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218Mixed-up meta-ethicsPhilosophical 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.
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233Moral Dilemmas and IncomparabilityAmerican 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
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27Killing versus totally disabling: a reply to criticsJournal 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
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41Moral 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
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306Moral dilemmasBlackwell. 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
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135Moderate classy pyrrhonian moral scepticismPhilosophical 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.
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1007Insanity DefensesIn 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.
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243Is 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
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2156It's Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral ObligationsIn 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.
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194How strong is this obligation? An argument for consequentialism from concomitant variationAnalysis 69 (3): 438-442. 2009.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
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103Emotion and Reliability in Moral PsychologyEmotion 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.
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2Free ContrastivismIn Martijn Blaauw (ed.), Contrastivism in philosophy, Routledge/taylor & Francis Group. 2013.
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42How to avoid deviance (in logic)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
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62Entrapment 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.
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18Finding Consciousness: The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2016.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
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72Explanation and Justification in Moral EpistemologyThe 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
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119From 'Is' to 'Ought' in Moral EpistemologyArgumentation 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
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11Experience and Foundationalism in Audi's The Architecture of Reason (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1): 181-187. 2003.Robert Audi’s The Architecture of Reason is a magnificent consolidation of decades of original work by a masterful philosopher. Its scope is impressive, as it covers both theoretical and practical reason in a slim volume. More impressive yet is its coherence, for Audi reveals a unified structure shared by what many philosophers assume to be disparate fields.
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69Do Psychopaths Refute Internalism?In Thomas Schramme (ed.), Being Amoral: Psychopathy and Moral Incapacity, Mit Press. pp. 187-208. 2014.The chapter focuses on the philosophical debate between moral motivational internalism and externalism. The author analyzes and thereby challenges the conceptual problems underlying this quarrel in relation to the apparent empirical findings on psychopathy. Major obstacles in making progress in this debate are conceptual and methodological problems. First, there is not a clear-cut and undisputed definition of moral internalism. Second, empirical results about a lack of moral judgment are not for…Read more
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338Expressivism and embeddingPhilosophy 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
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46Experience and Foundationalism in Audi’s The Architecture of Reason (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1). 2003.In The Architecture of Reason, Robert Audi claims that good reasoning always has some foundation in experience. It is not clear, however, precisely what kind of experience is supposed to ground practical reasoning. It is also not clear whether inference is necessary for a belief to be justified, even when the source of the belief is experience without inference. Finally, it is not clear why beliefs based on some kinds of experience would not need to be justified by inference when beliefs based o…Read more
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8Contemporary Perspectives on Constitutional Interpretation (edited book)Westview Press. 1993.Brings together ten of the nation's finest and most provocative legal scholars to present their views on constitutional interpretation. All of these papers are very recent, and four were written especially for this volume.
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43Classy pyrrhonismIn Pyrrhonian Skepticism, Oxford University Press. pp. 188--207. 2004.This essay invokes a technical framework of contrast classes within which Pyrrhonians can accept knowledge claims that are relativized to specific contrast classes, but avoid all unrelativized knowledge claims and all presuppositions about which contrast classes are really relevant. Pyrrhonians can then assert part of the content of everyday knowledge claims without privileging the everyday perspective or any other perspective. This framework provides a precise way to understand the central clai…Read more
Huckleberry Spring, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Psychology |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Neuroscience |
Psychology |
Areas of Interest
4 more
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Psychology |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Neuroscience |
Psychology |