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280Utilitarian morality and the personal point of viewJournal of Philosophy 83 (8): 417-438. 1986.Consideration of the objection from the personal point of view reveals the resources of utilitarianism. The utilitarian can offer a partial rebuttal by distinguishing between criteria of rightness and decision procedures and claiming that, because his theory is a criterion of rightness and not a decision procedure, he can justify agents' differential concern for their own welfare and the welfare of those close to them. The flexibility in utilitarianism's theory of value allows further rebuttal o…Read more
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16Skorupski, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mill (review)Review of Metaphysics 53 (4): 960-963. 2000.
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750Responsibility, Incompetence, and PsychopathyIn The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas. 2013.This essay articulates a conception of responsibility and excuse in terms of the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing and explores its implications for insanity, incompetence, and psychopathy. The fair opportunity conception factors responsibility into conditions of normative competence and situational control and factors normative competence into cognitive and volitional capacities. This supports a conception of incompetence that recognizes substantial impairment of either cognitive or voliti…Read more
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29Rational egoism and the separateness of personsIn J. Dancy (ed.), Reading Parfit, Blackwell. pp. 96--134. 1997.
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102Objectivity and dialectical methods in ethicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 42 (2). 1999.A cognitivist interpretation of moral inquiry treats it, like other kinds of inquiry, as aiming at true belief. A dialectical conception of moral inquiry represents the justification for a given moral belief as consisting in its intellectual fit with other beliefs, both moral and nonmoral. The essay appeals to semantic considerations to defend cognitivism as a default metaethical view; it defends a dialectical conception of moral inquiry by examining Sidgwick's ambivalence about the probative va…Read more
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50Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and DutyPhilosophical Review 108 (4): 576. 1999.This collection of essays contains revised versions of papers delivered at a conference entitled “Duty, Interest, and Practical Reason: Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics” that was organized by Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting at the University of Pittsburgh in 1994. One of the main aims of the conference was to bring together scholars on Aristotle, the Stoics, and Kant to reevaluate the common view that Greek and Kantian ethics represent fundamentally opposed conceptions of ethical theory and…Read more
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4Sidgwick and the Rationale for Rational EgoismIn Bart Schultz (ed.), Essays on Henry Sidgwick, Cambridge University Press. 1992.
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2Prolegomena to Ethics (edited book)Clarendon Press. 2003.A scholarly edition of a work by T.H. Green. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
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416Millian principles, freedom of expression, and hate speechLegal Theory 7 (2): 119-157. 2001.Hate speech employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other forms of group membership. The regulation of hate speech is deservedly controversial, in part because debates over hate speech seem to have teased apart libertarian and egalitarian strands within the liberal tradition. In the civil rights movements of the 1960s, libertarian concerns with freedom of movement and association and equal opportunity pointed in t…Read more
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135Legal theory, legal interpretation, and judicial reviewPhilosophy and Public Affairs 17 (2): 105-148. 1988.I argue that disputes within constitutional theory about whether recent supreme court decisions exceed the scope of legitimate judicial review and disputes within legal theory about the nature and determinacy of law are best seen and assessed as disputes over the nature of legal interpretation. I criticize the interpretive assumptions on which these disputes generally depend and defend a theory of interpretation which tends to vindicate the determinacy of law even in hard cases and the style of …Read more
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326Common Sense and First Principles in Sidgwick's MethodsSocial Philosophy and Policy 11 (1): 179-201. 1994.What role, if any, should our moral intuitions play in moral epistemology? We make, or are prepared to make, moral judgments about a variety of actual and hypothetical situations. Some of these moral judgments are more informed, reflective, and stable than others (call these ourconsideredmoral judgments); some we make more confidently than others; and some, though not all, are judgments about which there is substantial consensus. What bearing do our moral judgments have on philosophical ethics a…Read more
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33Situationism, responsibility, and fair opportunitySocial Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2): 121-149. 2013.The situationist literature in psychology claims that conduct is not determined by character and reflects the operation of the agent's situation or environment. For instance, due to situational factors, compassionate behavior is much less common than we might have expected from people we believe to be compassionate. This article focuses on whether situationism should revise our beliefs about moral responsibility. It assesses the implications of situationism against the backdrop of a conception o…Read more
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Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
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