•  10
    For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some …Read more
  • Moral heuristics
    with L. Young and F. Cushman
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.
  • Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology
    Philosophical Quarterly 49 (195): 252-254. 1999.
  •  41
    Moral intuitions
    with Liane Young and Fiery Cushman
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 246--272. 2010.
    Moral intuitions are strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs. Moral philosophers ask when they are justified. This question cannot be answered separately from a psychological question: How do moral intuitions arise? Their reliability depends upon their source. This chapter develops and argues for a new theory of how moral intuitions arise—that they arise through heuristic processes best understood as unconscious attribute substitutions. That is, when asked whether something has the attribute of …Read more
  •  34
    Moral intuitionism meets empirical psychology
    In Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons (eds.), Metaethics After Moore, Oxford University Press. 2006.
  •  9
    Mixed-up meta-ethics
    Philosophical Issues 19 (1): 235-256. 2009.
    My topic is the old debate between moral realists and moral expressivists. Although I will eventually adopt a Pyrrhonian position, as usual, my main goal is neither to argue for this position nor to resolve this debate but only to explore some new options that mix together realism and expressivism in various ways. Nothing that I say will be conclusive, but I hope that some of it will be suggestive.
  •  1
    Insanity vs. Irrationality
    Public Affairs Quarterly 1 (3): 1-21. 1987.
  •  22
    Moral Dilemmas and Incomparability
    American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (4). 1985.
    The author defines moral dilemmas as situations where there is a moral requirement for an agent to adopt each of two alternatives, And the agent cannot adopt both, But neither moral requirement overrides the other. The author then argues that moral dilemmas are possible because conflicting moral requirements can be either symmetrical or incomparable in a way that is limited enough to be plausible but still strong enough to yield moral dilemmas
  •  4
    Killing versus totally disabling: a reply to critics
    Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (1): 12-14. 2013.
    We are very grateful to the commentators for taking the time to respond to our little article, ‘What Makes Killing Wrong?’ They raise many points, so we cannot respond to them all, but we do want to head off a few misinterpretations.Our critics in this journal avoid one careless misinterpretation, but less informed readers have pressed this misinterpretation in popular venues, so we need to start by renouncing it. We do not deny that killing humans is morally wrong. To the contrary, we argue tha…Read more
  •  41
    Moral Dilemmas and ‘Ought and Ought Not’
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1): 127-139. 1987.
    Although common sense and literature support the possibility of moral dilemmas, many traditional and contemporary philosophers deny this possibility because of several arguments. Probably the strongest argument against the possibility of moral dilemmas can be called the argument from ought and ought not. Various versions of this argument have been presented by McConnell, Hare, and Conee. Its basic form can be outlined as follows.If any agent is in any moral dilemma, then that agent ought to adop…Read more
  •  50
    Moral dilemmas
    Blackwell. 1988.
    A strong tradition in philosophy denies the possibility of moral dilemmas. Recently, several philosophers reversed this tradition. In this dissertation, I clarify some fundamental issues in this debate, argue for the possibility of moral dilemmas, and determine some implications of this possibility. ;In chapter I, I define moral dilemmas roughly as situations where an agent morally ought to adopt each of two alternatives but cannot adopt both. Moral dilemmas are resolvable if and only if one of …Read more
  •  5
    Moral experience and justification
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 29 (S1): 89-96. 1991.
  •  6
    Moderate classy pyrrhonian moral scepticism
    Philosophical Quarterly 58 (232). 2008.
    This précis summarizes my book Moral Skepticisms, with emphasis on my contrastivist analysis of justified moral belief and my Pyrrhonian moral scepticism based on meta-scepticism about relevance. This complex moral epistemology escapes a common paradox facing moral philosophers.
  • In Contrast with What?
    In Moral skepticisms, Oxford University Press. 2006.
    This chapter develops a contrastivist account of justified belief in general, not only within morality. It argues that contrary to contextualism, no contrast class is ever really the relevant one, even in a given context. The result is a general theory of epistemology called “classy Pyrrhonian skepticism,” that is compatible with the moderate skeptical claim that some beliefs are justified out of a modest contrast class, but none is justified out of an unlimited or extreme contrast class.
  •  30
    Is moral phenomenology unified?
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1): 85-97. 2008.
    In this short paper, I argue that the phenomenology of moral judgment is not unified across different areas of morality (involving harm, hierarchy, reciprocity, and impurity) or even across different relations to harm. Common responses, such as that moral obligations are experienced as felt demands based on a sense of what is fitting, are either too narrow to cover all moral obligations or too broad to capture anything important and peculiar to morality. The disunity of moral phenomenology is, n…Read more
  •  167
    Insanity Defenses
    with Ken Levy
    In John Deigh & David Dolinko (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of the Criminal Law, Oxford University Press. pp. 299--334. 2011.
    We explicate and evaluate arguments both for and against the insanity defense itself, different versions of the insanity defense (M'Naghten, Model Penal Code, and Durham (or Product)), the Irresistible Impulse rule, and various reform proposals.
  •  2157
    It's Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations
    In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Richard B. Howarth (eds.), Perspectives on Climate Change, Elsevier. 2005.
    A survey of various candidates shows that there is no defensible moral principle that shows that individuals have an obligation to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Intuitionism
    In Moral skepticisms, Oxford University Press. 2006.
    This chapter criticizes moral intuitionism, which claims that some moral beliefs are justified independently of any ability to infer them from other beliefs. It defines moral intuitionism, and argues that beliefs need confirmation when they are partial, controversial, emotional, or formed in circumstances that are conducive to illusion or unreliability. Empirical research is cited to show that moral beliefs are subject to these problems and, hence, need confirmation by some inference, so moral i…Read more
  •  2
    Free Contrastivism
    In Martijn Blaauw (ed.), Contrastivism in philosophy, Routledge/taylor & Francis Group. 2013.
  •  9
    How to avoid deviance (in logic)
    with Amit Malhotra
    History and Philosophy of Logic 23 (3): 215--36. 2002.
    We show that classical two-valued logic is included in weak extensions of normal three-valued logics and also that normal three-valued logics are best viewed not as deviant logics but instead as strong extensions of classical two-valued logic obtained by adding a modal operator and the right axioms. This article develops a general method for formulating the right axioms to construct a two-valued system with theorems that correspond to all of the logical truths of any normal three-valued logic. T…Read more
  •  25
    Entrapment in the net?
    Ethics and Information Technology 1 (2): 95-104. 1999.
    Internet stings to catch child molesters raise problems for popular tests of entrapment that focus on causation, initiative, counterfactuals, and subjective predisposition. An objective test of entrapment works better in the context of the Internet. The best form of objective test is determined by consequences of drawing a line at various places. This approach allows some Internet stings but counts other stings as entrapment when they go too far.
  •  18
    The prominent contributors provide background information, survey the issues and positions, and take controversial stands from a wide variety of perspectives, including neuroscience and neurology, law and policy, and philosophy and ethics
  •  11
  •  72
    Explanation and Justification in Moral Epistemology
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 1 117-127. 1999.
    Recent exchanges among Harman, Thomson, and their critics about moral explanations have done much to clarify this two-decades-old debate. I discuss some points in these exchanges along with five different kinds of moral explanations that have been proposed. I conclude that moral explanations cannot provide evidence within an unlimited contrast class that includes moral nihilism, but some moral explanations can still provide evidence within limited contrast classes where all competitors accept th…Read more
  •  2
    From 'Is' to 'Ought' in Moral Epistemology
    Argumentation 14 (2): 159-174. 2000.
    Many philosophers claim that no formally valid argument can have purely non-normative premises and a normative or moral conclusion that occurs essentially. Mark Nelson recently proposed a new counterexample to this Humean doctrine
  •  7
    For Goodness' Sake
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 83-91. 2003.
  •  45
    The rule ‘Keep your promises’ is often presented as a challenge to consequentialism, because the ground of your moral obligation not to break a promise seems to lie in the past fact that you made the promise, which is not a consequence of the act. A different picture emerges, however, when we move beyond the question of whether you have any moral obligation at all to the related question of how strong that obligation is.If I promise to meet you and some other mutual friends for a casual lunch, t…Read more
  •  3
    Emotion and Reliability in Moral Psychology
    Emotion Review 3 (3): 288-289. 2011.
    Instead of arguing about whether moral judgments are based on emotion or reason, moral psychologists should investigate the reliability of moral judgments by checking rates of framing effects in different kinds of moral judgments under different conditions by different people.
  •  29
    Expressivism and embedding
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (3): 677-693. 2000.
    Expressivism faces four distinct problems when evaluative sentences are embedded in unassertive contexts like: If lying is wrong, getting someone to lie is wrong, Lying is wrong, so Getting someone to lie is wrong. The initial problem is to show that expressivism is compatible with - being valid. The basic problem is for expressivists to explain why evaluative instances of modus ponens are valid. The deeper problem is to explain why a particular argument like - is valid. The deepest problem is t…Read more