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711Fickle consentPhilosophical Studies 167 (1): 25-40. 2014.Why is consent revocable? In other words, why must we respect someone's present dissent at the expense of her past consent? This essay argues against act-based explanations and in favor of a rule-based explanation. A rule prioritizing present consent will serve our interests the best, in light of our interests in having flexibility over our consent and in minimizing the possibility of error in people's judgments about whether we consent
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571On Whether To Prefer Pain to PassEthics 121 (3): 521-537. 2011.Most of us are “time-biased” in preferring pains to be past rather than future and pleasures to be future rather than past. However, it turns out that if you are risk averse and time-biased, then you can be turned into a “pain pump”—in order to insure yourself against misfortune, you will take a series of pills which leaves you with more pain and better off in no respect. Since this vulnerability seems rationally impermissible, while time-bias and risk aversion seem rationally permissible, we ar…Read more
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382The Burdens of Morality: Why Act‐Consequentialism Demands Too LittleThought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (1): 82-85. 2016.A classic objection to act-consequentialism is that it is overdemanding: it requires agents to bear too many costs for the sake of promoting the impersonal good. I develop the complementary objection that act-consequentialism is underdemanding: it fails to acknowledge that agents have moral reasons to bear certain costs themselves, even when it would be impersonally better for others to bear these costs.
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1199Agent-neutral deontologyPhilosophical Studies 163 (2): 527-537. 2013.According to the “Textbook View,” there is an extensional dispute between consequentialists and deontologists, in virtue of the fact that only the latter defend “agent-relative” principles—principles that require an agent to have a special concern with making sure that she does not perform certain types of action. I argue that, contra the Textbook View, there are agent-neutral versions of deontology. I also argue that there need be no extensional disagreement between the deontologist and consequ…Read more
Areas of Specialization
| Normative Ethics |
| Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
| Meta-Ethics |
| Normative Ethics |
| Social and Political Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
| Rights in Applied Ethics |
| Rights |