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246Non-cognitivism, truth and logicPhilosophical Studies 86 (1): 73-91. 1997.This paper provides a new argument for a position of Crispin Wright's: given that ethical statements can be embedded within all sorts of sentential operators and are subject to definite standards of warrantedness, they must have truth conditions. Allan Gibbard's normative logic' is the only noncognitivist logic that stands a chance of avoiding Geach's Fregean objection. But what, according to Gibbard, is the point of avoiding inconsistency in one's ethical statements? He must say that it is to e…Read more
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97The Nature of Normativity: PrécisPhilosophical Studies 151 (3). 2010.This is a precis of Ralph Wedgwood's book "The Nature of Normativity".
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1921Internalism ExplainedPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2): 349-369. 2002.According to epistemological internalism, the rationality of a belief supervenes purely on "internal facts" about the thinker's mind. But what are "internal facts"? Why does the rationality of a belief supervene on them? The standard answers are unacceptable. This paper proposes new answers. "Internal facts" are facts about the thinker's nonfactive mental states. The rationality of a belief supervenes on such internal facts because we need rules of belief revision that we can follow directly, no…Read more
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554The moral evil demonsIn Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement, Oxford University Press. 2010.Moral disagreement has long been thought to create serious problems for certain views in metaethics. More specifically, moral disagreement has been thought to pose problems for any metaethical view that rejects relativism—that is, for any view that implies that whenever two thinkers disagree about a moral question, at least one of those thinkers’ beliefs about the question is not correct. In this essay, I shall outline a solution to one of these problems. As I shall argue, it turns out in the en…Read more
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199Fact and Value: Essays on Ethics and Metaphysics for Judith Jarvis Thomson (edited book)Bradford. 2001.The diversity of topics discussed in this book reflects the breadth of Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical work. Throughout her long career at MIT, Thomson's straightforward approach and emphasis on problem-solving have shaped philosophy in significant ways. Some of the book's contributions discuss specific moral and political issues such as abortion, self-defense, the rights and obligations of prospective fathers, and political campaign finance. Other contributions concern the foundations of …Read more
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28Review of "The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics" by Philip Pettit (review)European Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 111-115. 1996.This is a review of Philip Pettit's book "The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics"
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340Review of Being Realistic about Reasons, by T. M. Scanlon (review)Philosophical Quarterly 66 (262): 213-217. 2016.This is a review of T. M. Scanlon's book "Being Realistic about Reasons", which is based on the Locke Lectures that Scanlon gave in Oxford in 2009.
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131Railton on normativity (review)Philosophical Studies 126 (3): 463-479. 2005.This is a critical discussion of Part III of Peter Railton's recent book Facts, Values, and Norms: Essays Toward a Morality of Consequence (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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312The Right Thing to BelieveIn Timothy Chan (ed.), The Aim of Belief, Oxford University Press. pp. 123-139. 2013.Many philosophers have claimed that “belief aims at the truth”. But is there any interpretation of this claim on which it counts as true? According to some philosophers, the best interpretation of the claim takes it as the normative thesis that belief is subject to a truth-norm. The goal of this essay is to clarify this normative interpretation of the claim. First, the claim can be developed so that it applies to partial beliefs as well as to flat-out full beliefs. Secondly, an answer is given t…Read more
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214Practical reasoning as figuring out what is best: Against constructivismTopoi 21 (1): 139-152. 2002.
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363Instrumental rationalityOxford Studies in Metaethics 6 280-309. 2011.Is there any distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of “instrumental rationality”? Recently, Joseph Raz (2005) has argued that instrumental rationality is a “myth”. In this essay, I shall give some qualified support to Raz’s position: as I shall argue, many philosophers have indeed been seduced by certain myths about instrumental rationality. Nonetheless, Raz’s conclusion is too strong. Instrumental rationality is not itself a myth: there really is a distinctive aspect of rati…Read more
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265The nature and value of knowledge: Three investigations, by Duncan Pritchard, Alan Millar, and Adrian Haddock (review)Analysis 72 (1): 187-189. 2012.This is a review of "The nature and value of knowlege: Three investigations", by Duncan Pritchard, Alan Millar, and Adrian Haddock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011).
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262Doxastic CorrectnessAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1): 217-234. 2013.If beliefs are subject to a basic norm of correctness—roughly, to the principle that a belief is correct only if the proposition believed is true—how can this norm guide believers in forming their beliefs? Answer: this norm guides believers indirectly: believers are directly guided by requirements of rationality—which are themselves explained by this norm of correctness. The fundamental connection between rationality and correctness is probabilistic. Incorrectness comes in degrees; for beliefs, …Read more
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375The "Good" and the "Right" RevisitedPhilosophical Perspectives 23 (1). 2009.Moral philosophy has long been preoccupied by a supposed dichotomy between the "good" and the "right". This dichotomy has been taken to define certain allegedly central issues for ethics. How are the good and the right related to each other? For example, is one of the two "prior" to the other? If so, is the good prior to the right, or is the right prior to the good?
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1317The Pitfalls of ‘Reasons’Philosophical Issues 25 (1): 123-143. 2015.Many philosophers working on the branches of philosophy that deal with the normative questions have adopted a " Reasons First" program. This paper criticizes the foundational assumptions of this program. In fact, there are many different concepts that can be expressed by the term 'reason' in English, none of which are any more fundamental than any others. Indeed, most of these concepts are not particularly fundamental in any interesting sense
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384Sensing values?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (1): 215-223. 2001.This is a reply to Mark Johnston's paper "The Authority of Affect", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2001).
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1260Akrasia and UncertaintyOrganon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 20 (4). 2013.According to John Broome, akrasia consists in a failure to intend to do something that one believes one ought to do, and such akrasia is necessarily irrational. In fact, however, failing to intend something that one believes one ought to do is only guaranteed to be irrational if one is certain of a maximally detailed proposition about what one ought to do; if one is uncertain about any part of the full story about what one ought to do, it could be perfectly rational not to intend to do something…Read more
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282Review: Kieran Setiya: Reasons without Rationalism (review)Mind 117 (468): 1130-1135. 2008.This is a review of Kieran Setiya's book, "Reasons without Rationalism" (Princeton University Press, 2007).
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523Objective and Subjective 'Ought'In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality, Oxford University Press. pp. 143-168. 2016.This essay offers an account of the truth conditions of sentences involving deontic modals like ‘ought’, designed to capture the difference between objective and subjective kinds of ‘ought’ This account resembles the classical semantics for deontic logic: according to this account, these truths conditions involve a function from the world of evaluation to a domain of worlds (equivalent to a so-called “modal base”), and an ordering of the worlds in such domains; this ordering of the worlds itself…Read more
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284Theories of content and theories of motivationEuropean Journal of Philosophy 3 (3): 273-288. 1995.According to the anti-Humean theory of motivation, it is possible to be motivated to act by reason alone. According to the Humean theory of motivation, this is impossible. The debate between these two theories remains as vigorous as ever (see for example Pettit 1987, Lewis 1988, Price 1989 and Smith 1994). In this paper I shall argue that the anti-Humean theory of motivation is incompatible with a number of prominent recent theories of content. I shall focus on causal or informational theories o…Read more
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6Critical Notice of Jean Hampton, "The Authority of Reason" (review)Philosophical Books 40 (4): 218-226. 1999.This is a review of Jean Hampton's posthumously published book "The Authority of Reason" (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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256The metaethicists' mistakePhilosophical Perspectives 18 (1). 2004.According to normative judgment internalism (NJI), normative judgments -- that is, judgments of the form 'I ought to F' and the like -- are "essentially practical", in the sense that they are in some way essentially connected to practical reasoning, or to motivation for action. Many metaethicists believe that if NJI is true, then it would cast grave doubts on any robustly realist (RR) conception of normative judgments. These metaethicists are mistaken. This mistake about the relations between NJ…Read more
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456Gandalf’s solution to the Newcomb problemSynthese 190 (14). 2013.This article proposes a new theory of rational decision, distinct from both causal decision theory (CDT) and evidential decision theory (EDT). First, some intuitive counterexamples to CDT and EDT are presented. Then the motivation for the new theory is given: the correct theory of rational decision will resemble CDT in that it will not be sensitive to any comparisons of absolute levels of value across different states of nature, but only to comparisons of the differences in value between the ava…Read more
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388The Essence of Response-DependenceEuropean Review of Philosophy 3 31-54. 1997.Many philosophers have thought that colours or flavours or values are in some way less objective than shape or mass or motion. This paper explores the approach to capturing this thought that is based on the idea of ‘ response-dependence ’. First, it is argued that the conceptions of response-dependence developed by Mark Johnston, Philip Pettit and Crispin Wright fail to capture this thought adequately. Then, the rest of the paper proposes an alternative conception, based in part on Kit Fine's no…Read more
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1763Is Civil Marriage Illiberal?In Elizabeth Brake (ed.), After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This paper defends the institution of civil marriage against the objection that it is inconsistent with political liberalism, and so should be either totally abolished or else transformed virtually beyond recognition.
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413Choosing Rationally and Choosing CorrectlyIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 201--229. 2007.Let us take an example that Bernard Williams (1981: 102) made famous. Suppose that you want a gin and tonic, and you believe that the stuff in front of you is gin. In fact, however, the stuff is not gin but petrol. So if you drink the stuff (even mixed with tonic), it will be decidedly unpleasant, to say the least. Should you choose to drink the stuff or not?
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384Primitively rational belief-forming processesIn Andrew Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief, Cambridge University Press. pp. 180--200. 2011.Intuitively, it seems that some belief-forming practices have the following three properties: 1. They are rational practices, and the beliefs that we form by means of these practices are themselves rational or justified beliefs. 2. Even if in most cases these practices reliably lead to correct beliefs (i.e., beliefs in true propositions), they are not infallible: it is possible for beliefs that are formed by means of these practices to be incorrect (i.e., to be beliefs in false propositions). 3.…Read more
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1449Justified InferenceSynthese 189 (2): 273-295. 2012.What is the connection between justification and the kind of consequence relations that are studied by logic? In this essay, I shall try to provide an answer, by proposing a general conception of the kind of inference that counts as justified or rational.
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519The normative force of reasoningNoûs 40 (4). 2006.What exactly is reasoning? Like many other philosophers, I shall endorse a broadly causal conception of reasoning. Reasoning is a causal process, in which one mental event (say, one’s accepting the conclusion of a certain argument) is caused by an antecedent mental event (say, one’s considering the premises of the argument). Just like causal accounts of action and causal accounts of perception, causal accounts of reasoning have to confront a version of what has come to be known as the problem of…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
| Epistemology |
| Meta-Ethics |
Areas of Interest
| Normative Ethics |
| Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |