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179Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for ActionSocial Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 218. 2001.These days, just about every philosophical debate seems to generate a position labeledinternalism. The debate I will be joining in this essay concerns reasons for action and their connection, or lack of connection, to motivation. The internalist position in this debate posits a certain essential connection between reasons and motivation, while the externalist position denies such a connection. This debate about internalism overlaps an older debate between Humeans and Kantians about the exclusive…Read more
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170Pleasure as a Mental StateUtilitas 11 (2): 230. 1999.Shelly Kagan and Leonard Katz have offered versions of hedonism that aspire to occupy a middle position between the view that pleasure is a unitary sensation and the view that pleasure is, as Sidgwick put it, desirable consciousness. Thus they hope to offer a hedonistic account of well-being that does not mistakenly suppose that pleasure is a special kind of tingle, yet to offer a sharp alternative to desire-based accounts. I argue that they have not identified a coherent middle position
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937Disagreeing about how to disagreePhilosophical Studies 168 (3): 823-34. 2014.David Enoch, in Taking Morality Seriously, argues for a broad normative asymmetry between how we should behave when disagreeing about facts and how we should behave when disagreeing due to differing preferences. Enoch claims that moral disputes have the earmarks of a factual dispute rather than a preference dispute and that this makes more plausible a realist understanding of morality. We try to clarify what such claims would have to look like to be compelling and we resist his main conclusions.
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84Practical reasons and mistakes of practical rationalityPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 94 (1): 299-321. 2007.
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216Instrumental Rationality: Not Dead YetJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (1): 1-13. 2005.No abstract
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290Backing Away from Libertarian Self-OwnershipEthics 123 (1): 32-60. 2012.Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counter-intuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people's rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this paper I consider t…Read more
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91What we owe to each other, T. M. Scanlon, the Belknap press of Harvard university press, 1998, IX + 420 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 16 (2): 333-378. 2000.
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216Review of mark Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.I assess Schroeder's book Slaves of the Passions and isolate some grounds for concerns about the overall position.
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8Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 4 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.This is the fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory.
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60Reply to RobertsonPhilosophical Papers 32 (2): 185-191. 2003.Philosophical Papers Vol.32(2) 2003: 185-191
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66Sumner on WelfareDialogue 37 (3): 571-. 1998.In this paper I criticize the way Sumner marks the subjective/objective divide and the way he argues for subjective views of well-being.
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653Self-Ownership and the Conflation ProblemIn Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, . forthcoming.Libertarian self-ownership views in the tradition of Locke, Nozick, and the left-libertarians have supposed that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against infringing upon our property. Such a conception makes sense when we are focused on property that is very important to its owner, such as a person’s kidney. However, this stringency of our property rights is harder to credit when we consider more trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such havi…Read more
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97Parfit's Case Against SubjectivismIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 6: Volume 6, Oxford University Press. 2011.I argue that Parfit's On What Matters does not make a compelling case against subjective accounts of reasons for action.
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Well-Being and ConsequentialismDissertation, University of Michigan. 1997.There are two common assumptions about well-being that I am especially concerned to dispute in this dissertation. The first assumption is that differences in kinds of prudential values can be reduced to differences in amount of prudential value. That is, that differences in the qualities of values can reliably be reduced to mere differences in quantity. The second assumption is that well-being is the appropriate object of moral concern. Consequentialist moral theories typically argue that morali…Read more
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62Michael J. Zimmerman, The Concept of Moral Obligation:The Concept of Moral ObligationEthics 109 (2): 468-470. 1999.
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809Subjectivism and blameCanadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (5). 2007.My favorite thing about this paper is that I think I usefully explicate and then mess with Bernard Williams's attempt to explain how his internalism is compatible with our ordinary practices of blame. There are a surprising number of things wrong with Williams's position. Of course that leaves my own favored subjectivism in a pickle, but still...
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44From Valuing to Value: A Defense of SubjectivismOxford University Press. 2016.David Sobel defends subjectivism about well-being and reasons for action: the idea that normativity flows from what an agent cares about, that something is valuable because it is valued. In these essays Sobel explores the tensions between subjective views of reasons and morality, and concludes that they do not undermine subjectivism.
Syracuse, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |