•  42
    Wiggins on historical inevitability and incompatibilism
    Philosophical Studies 29 (April): 235-247. 1976.
  •  36
    Moral 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
  •  36
    The Evaluative Content of Emotion
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 85 75-86. 2019.
    The content of emotion sometimes seems to be conflated with its object, but we can distinguish between content and object on the model of Fregean sense versus reference. Fear, for instance, refers to something the subject of fear is afraid of and represents that object of fear as dangerous, so that the emotion can be said to have evaluative content. Here I attempt to clarify and defend my view of emotional discomfort or other affect as what does the evaluating. Some current accounts of the unple…Read more
  •  34
    The 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
  •  30
    Emotions as evaluations
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (2): 158-169. 1981.
  •  26
    Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms
    Philosophical 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.
  •  24
    The 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
  •  18
    Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification, by Patricia S. Greenspan (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (3): 716-719. 1991.
  •  14
    Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms
    Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 730-732. 1995.
  •  12
    Guilt and Virtue
    Journal of Philosophy 91 (2): 57-70. 1994.
  •  10
    Twentieth Century Ethics
    with Roger N. Hancock
    Philosophical Review 85 (3): 394. 1976.
  •  8
    P.S. Greenspan uses the treatment of moral dilemmas as the basis for an alternative view of the structure of ethics and its relation to human psychology. In its treatment of the role of emotion in ethics the argument of the book outlines a new way of packing motivational force into moral meaning that allows for a socially based version of moral realism.
  •  5
    Guilt as an Identificatory Mechanism
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1): 46-59. 1993.
  •  4
    Freedom and Responsibility
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Many authors treat freedom and responsibility as interchangeable and simply apply conclusions about responsibility to freedom. This paper argues that the two are distinct, thus allowing for a “semi-compatibilist” view, on which responsibility but not freedom (in the sense of freedom to do otherwise) is compatible with determinism. It thereby avoids the implausible features of recent compatibilist accounts of freedom without alternative possibilities—as if one could make oneself free just by acce…Read more
  • Practical Reasons and Moral "Ought"
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 2 172-199. 2007.
  • Practical Reasons and Moral "
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume Ii, Clarendon Press. 2007.
  • Making room for options : moral reasons, imperfect duties, and choice
    In Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Dycus Miller & Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Moral obligation, Cambridge University Press. 2010.