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117The good, the bad, and the ethically neutralEconomics and Philosophy 23 (1): 97-105. 2007.John Broome's Weighing Lives provides a much-needed framework for the intriguing problems of population ethics. It is also an impressive attempt to find a workable solution to these problems. I am not sure that Broome has found the right solution, but I think he has done the ethics profession a tremendous service in tidying up the discussion. The framework he presents will make it possible for the participants in this debate to formulate their positions in a clear and precise manner. Even people…Read more
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261Prudence for changing selvesUtilitas 18 (3): 264-283. 2006.What is the prudentially right thing to do in situations in which our actions will shape our preferences? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. This is the problem I will deal with in this article. I will begin by explaining why preferences matter to prudence. I will then go on to discuss a couple of unsuccessful theories and see wh…Read more
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127Comments on Dennis McKerlie's 'rational choice, changes in values over time, and well-being'Utilitas 19 (1): 73-77. 2007.I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to comment on McKerlie's interesting article, especially since it concerns one of my pet topics and provides many helpful comments on one of my own articles on this topic. My comments will be brief because I agree with most of his points, in particular, his criticisms of the prudential view and the present-aim theory. What I want to do here is just to clarify a couple of things concerning my own theory, concede some of the difficulties that McKerl…Read more
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157Violations of normative invariance: Some thoughts on shifty oughtsTheoria 73 (2): 98-120. 2007.It seems paradoxical to say that an action's normative status ‐ whether it is right, wrong, or obligatory ‐ depends on whether or not it is performed. In this paper, I shall argue that in itself this dependency is not paradoxical. I shall argue that we should not reject a normative theory just because it implies this kind of dependency. Not all dependencies of this kind are bad, or at least not bad enough to warrant wholesale rejection. Instead, we should reject a theory when this dependency mak…Read more
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75Satisficing and maximizing: Moral theorists on practical reason, edited by Michael Byron. Cambridge university press, 2004, 245 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 23 (2): 240-245. 2007.
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213Expressivism and moral certitudePhilosophical Quarterly 59 (235): 202-215. 2009.Michael Smith has recently argued that non-cognitivists are unable to accommodate crucial structural features of moral belief, and in particular that non-cognitivists have trouble accounting for subjects' certitude with respect to their moral beliefs. James Lenman and Michael Ridge have independently constructed 'ecumenical' versions of non-cognitivism, intended to block this objection. We argue that these responses do not work. If ecumenical non-cognitivism, a hybrid view which incorporates bot…Read more
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And Intergenerational JusticeIn Gosseries Axel & Meyer Lukas (eds.), Intergenerational Justice, Oxford University Press. pp. 301. 2009.
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50The moral relevance of past preferencesIn Heather Dyke (ed.), Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 115--136. 2003.
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322Moral uncertaintyPhilosophy Compass 12 (3). 2017.What should we do when we are not certain about what we morally should do? There is a long history of theorizing about decision-making under empirical uncertainty, but surprisingly little has been written about the moral uncertainty expressed by this question. Only very recently have philosophers started to systematically address the nature of such uncertainty and its impacts on decision-making. This paper addresses the main problems raised by moral uncertainty and critically examines some propo…Read more
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130Can unstable preferences provide a stable standard of well-being?Economics and Philosophy 26 (1): 1-26. 2010.How do we determine the well-being of a person when her preferences are not stable across worlds? Suppose, for instance, that you are considering getting married, and that you know that if you get married, you will prefer being unmarried, and that if you stay unmarried, you will prefer being married. The general problem is to find a stable standard of well-being when the standard is set by preferences that are not stable. In this paper, I shall show that the problem is even worse: inconsistency …Read more
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83What are desires good for? Towards a coherent endorsement theoryRatio 19 (3). 2006.Desire-based theories of well-being are often said to accept (G), x is good for a person just in case he wants it, and (B), x is better for a person than y just in case he prefers x to y. I shall argue that (G) and (B) are inconsistent, and this inconsistency resists any plausible refinement of these principles. The inconsistency is brought out by cases in which our wants and preferences for certain life-options are contingent on which life-option we realize. My argument can be generalized to en…Read more
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33Sumner On Desires and Well-BeingCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (4): 475-490. 2002.A person's welfare or well-being concerns what is good for him, what makes his life worth living. It therefore depends crucially on facts about the person and his life. As William James once remarked, whether a life is worth living depends on the liver. How this dependency should be spelled out is a controversial question. Desire theorists, or as I shall call them well-being preferentialists, claim that a person's well-being depends on his desires and preferences.
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69Against the Being For Account of Normative CertitudeJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (2): 1-8. 2012.Just as we can be more or less certain about empirical matters, we can be more or less certain about normative matters. Recently, it has been argued that this is a challenge for noncognitivism about normativity. Michael Smith presented the challenge in a 2002 paper and James Lenman and Michael Ridge responded independently. Andrew Sepielli has now joined the rescue operation. His basic idea is that noncognitivists should employ the notion of being for to account for normative certitude. We shall…Read more
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342Utilitarianism: A Guide for the PerplexedContinuum. 2009.Introduction -- The nature and assessment of moral theories -- What is utilitarianism? -- Well-being -- Utilitarian aggregation -- A user-friendly guide to action? -- Is utilitarianism too demanding? -- Is utilitarianism too permissive? -- The way outcomes are brought about -- The place of rules in utilitarianism.
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12Review of Satisficing and Maximizing: Moral Theorists on Practical Reason (review)Economics and Philosophy 23 (2): 240-245. 2007.
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82Non-Cognitivism and Fundamental Moral Certitude: Reply to Eriksson and Francén OlinderAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (4): 794-799. 2017.Accommodating degrees of moral certitude is a serious problem for non-cognitivism about ethics. In particular, non-cognitivism has trouble accommodating fundamental moral certitude. John Eriksson and Ragnar Francén Olinder [2016] have recently proposed a solution. In fact, Eriksson and Francén Olinder offer two different proposals—one ‘classification’ account and one ‘projectivist’ account. We argue that the classification account faces the same problem as previous accounts do, while the project…Read more
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86Desire, practical reason, and the good * edited by Sergio TenenbaumAnalysis 72 (1): 200-202. 2012.
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130Normative Supervenience and ConsequentialismUtilitas 15 (1): 27. 2003.Act-consequentialism is usually taken to be the view that we ought to perform the act that will have the best consequences. But this definition ignores the possibility of various non-maximizing forms of act-consequentialism, e.g. satisficing theories that tell us to perform the act whose consequences will be good enough. What seems crucial to act-consequentialism is not that we ought to maximize value but that the normative status of alternative actions depends solely on the values of their outc…Read more
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137The Benefits of Coming into ExistencePhilosophical Studies 135 (3): 335-362. 2007.This paper argues that we can benefit or harm people by creating them, but only in the sense that we can create things that are good or bad for them. What we cannot do is to confer comparative benefits and harms to people by creating them or failing to create them. You are not better off (or worse off) created than you would have been had you not been created, for nothing has value for you if you do not exist, not even neutral value.
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Preference Formation and Intergenerational JusticeIn Axel Gosseries & Lukas H. Meyer (eds.), Intergenerational Justice, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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92John Broome, Weighing Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 286Utilitas 22 (4): 497-500. 2010.
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93Utilitarian deontologies? On preference utilitarianism and agent-relative valueTheoria 62 (1-2): 124-143. 1996.
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230No Good Fit: Why the Fitting Attitude Analysis of Value FailsMind 118 (469): 1-30. 2009.Understanding value in terms of fitting attitudes is all the rage these days. According to this fitting attitude analysis of value (FA-analysis for short) what is good is what it is fitting to favour in some sense. Many aspects of the FA-analysis have been discussed. In particular, a lot of discussion has been concerned with the wrong-reason objection: it can be fitting to have an attitude towards something for reasons that have nothing to do with the value the thing has in itself. Much less att…Read more
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |