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14Chapter 5. My Response to Your ValueIn Partiality, Princeton University Press. pp. 113-156. 2013.
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331Four Theories of Filial DutyPhilosophical Quarterly 56 (223). 2006.Children have special duties to their parents: there are things that we ought to do for our parents, but not for just anyone. Three competing accounts of filial duty appear in the literature: the debt theory, the gratitude theory and the friendship theory. Each is unsatisfactory: each tries to assimilate the moral relationship between parent and child to some independently understood conception of duty, but this relationship is different in structure and content from any that we are likely to sh…Read more
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A longer version of the virtue ethics paper. I go on to argue that virtue ethics faces special problems in explaining why self-effacement (even if inevitable) is regrettable, and say that the real worries about self-effacement can be navigated quite nicely by a certain form of consequentialism.
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36Chapter 1. Special Relationships and Special ReasonsIn Partiality, Princeton University Press. pp. 1-30. 2013.
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27Review of Diane Jeske, Rationality and Moral Theory: How Intimacy Generates Reasons (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (11). 2008.
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29On what is the war on terror?In Timothy Shanahan (ed.), Human Rights Review, Open Court. pp. 48-60. 2005.
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32Fiduciary Duties and Moral BlackmailJournal of Applied Philosophy 34 (2). 2017.In meeting legal or professional fiduciary obligations, a fiduciary can sometimes come to share a special moral relationship with her beneficiary. Special moral relationships produce special moral obligations. Sometimes the obligations faced by a fiduciary as a result of her moral relationship with her beneficiary go beyond the obligations involved in the initial fiduciary relationship. How such moral obligations develop is sometimes under the control of the beneficiary, or of an outside party. …Read more
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807Presentism and TruthmakingIn Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Vol. 1, Oxford University Press. pp. 83-104. 2004.
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79Moral Blackmail and the FamilyJournal of Moral Philosophy 13 (6): 699-719. 2016._ Source: _Volume 13, Issue 6, pp 699 - 719 Moral blackmail is a wrongful strategy intended to force a person to perform an act by manipulating her circumstances so as to make it morally wrong for her to do anything else. The idea of moral blackmail can seem paradoxical, but moral blackmail is a coherent and indeed a familiar phenomenon. It has special significance for our intimate personal relationships and is often a force within family dynamics. It is used to enforce power relationships withi…Read more
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185Welfare and the achievement of goalsPhilosophical Studies 121 (1): 27-41. 2004.I defend the view that an individual''s welfareis in one respect enhanced by the achievementof her goals, even when her goals are crazy,self-destructive, irrational or immoral. This``Unrestricted View'''' departs from familiartheories which take welfare to involve only theachievement of rational aims, or of goals whoseobjects are genuinely valuable, or of goalsthat are not grounded in bad reasons. I beginwith a series of examples, intended to showthat some of our intuitive judgments aboutwelfare…Read more
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68Review of Trenton Merricks, Truth and Ontology (review)Philosophical Review 118 (2): 273-276. 2009.
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66PartialityPrinceton University Press. 2013.We are partial to people with whom we share special relationships--if someone is your child, parent, or friend, you wouldn't treat them as you would a stranger. But is partiality justified, and if so, why? Partiality presents a theory of the reasons supporting special treatment within special relationships and explores the vexing problem of how we might reconcile the moral value of these relationships with competing claims of impartial morality. Simon Keller explains that in order to understand …Read more
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40Comments on George Schedler, "Should Peter Singer Become an Ethical Meat Eater?"Southwest Philosophy Review 21 (2): 159-162. 2005.
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51Against Friendship between CountriesJournal of International Political Theory 5 (1): 59-74. 2009.The idea that countries (or nations or peoples) should sometimes be friends is embedded in everyday talk about international relations and receives sophisticated defences in recent works by P. E. Digeser and Catherine Lu. The idea relies upon an analogy between interactions between persons and interactions between countries — an analogy that this article argues to be ontologically and ethically dubious. Persons and countries are very different entities, meriting very different kinds of treatment…Read more
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469Virtue ethics is self-effacingAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2). 2007.An ethical theory is self-effacing if it tells us that sometimes, we should not be motivated by the considerations that justify our acts. In his influential paper 'The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories' [1976], Michael Stocker argues that consequentialist and deontological ethical theories must be self-effacing, if they are to be at all plausible. Stocker's argument is often taken to provide a reason to give up consequentialism and deontology in favour of virtue ethics. I argue that this …Read more
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2Making nonsense of loyalty to countryIn Boudewijn de Bruin & Christopher F. Zurn (eds.), New waves in political philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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642Friendship and BeliefPhilosophical Papers 33 (3): 329-351. 2004.I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer
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Victoria University of WellingtonSchool of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International RelationsRegular Faculty
Parkville, Victoria, Australia