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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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59Review of Trenton Merricks, Truth and Ontology (review)Philosophical Review 118 (2): 273-276. 2009.
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69PartialityPrinceton 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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41Comments on George Schedler, "Should Peter Singer Become an Ethical Meat Eater?"Southwest Philosophy Review 21 (2): 159-162. 2005.
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480Virtue 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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54Against 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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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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658Friendship 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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Victoria University of WellingtonSchool of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International RelationsRegular Faculty
Parkville, Victoria, Australia