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6741The Immorality of Eating MeatChapter in The Moral Life 856-889. 2000.Unlike other ethical arguments for veganism, the argument advanced is not predicated on the wrongness of speciesism, nor does it depend on your believing that all animals are equal or that all animals have a right to life, nor is it predicated on some highly contentious metaethical theory which you reject. Rather, it is predicated on your beliefs. Simply put, the argument shows that even those of you who are steadfastly committed to valuing humans over nonhumans are nevertheless committed to the…Read more
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54Do Animals Have Rights and Does It Matter if They Don't?In Mylan Engel & Gary Lynn Comstock (eds.), The Moral Rights of Animals, Lexington. pp. 39-64. 2016.
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The Kiefer ArgumentIn Wolfgang Leopold Gombocz (ed.), Philosophy of Religion, D. Reidel [distributor]. 1984.
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96Positism: The Unexplored Solution to the Epistemic Regress ProblemMetaphilosophy 45 (2): 146-160. 2014.As we trace a chain of reasoning backward, it must ultimately do one of four things: (i) end in an unjustified belief, (ii) continue infinitely, (iii) form a circle, or (iv) end in an immediately justified basic belief. This article defends positism—the view that, in certain circumstances, type-(i) chains can justify us in holding their target beliefs. One of the assumptions that generates the epistemic regress problem is: (A) Person S is mediately justified in believing p iff (1) S has a doxast…Read more
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404A noncontextualist account of contextualist linguistic dataActa Analytica 20 (2): 56-79. 2005.The paper takes as its starting point the observation that people can be led to retract knowledge claims when presented with previously ignored error possibilities, but offers a noncontextualist explanation of the data. Fallibilist epistemologies are committed to the existence of two kinds of Kp -falsifying contingencies: (i) Non-Ignorable contingencies [NI-contingencies] and (ii) Properly-Ignorable contingencies [PI-contingencies]. For S to know that p, S must be in an epistemic position to rul…Read more
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Paul Warren TaylorIn Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 2, Gale Cengage Learning. pp. 302-304. 2008.
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44Russellizing Russell: A reply to his “a critique of Lehrer's coherentism”Philosophical Studies 66 (1). 1992.
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15InconsistencyGrazer Philosophische Studien 40 (1): 113-130. 1991.The relationship between inconsistency and Lehrerian coherence is scrutinized. Like most coherence theorists of epistemic justification, Lehrer contends that consistency is necessary for coherence. Despite this contention, minimally inconsistent belief-sets prove coherent and rationally acceptable on Lehrer's account of coherence. Lehrer is left with the following dilemma: If consistency is necessary for coherence, then (i) he must revise his account of coherence accordingly and, more importantl…Read more
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Tierethik, Tierrechte, und moralische IntegritätIn Rainer Ebert (ed.), Tierrechte – Eine interdisziplinäre Herausforderung, Harald Fischer Verlag. pp. 105-133. 2007.
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Ethical ExtensionismIn Engel Jr Mylan (ed.), Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 1, Gale Cengage Learning. pp. 396-398. 2008.
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909The mere considerability of animalsActa Analytica 16 89-108. 2001.Singer and Regan predicate their arguments -- for ethical vegetarianism, against animal experimentation, and for an end to animal exploitation generally -- on the equal considerability premise (EC). According to (EC), we owe humans and sentient nonhumans exactly the same degree of moral considerability. While Singer's and Regan's conclusions follow from (EC), many philosophers reject their arguments because they find (EC)'s implications morally repugnant and intuitively unacceptable. Like most p…Read more
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42Review of Practical Ethics, 3rd Edition by Peter Singer1 (review)American Journal of Bioethics 11 (12): 73-75. 2011.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 73-75, December 2011
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138Coherentism and the epistemic justification of moral beliefs: A case study in how to do practical ethics without appeal to a moral theorySouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (1): 50-74. 2012.This paper defends a coherentist approach to moral epistemology. In “The Immorality of Eating Meat”, I offer a coherentist consistency argument to show that our own beliefs rationally commit us to the immorality of eating meat. Elsewhere, I use our own beliefs as premises to argue that we have positive duties to assist the poor and to argue that biomedical animal experimentation is wrong. The present paper explores whether this consistency-based coherentist approach of grounding particular moral…Read more
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Review of Mark Devries’s documentary film "Speciesism: The Movie"The Philosophers’ Magazine (65): 123-124. 2014.
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141The Commonsense Case for Ethical VegetarianismBetween the Species: A Journal of Ethics 19 (1): 2-31. 2016.The article defends ethical vegetarianism, which, for present purposes, is stipulatively taken to be the view that it is morally wrong to eat animals when equally nutritious plant-based foods are available. Several examples are introduced to show that we all agree that animals deserve some direct moral consideration and to help identify and clarify several commonsense moral principles—principles we all accept. These principles are then used to argue that eating animals is morally wrong. Since yo…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |