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215Practical Reasons and Moral 'Ought'In Russell Schafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. II, Clarendon Press. pp. 172-194. 2007.Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’¹ When we say that someone morally ought not to harm others, perhaps all we are saying is that he has a certain kind of reason n…Read more
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172Moral dilemmas and guiltPhilosophical Studies 43 (1). 1983.I use a version of the case in "sophie's choice" as an example of the strongest sort of dilemma, With all options seriously wrong, And no permissible way of choosing one of them. This is worse, I argue, Than a choice between conflicting obligations, Where the agent has an overriding obligation "to choose", And does nothing wrong, Once the choice is made, By ignoring one of his prior obligations. Here, "contra" marcus, Guilt seems inappropriate
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223Emotions, rationality, and mind-bodyIn Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, Oxford University Press. pp. 113-125. 2004.This paper attempts to connect recent cross-disciplinary treatments of the cognitive or rational significance of emotions with work in contemporary philosophy identifying an evaluative propositional content of emotions. An emphasis on the perspectival nature of emotional evaluations allows for a notion of emotional rationality that does not seem to be available on alternative accounts
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31Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social NormsPhilosophical Review 105 (4): 550. 1996.This book brings together and develops Patricia Greenspan’s thoughts on moral dilemmas and the role of emotions in moral judgment. Her main focus is on metaethics and moral psychology, and she discusses moral dilemmas primarily as a concrete way of introducing these issues.
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60Confabulating the Truth: In Defense of “Defensive” Moral ReasoningThe Journal of Ethics 19 (2): 105-123. 2015.Empirically minded philosophers have raised questions about judgments and theories based on moral intuitions such as Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium. But they work from the notion of intuitions assumed in empirical work, according to which intuitions are immediate assessments, as in psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s definition. Haidt himself regards such intuitions as an appropriate basis for moral judgment, arguing that normal agents do not reason prior to forming a judgment and afterwards…Read more
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90Responsible Psychopaths RevisitedThe Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3): 265-278. 2016.This paper updates, modifies, and extends an account of psychopaths’ responsibility and blameworthiness that depends on behavioral control rather than moral knowledge. Philosophers mainly focus on whether psychopaths can be said to grasp moral rules as such, whereas it seems to be important to their blameworthiness that typical psychopaths are hampered by impulsivity and other barriers to exercising self-control. I begin by discussing an atypical case, for contrast, of a young man who was diagno…Read more
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15Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social NormsPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 730-732. 1995.
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127Impulse and self-reflection: Frankfurtian responsibility versus free will (review)The Journal of Ethics 3 (4): 325-341. 1999.Harry Frankfurt''s early work makes an important distinction between moral responsibility and free will. Frankfurt begins by focusing on the notion of responsibility, as supplying counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities; he then turns to an apparently independent account of free will, in terms of his well-known hierarchy of desires. But the two notions seem to reestablish contact in Frankfurt''s later discussion of issues and cases. The present article sets up a putative Fr…Read more
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22Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification, by Patricia S. Greenspan (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (3): 716-719. 1991.
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Practical Reasons and Moral "In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume Ii, Clarendon Press. 2007.
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38Moral responses and moral theory: Socially-based externalist ethics (review)The Journal of Ethics 2 (2): 103-122. 1998.The paper outlines a view called social (or two-level) response-dependency as an addition to standard alternatives in metaethics that allows for a position intermediate between standard versions of internalism and externalism on the question of motivational force. Instead of taking psychological responses as either directly supplying the content of ethics (as on emotivist or sentimentalist accounts) or as irrelevant to its content (as in classical versions of Kantian or utilitarian ethics), the …Read more
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192Genes, electrotransmitters, and free willIn Patricia S. Greenspan, David Wasserman & Robert Wachbroit (eds.), Genetics and Criminal Behavior: Methods, Meanings, and Morals, Cambridge University Press. 2001.There seems to be evidence of a genetic component in criminal behavior. It is widely agreed not to be "deterministic"--by which discussions outside philosophy seem to mean that by itself it is not sufficient to determine behavior. Environmental factors make a decisive difference--for that matter, there are nongenetic biological factors--in whether and how genetic.
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26The language of evolutionary biology and psychology is built on concepts applicable in the first instance to individual strategic rationality but extended to the level of genetic explanation. Current discussions of mental disorders as evolutionary adaptations would apply that extended language back to the individual level, with potentially problematic moral/political implications as well as possibilities of confusion. This paper focuses on one particularly problematic area: the explanation of wo…Read more
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119Philosophy of action: 5 questionsIn J. H. Aguilar & A. A. Buckareff (eds.), Philosophy of action: 5 questions, Automatic Press/vip. 2000.Like many people, I was initially attracted to free will issues – at first embracing hard determinism, as part of a general rejection of doctrines associated with religion, though exposure to Kant’s views in my first philosophy course made me begin to consider nonreligious grounds for an indeterminist conception of free action. Of course, Kant also takes belief in God and immortality as presupposed by moral agency, but I was never much moved by those arguments. On free will, though, I thought se…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
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Emotions |
Reasons and Rationality |
Free Will |
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Value Theory |