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26Sinnott–Armstrong's Moral ScepticismRatio 16 (1): 63-82. 2003.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s recent defence of moral scepticism raises the debate to a new level, but I argue that it is unsatisfactory because of problems with its assumption of global scepticism, with its use of the Sceptical 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, e…Read more
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89Promises and Material ConditionalsTeaching Philosophy 16 (2): 155-156. 1993.Some beginning logic students find it hard to understand why a material conditional is true when its antecedent is false. I draw an analogy between conditional statements and conditional promises (especially between true conditional statements and unbroken conditional promises) that makes this point of logic less counter-intuitive.
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155Moral realism and program explanationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (3). 2006.Alexander Miller has recently considered an ingenious extension of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit's account of 'program explanation' as a way of defending non-reductive naturalist versions of moral realism against Harman's explanatory criticism. Despite the ingenuity of this extension, Miller concludes that program explanation cannot help such moral realists in their attempt to defend moral properties. Specifically, he argues that such moral program explanations are dispensable from an epistemi…Read more
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4Eliminative Materialism and Substantive CommitmentsInternational Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1): 39-49. 1991.This paper is critical examination of eliminativism in the philosophy of mind. I begin by identifying eliminativism over and against two other positions in the mind/brain debate. I examine a 'postulational' version of the argument and Richard Rorty's version, arguing that the former is best interpreted as an attempt to eliminate singular terms whereas the latter is best interpreted as an attempt to eliminate predicates. I then set the eliminativism debate in the context of the metaphilosphica…Read more
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38Who are the best judges of theistic arguments?Sophia 35 (2): 1-12. 1996.The best judge of the soundness of a philosophical argument is the philosopher with the greatest philosophical aptitude, the deepest knowledge of the relevant subject matter, the most scrupulous character, and a disinterested position with respect to the subject matter. This last feature is important because even a highly intelligent and scrupulous judge may find it hard to reach the right conclusion about a subject in which he or she has a vested interest. When the subject of inquiry is the s…Read more
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58An aristotelian business ethics?Journal of Applied Philosophy 15 (1). 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 o…Read more
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13Review: Frances Snare,The Nature of Moral Thinking (review)Philosophical Books 35 (1): 78-80. 1994.
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39Review: Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation (Harvard, 2002) (review)Mind 113 (449): 189-192. 2004.
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122Non-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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72Is 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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89What 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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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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26Review: T.L.S. Sprigge,The Rational Foundations of Ethics (review)Philosophical Books 30 (1): 49-51. 1989.
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31Stephen T. Davis God, reason and theistic proofs. (Edinburgh university press, 1997). (review)Religious Studies 35 (1): 99-111. 1999.
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91Utilitarian 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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111Morally 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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34Epistemic Value, edited by Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan PritchardMind 123 (490): 609-612. 2014.
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359We 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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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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35John 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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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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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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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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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |