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603A Wrong Turn to Reasons?In Michael Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.This paper argues that the recent metaethical turn to reasons as the fundamental units of normativity offers no special advantage in explaining a variety of other normative and evaluative phenomena, unless perhaps a form of reductionism about reasons is adopted which is rejected by many of those who advocate turning to reasons.
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753Usable moral principlesIn Vojko Strahovnik, Matjaz Potrc & Mark Norris Lance (eds.), Challenging Moral Particularism, Routledge. pp. 75-106. 2008.One prominent strand in contemporary moral particularism concerns the claim of "principle abstinence" that we ought not to rely on moral principles in moral judgment because they fail to provide adequate moral guidance. I argue that moral generalists can vindicate this traditional and important action-guiding role for moral principles. My strategy is to argue, first, that, for any conscientious and morally committed agent, the agent's acceptance of (true) moral principles shapes their responsive…Read more
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795Moral Generalism: Enjoy in ModerationEthics 116 (4): 707-741. 2006.I defend moral generalism against particularism. Particularism, as I understand it, is the negation of the generalist view that particular moral facts depend on the existence of a comprehensive set of true moral principles. Particularists typically present "the holism of reasons" as powerful support for their view. While many generalists accept that holism supports particularism but dispute holism, I argue that generalism accommodates holism. The centerpiece of my strategy is a novel model of mo…Read more
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2621Reasons and Moral PrinciplesIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. pp. 839-61. 2018.This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate and related issues concerning the relationship between normative reasons and moral principles.
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1156Essential Contestability and EvaluationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3): 471-488. 2014.Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyse disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like democracy, freedom, genocide, rape, coercion, and the rule of law. Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who coined the term), for instance, argues that the central struc…Read more
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634Particularism and default reasonsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (1): 53-79. 2004.This paper addresses a recent suggestion that moral particularists can extend their view to countenance default reasons (at a first stab, reasons that are pro tanto unless undermined) by relying on certain background expectations of normality. I first argue that normality must be understood non-extensionally. Thus if default reasons rest on normality claims, those claims won't bestow upon default reasons any definite degree of extensional generality. Their generality depends rather on the contin…Read more
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544Thick 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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625Slim 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
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
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Meta-Ethics |
Moral Explanation |
Moral Semantics |
Moral Normativity |
Moral Principles |
Moral Naturalism and Non-Naturalism |
Moral Value |