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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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413Millian 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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319Common 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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32Situationism, 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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1413Situationism, 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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403Realism, 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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243Prudence 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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181Impartiality 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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139The 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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46Aristotelian 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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134Sidgwick's dualism of practical reasonAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 66 (3). 1988.This Article does not have an abstract
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921First 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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49Retributivism 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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33Mill’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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208Eudaimonism, 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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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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41Review: Engstrom & Whiting, Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics (review)Philosophical Review 108 (4): 576-582. 1999.
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377Self-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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172Principles 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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