-
62Moral Internalism: An Essay in Moral PsychologyDissertation, Stockholm University. 1998.An ancient but central divide in moral philosophy concerns the nature of opinions about what is morally wrong or what our moralduties are. Some philosophers argue that moral motivation is internal to moral opinions: that moral opinions consist of motivationalstates such as desires or emotions. This has often been seen as athreat to the possibility of rational argument and justification inmorals. Other philosophers argue that moral motivation is external to moral opinion: moral opinions should b…Read more
-
798How effects depend on their causes, why causal transitivity fails, and why we care about causationPhilosophical Studies 133 (3): 349-390. 2007.Despite recent efforts to improve on counterfactual theories of causation, failures to explain how effects depend on their causes are still manifest in a variety of cases. In particular, theories that do a decent job explaining cases of causal preemption have problems accounting for cases of causal intransitivity. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the counterfactual accounts makes it difficult to see why the concept of causation would be such a central part of our cognition. In this paper, …Read more
-
1199A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility JudgmentsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3): 611-639. 2012.Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incomp…Read more
-
1000Normative Responsibilities: Structure and SourcesIn Kristien Hens, Daniela Cutas & Dorothee Horstkötter (eds.), Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics, Springer International Publishing. 2016.Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend to their emotional needs, or to see to it that someone else does. Similarly, it is sometimes argued tha…Read more
-
1086Metaethical Contextualism DefendedEthics 121 (1): 7-36. 2010.We defend a contextualist account of deontic judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends, against recent objections that turn on practices of moral disagreement. Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice; we suggest in response that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are eva…Read more
-
635Quasi-Realism, Absolutism, and Judgment-Internal Correctness ConditionsIn Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday, Ontos Verlag. pp. 96-119. 2013.The traditional metaethical distinction between cognitivist absolutism,on the one hand, and speaker relativism or noncognitivism, on the other,seemed both clear and important. On the former view, moral judgmentswould be true or false independently on whose judgments they were, andmoral disagreement might be settled by the facts. Not so on the latter views. But noncognitivists and relativists, following what Simon Blackburn has called a “quasi-realist” strategy, have come a long way inmaking sens…Read more
-
748Joint responsibility without individual control: Applying the Explanation HypothesisIn Jeroen van den Hoven, Ibo van de Poel & Nicole Vincent (eds.), Moral Responsibility: beyond free will and determinism, Springer. 2011.This paper introduces a new family of cases where agents are jointly morally responsible for outcomes over which they have no individual control, a family that resists standard ways of understanding outcome responsibility. First, the agents in these cases do not individually facilitate the outcomes and would not seem individually responsible for them if the other agents were replaced by non-agential causes. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility as overlapping individual res…Read more
-
1274Enoch’s Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical RealismJournal of Moral Philosophy 13 (1). 2016.Taking Morality Seriously is David Enoch’s book-length defense of meta-ethical and meta-normative non-naturalist realism. After describing Enoch’s position and outlining the argumentative strategy of the book, we engage in a critical discussion of what we take to be particularly problematic central passages. We focus on Enoch’s two original positive arguments for non-naturalist realism, one argument building on first order moral implications of different meta-ethical positions, the other attendi…Read more
-
33A Naturalist's Approach to Modal IntuitionsIn Erik Weber Tim De Mey (ed.), Modal Epistemology, . 2004.Modal inquiry is plagued by methodological problems. The best-developed views on modal semantics and modal ontology take modalstatements to be true in virtue of relations between possible worlds. Unfortunately, such views turn modal epistemology into a mystery, and this paper is about ways to avoid that problem. It looks at different remedies suggested by Quine, Blackburn and Peacocke and finds them all wanting. But although Peacocke’s version of the popular conceptualist approach fails to give …Read more
-
794Explaining away epistemic skepticism about culpabilityIn Shoemaker David (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility, Oxford University Press. 2017.Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases t…Read more
-
133Why emotivists love inconsistencyPhilosophical Studies 104 (1). 2001.Emotivists hold that moral opinions are wishes and desires, and that the function of moral language is to “express” such states. But if moral opinions were but wishes or desires, why would we see certain opinions as inconsistent with, or following from other opinions? And why should our reasoning include complex opinions such as the opinion that a person ought to be blamed only if he has done something wrong? Indeed, why would we think that anything is conditional on his doing something wrong un…Read more
-
135Motivational Internalism: Contemporary DebatesIn Gunnar Björnsson, Caj Strandberg, Ragnar Francén Olinder, John Eriksson & Fredrik Björklund (eds.), Motivational Internalism, Oxford University Press. 2015.Motivational internalism—the idea that moral judgments are intrinsically or necessarily connected to motivation—has played a central role in metaethical debates. In conjunction with a Humean picture of motivation, internalism has provided a challenge for theories that take moral judgments to concern objective aspects of reality, and versions of internalism have been seen as having implications for moral absolutism, realism, and rationalism. But internalism is a controversial thesis, and the appa…Read more
-
768Incompatibilism and "Bypassed" AgencyIn Alfred R. Mele (ed.), Surrounding Free Will, Oxford University Press. 2014.Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray have recently argued that when people take agents to lack responsibility in deterministic scenarios, they do so because they take agents’ beliefs, desires and decisions to be bypassed, having no effect on their actions. This might seem like an improbable mistake, but the Bypass Hypothesis is bolstered by intriguing experimental data. Moreover, if the hypothesis is correct, it provides a straightforward error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. This chapter argues…Read more
-
1199Contextualism in EthicsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.There are various ways in which context matters in ethics. Most clearly, the context in which an action is performed might determine whether the action is morally right: though it is often wrong not to keep a promise, it might be permissible in certain contexts. More radically, proponents of moral particularism (see particularism) have argued that a reason for an action in one context is not guaranteed to be a reason in a different context: whether it is a reason against an act that it breaks a …Read more
-
1247On individual and shared obligations: in defense of the activist’s perspectiveIn Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), Philosophy and Climate Change, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.We naturally attribute obligations to groups, and take such obligations to have consequences for the obligations of group members. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change provides an urgent case. It seems that we, together, have an obligation to prevent climate catastrophe, and that we, as individuals, have an obligation to contribute. However, understood strictly, attributions of obligations to groups might seem illegitimate. On the one hand, the groups in question—the people alive tod…Read more
-
231How Emotivism Survives Immoralists, Irrationality, and DepressionSouthern Journal of Philosophy 40 (3): 327-344. 2002.Argues that emotivism is compatible with cases where we seem to lack motivation to act according to our moral opinions.
-
85Meaning as a Normative ConceptTheoria 73 (3): 190-206. 2007.IN LATE SPRING 2007, professor Allan Gibbard gave the Hägerström Lectures at Uppsala University, Sweden, under the title of “Meaning as a Normative Concept”. He met up with Gunnar Björnsson and Arvid Båve to talk about the views he develops and defends in the lectures.
-
En internalistisk teori om moraliska uppfattningarFilosofisk Tidskrift 1. 2000.Responds to Ingmar Persson's criticism of my Moral Internalism: An Essay in Moral Psychology. In Swedish.
-
1498Recent Work on Motivational InternalismAnalysis 72 (1): 124-137. 2012.Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.
-
1405Explaining (away) the epistemic condition on moral responsibilityIn Philip Robichaud & Jan Willem Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition, Oxford University Press. 2017.It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known better”, but it is unclear how to spell o…Read more
-
643Contextualism, assessor relativism, and insensitive assessmentsLogique Et Analyse 52 (208): 363-372. 2009.Recently, contextualism about epistemic modals and predicates of taste have come under fire from advocates of assessment relativistic analyses. Contextualism, they have argued, fails to account for what we call "felicitous insensitive assessments". In this paper, we provide one hitherto overlooked way in which contextualists can embrace the phenomenon by slightly modifying an assumption that has remained in the background in most of the debate over contextualism and relativism. Finally, we brief…Read more
-
174Motivational Internalism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2015.Motivational internalism—the idea that there is an intrinsic or necessary connection between moral judgment and moral motivation—is a central thesis in a number of metaethical debates. In conjunction with a Humean picture of motivation, it provides a challenge for cognitivist theories that take moral judgments to concern objective aspects of reality. Versions of internalism have potential implications for moral absolutism, realism, non-naturalism, and rationalism. Being a constraint on more deta…Read more
-
706Internalists Beware—we Might all be Amoralists!Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1): 1-14. 2013.Standard motivational internalism is the claim that by a priori or conceptual necessity, a psychological state is a moral opinion only if it is suitably related to moral motivation. Many philosophers, the authors of this paper included, have assumed that this claim is supported by intuitions to the effect that amoralists—people not suitably related to such motivation—lack moral opinions proper. In this paper we argue that this assumption is mistaken, seeming plausible only because defenders of s…Read more
Stockholm, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Responsibility |
Philosophy of Language |
Metaphilosophy |