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152Lockean 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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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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35The Supervenience Argument Against Moral RealismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 13-38. 1992.
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27Skepticism in Ethics, by Panayot Butchvarov (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (4): 934-938. 1991.
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119Contemporary 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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971Meta‐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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129The 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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33Dispositions 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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613Relativism (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