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Moral Relativism and Political JusticeDissertation, Princeton University. 1989.My dissertation aims to spell out the implications of moral relativism for political justice. The first part develops and defends a kind of moral relativism I call "Speaker Relativism". According to this view, moral expressions are indexicals; their content depends on the moral system of the speaker. I defend Speaker Relativism from some prominent objections, and provide an argument in favor of the view. ;The second part investigates the question of how, given relativism, citizens might establis…Read more
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347Expressivist embeddings and minimalist truthPhilosophical Studies 83 (1): 29-51. 1996.This paper is about Truth Minimalism, Norm Expressivism, and the relation between them. In particular, it is about whether Truth Minimalism can help to solve a problem thought to plague Norm Expressivism. To start with, let me explain what I mean by 'Truth Minimalism' and 'Norm Expressivism.'
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11. Wedgwood's argumentIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 5--153. 2010.
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417Structures of Normative TheoriesThe Monist 76 (1): 22-40. 1993.Normative theorists like to divide normative theories into classes. One special point of focus has been to place utilitarianism into a larger class of theories which do not necessarily share its view about what is alone of impersonal intrinsic value, namely, individual human well-being, but do share another structural feature, roughly its demand that each person seek to maximize the realization of what is of impersonal intrinsic value. The larger class is distinguished from its complement in two…Read more
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97Accepting agent centred norms: A problem for non-cognitivists and a suggestion for solving itAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (3). 1996.Non-cognitivists claim to be able to represent normative judgment, and especially moral judgment, as an expression of a non-cognitive attitude. There is some reason to worry whether their treatment can incorporate agent centred theories, including much of common sense morality. In this paper I investigate the prospects for a non-cognitivist explanation of what is going on when we subscribe to agent centred theories or norms. The first section frames the issue by focusing on a particularly simple…Read more
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Philosophical Issues, 12, Realism and Relativism, 2002In Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Realism and Relativism, Blackwell. pp. 241. 2002.
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5Another WorldIn Robert Johnson & Michael Smith (eds.), Passions and Projections Themes from the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press. pp. 155-171. 2015.The metaethics and metametaethics of Scanlon's "Reasons Fundamentalism".
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30Meta‐Ethics and The Problem of Creeping MinimalismPhilosophical Perspectives 18 (1): 23-44. 2004.
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594Internalism and speaker relativismEthics 101 (1): 6-26. 1990.In this article I set out a reason for believing in a form of metaethical relativism. In rough terms, the reason is this: a widely held thesis, internalism, tells us that to accept (sincerely assert, believe, etc.) a moral judgment logically requires having a motivating reason. Since the connection is logical, or conceptual, it must be explained by a theory of what it is to accept a moral claim. I argue that the internalist feature of moral expressions can best be explained by my version of mora…Read more
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92Disagreeing (about) What to Do: Negation and Completeness in Gibbard’s Norm-Expressivism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3). 2006.Brown University.
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57Disagreeing (about) What to Do: Negation and Completeness in Gibbard's Norm-ExpressivismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3): 714-721. 2006.Brown University.
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21The Expressivist Circle: Invoking Norms in the Explanation of Normative JudgmentPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (1): 136-143. 2002.“States of mind are natural states. They are extremely hard to define.”1.