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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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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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407Realism, Naturalism, and Moral SemanticsSocial Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 154. 2001.The prospects for moral realism and ethical naturalism have been important parts of recent debates within metaethics. As a first approximation, moral realism is the claim that there are facts or truths about moral matters that are objective in the sense that they obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. Ethical naturalism is the claim that moral properties of people, actions, and institutions are natural, rather than occult or supernatural, features of the world. Tho…Read more
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1430Situationism, Responsibility, and Fair OpportunitySocial Philosophy and Policy (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 situationism’s implications against the backdrop of a conception of r…Read more
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244Prudence and AuthenticityPhilosophical Review 112 (2): 215-245. 2003.Prudence and authenticity are sometimes seen as rival virtues. Prudence,as traditionally conceived, is temporally neutral. It attaches no intrinsic significance to the temporal location of benefits or harms within the agent’s life; the prudent agent should be equally concerned about all parts of her life. But people’s values and ideals often change over time, sometimes in predictable ways, as when middle age and parenthood often temporize youthful radicalism or spontaneity with concerns for comf…Read more
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140The Separateness of Persons, Distributive Norms, and Moral TheoryIn R. G. Frey & Christopher Morris (eds.), Value, Welfare, and Morality, Cambridge University Press. pp. 252-289. 1993.
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182Impartiality and Associative Duties: David O. BrinkUtilitas 13 (2): 152-172. 2001.Consequentialism is often criticized for failing to accommodate impersonal constraints and personal options. A common consequentialist response is to acknowledge the anticonsequentialist intuitions but to argue either that the consequentialist can, after all, accommodate the allegedly recalcitrant intuitions or that, where accommodation is impossible, the recalcitrant intuition can be dismissed for want of an adequate philosophical rationale. Whereas these consequentialist responses have some pl…Read more
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134Sidgwick's dualism of practical reasonAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 66 (3). 1988.This Article does not have an abstract
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48Aristotelian Naturalism and the History of EthicsJournal of the History of Philosophy 52 (4): 813-833. 2014.terence irwin’s monumental three-volume The Development of Ethics is a masterful reconstruction and assessment of figures, traditions, and ideas in the history of ethics in the Western tradition from Socrates through John Rawls.1, 2 The three volumes weigh in at over 11 pounds and span 96 substantial chapters and over 2,700 densely formatted pages (large pages, small margins, and small font). The Development of Ethics covers not only familiar figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Aquina…Read more
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928First Acts, Last Acts, and AbandonmentLegal Theory 19 (2): 114-123. 2013.This contribution reconstructs and assesses Gideon Yaffe’s claims in his book Attempts about what constitutes an attempt, what can count as evidence that an attempt has been made, whether abandonment is a genuine defense, and whether attempts should be punished less severely than completed crimes. I contrast Yaffe’s account of being motivated by an intention and the completion of an attempt in terms of the truth of the completion counterfactual with an alternative picture of attempts as tempora…Read more
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50Retributivism and Legal MoralismRatio Juris 25 (4): 496-512. 2012.This article examines whether a retributivist conception of punishment implies legal moralism and asks what liberalism implies about retributivism and moralism. It makes a case for accepting the weak retributivist thesis that culpable wrongdoing creates a pro tanto case for blame and punishment and the weak moralist claim that moral wrongdoing creates a pro tanto case for legal regulation. This weak moralist claim is compatible with the liberal claim that the legal enforcement of morality is rar…Read more
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34Mill’s Progressive PrinciplesOxford University Press UK. 2013.David O. Brink offers a reconstruction and assessment of John Stuart Mill's contributions to the utilitarian and liberal traditions. Brink defends interpretations of key elements in Mill's moral and political thought, and shows how a perfectionist reading of his conception of happiness has a significant impact on other aspects of his philosophy.
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2„The Autonomy of Ethics “In Michael Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Cambridge University Press. pp. 149--65. 2007.
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210Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community*: DAVID O. BRINKSocial Philosophy and Policy 16 (1): 252-289. 1999.It is common to regard love, friendship, and other associational ties to others as an important part of a happy or flourishing life. This would be easy enough to understand if we focused on friendships based on pleasure, or associations, such as business partnerships, predicated on mutual advantage. For then we could understand in a straightforward way how these interpersonal relationships would be valuable for someone involved in such relationships just insofar as they caused her pleasure or ca…Read more
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378Self-Love and AltruismSocial Philosophy and Policy 14 (1): 122-157. 1997.Whether morality has rational authority is an open question insofar as we can seriously entertain conceptions of morality and practical reason according to which it need not be contrary to reason to fail to conform to moral requirements. Doubts about the authority of morality are especially likely to arise for those who hold a broadly prudential view of rationality. It is common to think of morality as including various other-regarding duties of cooperation, forbearance, and aid. Most of us also…Read more
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41Review: Engstrom & Whiting, Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics (review)Philosophical Review 108 (4): 576-582. 1999.
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174Principles and Intuitions in Ethics: Historical and Contemporary PerspectivesEthics 124 (4): 665-694. 2014.This essay situates some recent empirical research on the origin, nature, role, and reliability of moral intuitions against the background of nineteenth-century debates between ethical naturalism and rational intuitionism. The legitimate heir to Millian naturalism is the contemporary method of reflective equilibrium and its defeasible reliance on moral intuitions. Recent doubts about moral intuitions—worries that they reflect the operation of imperfect cognitive heuristics, are resistant to unde…Read more
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9Legal Interpretation, Objectivity and MoralityIn Brian Leiter (ed.), Objectivity in Law and Morals, Cambridge University Press. pp. 12--65. 2001.
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158Some Forms and Limits of ConsequentialismIn David Copp (ed.), The Oxford handbook of ethical theory, Oxford University Press. 2006.All forms of consequentialism make the moral assessment of alternatives depend in some way on the value of the alternatives, but they form a heterogeneous family of moral theories. Some employ subjective assumptions about value, while others employ objective assumptions. Some assess the value of alternatives directly, while others assess value indirectly. Some direct agents to maximize value, while others direct agents to satisfice. Some, such as utilitarianism, are impartial and concerned to pr…Read more
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124Rawlsian Constructivism In Moral TheoryCanadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1): 71-90. 1987.Since his article, ‘Outline for a Decision Procedure in Ethics,’ John Rawls has advocated a coherentist moral epistemology according to which moral and political theories are justified on the basis of their coherence with our other beliefs, both moral and nonmoral. A moral theory which is maximally coherent with our other beliefs is in a state which Rawls calls ‘reflective equilibrium’. In A Theory of Justice Rawls advanced two principles of justice and claimed that they are in reflective equili…Read more
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1354Fairness and the Architecture of ResponsibilityOxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility 1 284-313. 2013.This essay explores a conception of responsibility at work in moral and criminal responsibility. Our conception draws on work in the compatibilist tradition that focuses on the choices of agents who are reasons-responsive and work in criminal jurisprudence that understands responsibility in terms of the choices of agents who have capacities for practical reason and whose situation affords them the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. Our conception brings together the dimensions of normative …Read more
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1203Moral realism and the sceptical arguments from disagreement and queernessAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (2). 1984.This Article does not have an abstract
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113Making a Necessity of Virtue (review)Philosophical Review 109 (3): 428-434. 2000.Recent moral philosophy has seen a revival of interest in the concept of virtue, and with it a reassessment of the role of virtue in the work of Aristotle and Kant. This book brings that reassessment to a new level of sophistication. Nancy Sherman argues that Kant preserves a notion of virtue in his moral theory that bears recognizable traces of the Aristotelian and Stoic traditions, and that his complex anthropology of morals brings him into surprising alliance with Aristotle. She develops her …Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |