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5Drawn to the Good? Brewer on Dialectical ActivityJournal of Moral Philosophy 8 (4): 621-631. 2011.In The Retrieval of Ethics, Talbot Brewer defends an Aristotelian-inspired understanding of the good life, in which living the good life is conceived of in terms of engaging in a unified dialectical activity. In this essay, I explore the assumptions at work in Brewer's understanding of dialectical activity and raise some concerns about whether or not we have reason to embrace them. I argue that his conception of human nature and that towards which we are drawn stands in tension with empirical re…Read more
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6The Pursuit and Nature of HappinessPhilosophical Topics 41 (1): 103-121. 2013.This paper challenges the idea that happiness—taken to be a subjective mental state marked by positive affect—is something that depends upon and arises from the satisfaction of interests. While this understanding of happiness seems to follow from reflection on the paradox of happiness, empirical research concerning the production of happiness tells us a different story, and suggests that whether or not we are happy is largely independent of whether or not we satisfy our interests. Following anal…Read more
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1Just war theory, legitimate authority, and the "war" on terrorIn Timothy Shanahan (ed.), Philosophy 9/11: Thinking About the War on Terrorism, Open Court. 2005.
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1Review: Christian B. Miller, Character and Moral Psychology (review)Ethics 126 (2): 521-525. 2016.
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10The Cautious Jealous Virtue: Hume on Justice (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 50 (3): 461-462. 2012.
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5Review of Christopher J. Finlay, Hume's Social Philosophy: Human Nature and Commercial Sociability in a Treatise of Human Nature (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (4). 2008.
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13Eudaimonic Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Living WellRoutledge. 2014.In this book , Lorraine Besser-Jones develops a eudaimonistic virtue ethics based on a psychological account of human nature. While her project maintains the fundamental features of the eudaimonistic virtue ethical framework—virtue, character, and well-being—she constructs these concepts from an empirical basis, drawing support from the psychological fields of self-determination and self-regulation theory. Besser-Jones’s resulting account of "eudaimonic ethics" presents a compelling normative th…Read more
Middlebury, Vermont, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |