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121Non-contradiction: Oh Yeah and So What?Think 12 (34): 87-91. 2013.The logical Law of Non-contradiction – that a proposition cannot be both true and false – enjoys a special, perhaps uniquely privileged, status in philosophy. Most philosophers think that finding a contradiction – the assertion of both P and not-P – in one's reasoning is the best possible evidence that something has gone wrong, the ultimate refutation of a position. But why should this be so? What reason do we have to believe it? In this paper, I address these questions.
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71Is it Always Fallacious to Derive Values From Facts?Argumentation 9 (4): 553-562. 1995.Charles Pigden has argued for a logical Is/Ought gap on the grounds of the conservativeness of logic. I offer a counter-example which shows that Pigden’s argument is unsound and that there need be no logical gap between Is-premises and an Ought-conclusion. My counter-example is an argument which is logically valid, has only Is-premises and an Ought-conclusion, does not purport to violate the conservativeness of logic, and does not rely on controversial assumptions about Aristotelian biology o…Read more
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86What the Utilitarian Cannot ThinkEthical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (4): 717-729. 2015.I argue that utilitarianism cannot accommodate a basic sort of moral judgment that many people want to make. I raise a real-life example of shockingly bad behavior and ask what can the utilitarian say about it. I concede that the utilitarian can say that this behavior caused pain to the victim; that pain is bad; that the agent’s behavior was impermissible; even that the agent’s treatment of the victim was vicious. However, there is still one thing the utilitarian cannot say, namely that the agen…Read more
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23Review: T.L.S. Sprigge,The Rational Foundations of Ethics (review)Philosophical Books 30 (1): 49-51. 1989.
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27Commentary: Practical Wisdom and TheoryCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 21 (3): 404-408. 2012.This paper is an ethical reflection on the real-life case of "Angela", a highly intelligent but severely anorexic young woman who wishes to refuse all but palliative treatment. It is part of CQHE's "Ethics Committees and Consultants at Work" series, in response to the essay, "Starving for Perfection."
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30Stephen T. Davis God, reason and theistic proofs. (Edinburgh university press, 1997). (review)Religious Studies 35 (1): 99-111. 1999.
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88Utilitarian EschatologyAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 28 (4): 339-47. 1991.Traditional utilitarianism, when applied, implies a surprising prediction about the future, viz., that all experience of pleasure and pain must end once and for all, or infinitely dwindle. Not only is this implication surprising, it should render utilitarianism unacceptable to persons who hold any of the following theses: that evaluative propositions may not imply descriptive, factual propositions; that evaluative propositions may not imply contingent factual propositions about the future; tha…Read more
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109Morally serious critics of moral intuitionsRatio 12 (1). 1999.I characterise moral intuitionism as the methodological claim that one may legitimately appeal to moral judgments in the course of moral reasoning even when those judgments are not supported by inference from other judgments. I describe two patterns of criticism of this method: ‘morally unserious’ criticisms, which hold that ‘morality is bunk’, so appeals to moral intuitions are bunk as well; and ‘morally serious’ criticisms, which hold that morality is not bunk, but that appeals to moral intu…Read more
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357We Have No Positive Epistemic DutiesMind 119 (473): 83-102. 2010.In ethics, it is commonly supposed that we have both positive duties and negative duties, things we ought to do and things we ought not to do. Given the many parallels between ethics and epistemology, we might suppose that the same is true in epistemology, and that we have both positive epistemic duties and negative epistemic duties. I argue that this is false; that is, that we have negative epistemic duties, but no positive ones. There are things that we ought not to believe, but there is nothi…Read more
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34Epistemic Value, edited by Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan PritchardMind 123 (490): 609-612. 2014.
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12An Aristotelian Business Ethics?Journal of Applied Philosophy 15 (1): 89-104. 1998.Elaine Sternberg’s Just Business is one of the first book‐length Aristotelian treatments of business ethics. It is Aristotelian in the sense that Sternberg begins by defining the nature of business in order to identify its end, and, thence, normative principles to regulate it. According to Sternberg, the nature of business is ‘the selling of goods or services in order to maximise long‐term owner value’, therefore all business behaviour must be evaluated with reference to the maximisation of long…Read more
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31Review of Timothy Chappell, Ethics and Experience: Life Beyond Moral Theory (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (12). 2009.
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59Non-contradiction: Oh yeah and so what?: Nelson non-contradictionThink 12 (34): 87-91. 2013.ExtractThe logical Law of Non-contradiction – that a proposition cannot be both true and false – enjoys a special, perhaps uniquely privileged, status in philosophy. Most philosophers think that finding a contradiction – the assertion of both P and not-P – in one's reasoning is the best possible evidence that something has gone wrong, the ultimate refutation of a position. But why should this be so? What reason do we have to believe it?Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, f…Read more
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32John Hare God's call: Moral realism, God's commands, and human autonomy. (William B. Eerdmans, 2001). (review)Religious Studies 38 (2): 225-246. 2002.
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142Y and Z Are Not Off the Hook: The Survival Lottery Made FairerJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 35 (4): 396-401. 2010.In this article I show that the argument in John Harris's famous "Survival Lottery" paper cannot be right. Even if we grant Harris's assumptions—of the justifiability of such a lottery, the correctness of maximizing consequentialism, the indistinguishability between killing and letting die, the practical and political feasibility of such a scheme—the argument still will not yield the conclusion that Harris wants. On his own terms, the medically needy should be less favored (and more vulnerable t…Read more
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31Temporal Wholes and the Problem of EvilReligious Studies 29 (3). 1993.I borrow an idea from the fiction of C. S. Lewis that future outcomes may affect the value of past events, defend this idea via the concept of a 'temporal whole' and show its promise as a part of a theodicy and its resonance with Christian theism.
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54The contingency cosmological argumentIn Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.I present and explain a brief version of the "contingency" cosmological argument earlier developed by Samuel Clarke and then updated by William Rowe.
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28Christian theism and moral philosophy (edited book)Mercer University Press. 1998.These essays exhibit explanation and argument regarding some of the possible answers to these fundamental questions in moral philosophy.
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111The Morality of a Free Market for Transplant OrgansPublic Affairs Quarterly 5 (1): 63-79. 1991.There is a world-wide shortage of kidneys for transplantation. Many people will have to endure lengthy and unpleasant dialysis treatments, or die before an organ becomes available. Given this chronic shortage, some doctors and health economists have proposed offering financial incentives to potential donors to increase the supply of transplantable organs. In this paper, I explore objections to the practice of buying and selling organs from the point of view 1) justice, 2) beneficence and 3) …Read more
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61Must we argue?The Philosophers' Magazine 26 (26): 41-42. 2004.Analytic philosophers often claim that the giving and criticizing of deductive arguments is the main or only business of philosophy. I argue that this is mistaken and show analytic philosophers also use formal schemas, distinctions, examples, and analogies so as to make some aspect of reality manifest. That is, some analytic philosophers sometimes simply try to ‘tell it like it is’. This ‘method of descriptive manifestation’ is less commonly recognized than it should be given its divergence from…Read more
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63What justification could not beInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (3). 2002.I begin by asking the meta-epistemological question, 'What is justification?', analogous to the meta-ethical question, 'What is rightness?' I introduce the possibility of non-cognitivist, naturalist, non-naturalist, and eliminativist answers in meta-epistemology,corresponding to those in meta-ethics. I devote special attention to the naturalistic hypothesis that epistemic justification is identical to probability, showing its antecedent plausibility. I argue that despite this plausibility, justi…Read more
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19IntroductionPhilosophical Papers 40 (3): 279-283. 2011.Philosophical Papers, Volume 40, Issue 3, Page 279-283, November 2011
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67The Principle of Sufficient Reason: a Moral Argument: MARK T. NELSONReligious Studies 32 (1): 15-26. 1996.The Clarke/Rowe version of the Cosmological Argument is sound only if the Principle of Sufficient Reason is true, but many philosophers, including Rowe, think that there is not adequate evidence for the principle of sufficient reason. I argue that there may be indirect evidence for PSR on the grounds that if we do not accept it, we lose our best justification for an important principle of metaethics, namely, the Principle of Universalizability. To show this, I argue that all the other justificat…Read more
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141A problem for conservatismAnalysis 69 (4): 620-630. 2009.I present a problem for a prominent kind of conservatism, viz., the combination of traditional moral & religious values, patriotic nationalism, and libertarian capitalism. The problem is that these elements sometimes conflict. In particular, I show how libertarian capitalism and patriotic nationalism conflict via a scenario in which the thing that libertarian capitalists love – unregulated market activity – threatens what American patriots love – a strong, independent America. Unrestricted li…Read more
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74Sinnott–Armstrong's moral scepticismRatio 16 (1). 2003.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's recent defense of moral skepticism raises the debate to a new level, but I argue that it is unsatisfactory because of problems with its assumption of global skepticism, with its use of the Skeptical Hypothesis Argument, and with its use of the idea of contrast classes and the correlative distinction between "everyday" justification and "philosophical" justification. I draw on Chisholm's treatment of the Problem of the Criterion to show that my claim that I know that, …Read more
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49On the lack of ‘true philosophic spirit’ in Aquinas: Commitment V. tracking in philosophic methodPhilosophy 76 (2): 283-296. 2001.Bertrand Russell famously disparaged Thomas Aquinas as having ‘little of the true philosophic spirit’, because ‘he does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.’ Like many of Russell's pronouncements, this is breathtakingly supercilious and unfair. Still, even an enthusiastic admirer of Aquinas may worry that there is something in it, that there is something wrong with religious ‘commitments’ in philosophy. I examine Russell's objection by comparing stan…Read more
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27More Bad News For The Logical Autonomy of EthicsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (2): 203-216. 2007.Since the time of Hume, many philosophers have thought it impossible to deduce an ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is,’ or in general to deduce ‘ethical sentences’ from purely ‘factual sentences.’ This is the thesis of the logical autonomy of ethics. I consider a more recent argument by Toomas Karmo in support of the autonomism, but show its limitations in the context of justification skepticism about ethics.
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46Temporal Wholes and the Problem of Evil: MARK T. NELSONReligious Studies 29 (3): 313-324. 1993.This article is not intended to state what I positively believe to be true, but to make a suggestion which I think it well-worth working out. The suggestion is not altogether unfamiliar, but it has certain implications that seem to have been so far overlooked, or at any rate have never been developed. I do not think that it is the duty of a philosopher to confine himself in his publications to working out theories of the truth of which he is convinced.… It is a part of a philosopher's work, as i…Read more
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |