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153Lockean and logical truth conditionsAnalysis 64 (1): 84-91. 2004.1. In ‘A problem for expressivism’ Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit argue ‘that expressivists do not have a persuasive story to tell about how ethical sentences can express attitudes without reporting them and, in particular, without being true or false’ (1998: 240). Briefly: expressivists say that ethical sentences serve to express non-cognitive attitudes, but that these sentences do not report non-cognitive attitudes. The view that ethical sentences do report non-cognitive attitudes is not Expre…Read more
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36The Supervenience Argument Against Moral RealismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 13-38. 1992.
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36Disagreeing (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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27Skepticism in Ethics, by Panayot Butchvarov (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (4): 934-938. 1991.
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121Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2006._Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory _features pairs of newly commissioned essays by some of the leading theorists working in the field today. Brings together fresh debates on the most controversial issues in moral theory Questions include: Are moral requirements derived from reason? How demanding is morality? Are virtues the proper starting point for moral theorizing? Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, and paves the way for further discussion. Will serve as an accessible introduc…Read more
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405Practical conditionalsIn David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge University Press. pp. 116--133. 2009.
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5Why ethical satisficing makes sense and rational satisficing doesn'tIn Michael Byron (ed.), Satisficing and Maximizing, Cambridge University Press. pp. 131-154. 2004.
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973Meta‐ethics and the problem of creeping minimalismPhilosophical Perspectives 18 (1). 2004.This is a paper about the problem of realism in meta-ethics (and, I hope, also in other areas, but that hope is so far pretty speculative). But it is not about the problem of whether realism is true. It is about the problem of what realism is. More specifically, it is about the question of what divides meta-ethical realists from irrealists. I start with a potted history of the Good Old Days.
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225Humean Doubts about Categorical ImperativesIn Elijah Millgram (ed.), Varieties of Practical Reasoning, Mit Press. pp. 27--48. 2001.
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19Was Moore a Moorean?In Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons (eds.), Metaethics After Moore, Oxford University Press. pp. 191. 2006.
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131The expressivist circle: Invoking norms in the explanation of normative judgment (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (1). 2002.To naturalize normative judgment is to give some account of it, in naturalistic and non-normative terms. Simon Blackburn’s Ruling Passions embraces naturalism, about ethics especially.
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34Dispositions and Fetishes: Externalist Models of Moral MotivationPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 61 (3): 619-638. 2000.Internalism says that if an agent judges that it is right for her to φ, then she is motivated to φ. The disagreement between Internalists and Externalists runs deep, and it lingers even in the face of clever intuition pumps. An argument in Michael Smith's The Moral Problem seeks some leverage against Externalism from a point within normative theory. Smith argues by dilemma: Externalists either fail to explain why motivation tracks moral judgment in a good moral agent or they attribute a kind of …Read more
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615Relativism (and expressivism) and the problem of disagreementPhilosophical Perspectives 23 (1): 79-110. 2009.Many philosophers, in different areas, are tempted by what variously goes under the name of Contextualism, Speaker Relativism, Indexical Relativism. (I’ll just use Indexical Relativism in this paper.) Thinking of certain problematic expressions as deriving their content from elements of the context of use solves some problems. But it faces some problems of its own, and in this paper I’m interested in one in particular, namely, the problem of disagreement. Two alternative theories, tempting for j…Read more
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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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115Decision Theory and MoralityIn Piers Rawling & Al Mele (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Rationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 156--181. 2004.Dreier shows how the formal apparatus of decision theory is connected to some abstract issues in moral theory. He begins by explaining how to think about utility and the advice that decision theory gives us, in particular, decision theory does not assume or insist that all rational agents act in their own self-interest. Next he examines decision theory’s contributions to social contract theory, with emphasis on David Gauthier’s rationalist contractualism. Dreier’s third section considers a reint…Read more
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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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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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418Structures 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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Philosophical Issues, 12, Realism and Relativism, 2002In Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Realism and Relativism, Blackwell. pp. 241. 2002.
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98Accepting 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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30Meta‐Ethics and The Problem of Creeping MinimalismPhilosophical Perspectives 18 (1): 23-44. 2004.
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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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597Internalism 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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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.
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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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241Rational preference: Decision theory as a theory of practical rationalityTheory and Decision 40 (3): 249-276. 1996.In general, the technical apparatus of decision theory is well developed. It has loads of theorems, and they can be proved from axioms. Many of the theorems are interesting, and useful both from a philosophical and a practical perspective. But decision theory does not have a well agreed upon interpretation. Its technical terms, in particular, ‘utility’ and ‘preference’ do not have a single clear and uncontroversial meaning. How to interpret these terms depends, of course, on what purposes in pur…Read more