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661Friendship 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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I restate the view defended in my ‘Patriotism as Bad Faith’, offer a different argument for it, and respond to some objections from Steve Nathanson and Keith Horton.
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238WelfarismPhilosophy Compass 4 (1): 82-95. 2009.Welfarism is the view that morality is centrally concerned with the welfare or well-being of individuals. The division between welfarist and non-welfarist approaches underlies many important disagreements in ethics, but welfarism is neither consistently defined nor well understood. I survey the philosophical work on welfarism, and I offer a suggestion about how the view can be characterized and how it can be embedded in various kinds of moral theory. I also identify welfarism's major rivals, and…Read more
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107An Interpretation of Plato's CratylusPhronesis 45 (4): 284-305. 2000.Plato's main concern in the "Cratylus," I claim, is to argue against the idea that we can learn about things by examining their names, and in favour of the claim that philosophers should, so far as possible, look to the things themselves. Other philosophical questions, such as that of whether we should accept a naturalist or a conventionalist theory of namng, arise in the dialogue, but are subordinate. This reading of the "Cratylus," I say, explains certain puzzling facts about the dialogue's st…Read more
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428Motives to Assist and Reasons to Assist: the Case of Global PovertyJournal of Practical Ethics 3 (1): 37-63. 2015.The principle of assistance says that the global rich should help the global poor because they are able to do so, and at little cost. The principle of contribution says that the rich should help the poor because the rich are partly to blame for the plight of the poor. This paper explores the relationship between the two principles and offers support for one version of the principle of assistance. The principle of assistance is most plausible, the paper argues, when formulated so as to identify o…Read more
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299Four 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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15Chapter 5. My Response to Your ValueIn Partiality, Princeton University Press. pp. 113-156. 2013.
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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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38Chapter 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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30On what is the war on terror?In Timothy Shanahan (ed.), Philosophy 9/11: Thinking About the War on Terrorism, Open Court. pp. 48-60. 2005.
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41Fiduciary 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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810Presentism and TruthmakingIn Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 83-104. 2004.
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84Moral 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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187Welfare 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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Victoria University of WellingtonSchool of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International RelationsRegular Faculty
Parkville, Victoria, Australia