmitt, Stephen Turner, and Charles Wallis
    Social Epistemology 2 (3). 1988.
    No abstract
  •  88
    Deliberation and Decision
    In Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley-blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Decision ‐ Theoretic Picture The Decision ‐ plus ‐ Deliberation Picture A Common Mistake References.
  •  5
    Analytical Philosophy
    In Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit & Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 1996.
    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.
  •  7
    Rawls's Peoples
    In 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.
  •  2
    The Reality of Rule-Following
    In Alexander Miller & Crispin Wright (eds.), Rule-Following and Meaning, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 188-208. 2002.
  •  3
    Participation, Deliberation, and We-thinking
    In Daniel I. O'Neill, Mary Lyndon Shanley & Iris Marion Young (eds.), Illusion of Consent: Engaging with Carole Pateman, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 185-204. 2008.
  •  12
    The dustjacket of The Common Mind bears a photograph of the traffic at a Sydney intersection on a wet winter’s evening in 1938. It is rush hour, and the homeward traffic conveys a fine sense of common purpose. The scene has a special resonance for me, for I stood at that very spot with my parents and brothers one similar evening in 1966, on the day we first arrived in Australia. There was a marked pedestrian crossing there then, which we set out to negotiate, taking it for granted that the relev…Read more
  •  33
    The backward induction paradox
    Journal of Philosophy 86 (4): 169-182. 1989.
  •  6
    Precis of the Argument of On the people’s terms
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 18 (6): 642-643. 2015.
  •  2
    On the People’s Terms: A reply to five critiques
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 18 (6): 687-696. 2015.
  •  30
    Joint actions and group agents
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (1): 18-39. 2006.
    University of Cologne, Germany Joint action and group agency have emerged as focuses of attention in recent social theory and philosophy but they have rarely been connected with one another. The argument of this article is that whereas joint action involves people acting together to achieve any sort of result, group agency requires them to act together for the achievement of one result in particular: the construction of a centre of attitude and agency that satisfies the usual constraints of cons…Read more
  •  6
    Bare functional desire
    with Huw Price
    Analysis 49 (4): 162-69. 1989.
    The purpose of this paper is to sound two notes of caution about a beguiling argument for the negative answer: for the Humean view that desires cannot be beliefs, or cognitive states more generally.
  •  15
    Moral functionalism, supervenience and reductionism
    Philosophical Quarterly 46 (182): 82-86. 1996.
    We respond to Mark van Roojen's discussion of our 'Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation', "Philosophical Quarterly", 45 (January, 1995): 20-40. There we assumed that ethical language makes claims about how things are and sought to make plausible under this assumption a view of moral language modelled on David Lewis's treatment of theoretical terms. Van Roojen finds the idea of treating ethical terms as theoretical terms attractive but doubts that we 'have succeeded in offering a reduction of…Read more
  •  16
  •  19
    Locke, expressivism, conditionals
    with F. Jackson
    Analysis 63 (1): 86-92. 2003.
    The sentence ‘x is square’ might have had different truth conditions from those it in fact has. It might have had no truth conditions at all. Its having truth conditions and its having the ones it has rest on empirical facts about our use of ‘x is square’. What empirical facts? Any answer that goes into detail is inevitably highly controversial, but we think that there is a rough answer that is, by philosophers’ standards, relatively uncontroversial. It goes back to Locke 1689 and beyond, and is…Read more