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59The Significance of EmotionsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 31 (4): 319-331. 1994.We must distinguish between a capacity for goal-directedness of a sort found in chess-playing computers and a capacity for robust desire, which involves finding there being something in favor of the relevant course of action in light of its significance to the subject. Existing accounts of desire, especially those given in terms of instrumental rationality, either ignore or presuppose such significance, in both cases failing to give an adequate account of robust desire. My positive thesis in thi…Read more
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329FriendshipStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who we are as persons. Given this…Read more
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103Responsibility and Dignity: Strawsonian ThemesIn Carla Bagnoli (ed.), Morality and the Emotions, Oxford University Press. pp. 217-34. 2011.Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” usefully connected the concepts of freedom and responsibility with the reactive attitudes, but there has been some controversy concerning both the nature of that connection and what the reactive attitudes are. I shall argue—tentatively and speculatively—that we can best understand the reactive attitudes by seeing them as individually presupposing and jointly constituting both our respect for persons and the dignity to which that respect is responsive. Co…Read more
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2Significance, Emotions, and Objectivity: Some Limits of Animal ThoughtDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1994.Rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental. Therefore it is important to understand the sort of rationality at issue here. It is often assumed that rationality just is instrumental rationality, but this leaves us with too thin a notion of desire: Desires centrally involve the notion of things mattering or being significant, for their objects must normally be worth pursuing to the subject. Such significance is simply unintelligible in terms of instrumental rationality. Consequently, unde…Read more
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314Plural agentsNoûs 42 (1). 2008.Genuine agents are able to engage in activity because they find it worth pursuing—because they care about it. In this respect, they differ from what might be called “mere intentional systems”: systems like chess-playing computers that exhibit merely goal-directed behavior mediated by instrumental rationality, without caring. A parallel distinction can be made in the domain of social activity: plural agents must be distinguished from plural intentional systems in that plural agents have cares and…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Responsibility |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
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Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Realism about Gender |
Moral Responsibility |