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563Thick Concepts and UnderdeterminationIn Simon Kirchin (ed.), Thick Concepts, Oxford University Press. pp. 136-160. 2013.Thick terms and concepts in ethics somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. The non-evaluative aspects of thick terms and concepts underdetermine their extensions. Many writers argue that this underdetermination point is best explained by supposing that thick terms and concepts are semantically evaluative in some way such that evaluation plays a role in determining their extensions. This paper argues that the extensions of thick terms and concepts are underdetermined by their m…Read more
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643Slim Epistemology with a Thick SkinPhilosophical Papers 37 (3): 389-412. 2008.The distinction between “thick” and “thin” value concepts, and its importance to ethical theory, has been an active topic in recent meta-ethics. This paper defends three claims regarding the parallel issue about thick and thin epistemic concepts. (1) Analogy with ethics offers no straightforward way to establish a good, clear distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts. (2) Assuming there is such a distinction, there are no semantic grounds for assigning thick epistemic concepts priori…Read more
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2688Moral ParticularismIn Christian Miller (ed.), Continuum Companion to Ethics, Continuum. pp. 247-260. 2011.This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics.
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77Review of Christian Illies, The Grounds of Ethical Judgement: New Transcendental Arguments in Moral Philosophy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (3). 2004.This is a review of Christian Illies: The Grounds of Ethical Judgement: New Transcendental Arguments in Moral Philosophy (Clarendon Press, 2003).
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1110Grounding and Normative ExplanationAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1): 155-178. 2013.This paper concerns non-causal normative explanations such as ‘This act is wrong because/in virtue of__’. The familiar intuition that normative facts aren't brute or ungrounded but anchored in non- normative facts seems to be in tension with the equally familiar idea that no normative fact can be fully explained in purely non- normative terms. I ask whether the tension could be resolved by treating the explanatory relation in normative explanations as the sort of ‘grounding’ relation that receiv…Read more
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824Some Good and Bad News for Ethical IntuitionismPhilosophical Quarterly 58 (232). 2008.The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non-inferential. Against this, Sturgeon has recently objected that if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their foundationalism commits them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. I show that irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non-inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a posteriori, their commitment to the autonomy of ethics a…Read more
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1266Doubts about Moral PerceptionIn Anna Bergqvist & Robert Cowan (eds.), Evaluative Perception, Oxford University Press. pp. 109-28. 2018.This paper defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Standard examples of moral perception are better explained as transitions in thought whose degree of psychological immediacy varies with how readily non-moral perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject's background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral…Read more
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125The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty: A Study of Thick Concepts in EthicsOxford University Press. 2013.In addition to thin concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to thick concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind -- concepts that somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. Thick concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in content, and many philosophers claimed them to have deep and distinctive significance in ethics and metaethics. In this first book-length tr…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
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Meta-Ethics |
Moral Explanation |
Moral Semantics |
Moral Normativity |
Moral Principles |
Moral Naturalism and Non-Naturalism |
Moral Value |