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147Review of Erik Wielenberg's Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (review)Ethics 126 (2): 541-545. 2016.This article is a short book review of Erik Wielenberg's book Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism.
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284Review of T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (review)Utilitas 19 (4): 524-526. 2007.This paper is a short review of T.M. Scanlon's book What We Owe to Each Other. The book itself is already a philosophical classic. It defends a contractualist ethical theory but also has many interesting things to say about reasons, value, well-being, promises, relativism, and so on.
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119Review of Thomas Hurka's Drawing Morals - Essays in Moral Theory, The Best Things in Life, and (ed.) Underivative Duty - British Moral Philosophers from Sidgwick to Ewing (review)Philosophy in Review 33 (1): 44-48. 2013.This is a review of three books by Thomas Hurka. The first one, Drawing Morals - Essays in Ethical Theory, is a collection of Hurka's previously published articles. The second one, The Best Things in Life, is a short book on happiness, pleasure and love intended for the general audience. Finally, the third book, Underivative Duty is a collection of articles edited by Hurka on British Moral Philosophers from Sidgwick to Ewing.
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163Review of Michael Devitt's Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology (review)Mind 124 (493): 327-331. 2015.This is a review of Michael Devitt's collection of previously published articles entitled Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology. The review also suggests a new way of formulation the realism/anti-realism contrast on the basis of Devitt's work. This contrast is understood in terms explanatory priority: should we in a given domain begin our theorizing from metaphysics (realism) or semantics (anti-realism)?
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469Non-Realist Cognitivism, Truth and ObjectivityActa Analytica 32 (2): 193-212. 2017.In On What Matters, Derek Parfit defends a new metaethical theory, which he calls non-realist cognitivism. It claims that normative judgments are beliefs; that some normative beliefs are true; that the normative concepts that are a part of the propositions that are the contents of normative beliefs are irreducible, unanalysable and of their own unique kind; and that neither the natural features of the reality nor any additional normative features of the reality make the relevant normative belief…Read more
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110Review of John Kekes's The Human Condition (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (1). 2011.This article is a short review of John Kekes's book The Human Condition.
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394Non-Naturalism: The Jackson ChallengeIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics 5, Oxford University Press. pp. 87-110. 2010.Frank Jackson has famously argued that there is no logical space for the view which understands moral properties as non-natural properties of their own unique kind. His argument is based on two steps: firstly, given supervenience and truth-aptness of moral claims, it is always possible to find a natural property which is necessarily co-instantiated with a given moral property, and secondly that there are no distinct necessarily co-instantiated properties. I argue that this second step of the arg…Read more
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482Reasons and value – in defence of the buck-passing accountEthical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (5). 2005.In this article, I will defend the so-called buck-passing theory of value. According to this theory, claims about the value of an object refer to the reason-providing properties of the object. The concept of value can thus be analyzed in terms of reasons and the properties of objects that provide them for us. Reasons in this context are considerations that count in favour of certain attitudes. There are four other possibilities of how the connection between reasons and value might be formulated.…Read more
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279Normativity of Reasons: A Critical Notice of Joshua Gert's Brute Rationality (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12 (4): 480. 2004.This critical notice explores the distinction between the justifying and requiring forces of reasons, which Joshua Gert introduced and defended in his book Brute Rationality
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84Review of Anita M. Superson's The Moral Skeptic (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (7). 2009.This is a short review of Anita Superson's book The Moral Skeptic.
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347Reason‐Statements As Non‐Extensional ContextsPhilosophical Quarterly 62 (248): 592-613. 2012.Many believe that, if true, reason-statements of the form ‘that X is F is a reason to φ’ describe a ‘favouring-relation’ between the fact that X is F and the act of φing. This favouring-relation has been assumed to share many features of other, more concrete relations. This combination of views leads to immediate problems. Firstly, unlike statements about many other relations, reason-statements can be true even when the relata do not exist, i.e., when the relevant facts do not obtain and the rel…Read more
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865Moral Error Theory and the Belief ProblemIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 8, Oxford University Press. pp. 168-194. 2013.Moral error theories claim that (i) moral utterances express moral beliefs, that (ii) moral beliefs ascribe moral properties, and that (iii) moral properties are not instantiated. Thus, according to these views, there seems to be conclusive evidence against the truth of our ordinary moral beliefs. Furthermore, many error theorists claim that, even if we accepted moral error theory, we could still in principle keep our first-order moral beliefs. This chapter argues that this last claim makes many…Read more
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83Review of J. Lenman & Y. Shemmer's (eds.) Constructivism in Practical Philosophy. (review)Ethics 123 (4): 763-768. 2013.This is a short review of James Lenman and Yonatan Shemmer's (eds.) collection of articles Constructivism in Practical Philosophy.
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854Contractualism and Climate ChangeIn Marcello Di Paola & Gianfranco Pellegrino (eds.), Canned Heat: Ethics and Politics of Climate Change, Routledge. pp. 115-128. 2014.Climate change is ‘a complex problem raising issues across and between a large number of disciplines, including physical and life sciences, political science, economics, and psychology, to name just a few’ (Gardiner 2006: 397). It is also a moral problem. Therefore, in this chapter, I will consider what kind of a contribution an ethical theory called ‘contractualism’ can make to the climate change debates. This chapter first introduces contractualism. It then describes a simple climate change…Read more
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547Contractualist Replies to the Redundancy ObjectionsTheoria 71 (1): 38-58. 2005.This paper is a defence of T.M. Scanlon's contractualism - the view that an action is wrong if it is forbidden by the principles which no one could reasonably reject. Such theories have been argued to be redundant in two ways. They are claimed to assume antecedent moral facts to explain which principles could not be reasonably rejected, and the reasons they provide to follow the non-rejectable principles are said to be unnecessary given that we already have sufficient reasons not to do the acts …Read more
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285Contractualist Account of Reasons for Being Moral DefendedSATS 6 (2): 93-113. 2005.I will begin this paper by identifying the problem within the theory of ethics, which contractualism as a moral theory is attempting to address. It is not that of solving the problem of moral motivation like the ‘arch-contractualist’, Thomas Scanlon, often claims, but rather that of describing a class of fundamental moral reasons – contractualist reasons for short. In the second section, I will defend the contractualist idea of how the nature of these moral reasons provides us with sufficient, i…Read more
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645Judgment Internalism: An Argument from Self-KnowledgeEthical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3): 489-503. 2018.Judgment internalism about evaluative judgments is the view that there is a necessary internal connection between evaluative judgments and motivation understood as desires. The debate about judgment internalism has reached a standoff some time ago. In this paper, I outline a new argument for judgment internalism. This argument does not rely on intuitions about cases, but rather it has the form of an inference to the best explanation. I argue that the best philosophical explanations of how we kno…Read more
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488A dilemma for rule-consequentialismPhilosophia 36 (1): 141-150. 2008.Rule-consequentialists tend to argue for their normative theory by claiming that their view matches our moral convictions just as well as a pluralist set of Rossian duties. As an additional advantage, rule-consequentialism offers a unifying justification for these duties. I challenge the first part of the ruleconsequentialist argument and show that Rossian duties match our moral convictions better than the rule-consequentialist principles. I ask the rule-consequentialists a simple question. In t…Read more
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66Deontic Modality (review)Analysis 78 (2): 354-363. 2018.This is a critical notice of Nate Charlow and Matthew Chrisman's (eds.) edited collection of articles entitled Deontic Modality. It begins from a brief overview of Angelika Kratzer's standard ordering semantic model for understanding deontic modals such as 'ought', 'must', and 'may' and some of the problems of this model. The focus is then on how many of the articles of this collection reach to these problems by either developing the standard model further or by formulating alternatives to it. T…Read more
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851An Improved Whole Life Satisfaction Theory of HappinessInternational Journal of Wellbeing 1 (1): 149-166. 2011.According to the popular Whole Life Satisfaction theories of happiness, an agent is happy when she judges that her life fulfils her ideal life-plan. Fred Feldman has recently argued that such views cannot accommodate the happiness of spontaneous or pre-occupied agents who do not consider how well their lives are going. In this paper, I formulate a new Whole Life Satisfaction theory which can deal with this problem. My proposal is inspired by Michael Smith’s advice-model of desirability. Accordin…Read more
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169Essays on Derek Parfit's On what matters (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2009.World–renowned British philosopher Derek Parfit′s On What Matters is certain to change the face of some of the most fundamental concerns of moral philosophy – including the nature of practical reasons and rationality, and the interpretation of Kantian Ethics and its relation to consequentialism. It will also initiate new debates about the freedom of the will, the nature of moral attitudes and properties, the relationship between prudentiality and ethics, and the significance of desiring. In Essa…Read more
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604Consequentialist OptionsUtilitas 26 (3): 276-302. 2014.According to traditional forms of act-consequentialism, an action is right if and only if no other action in the given circumstances would have better consequences. It has been argued that this view does not leave us enough freedom to choose between actions which we intuitively think are morally permissible but not required options. In the first half of this article, I will explain why the previous consequentialist responses to this objection are less than satisfactory. I will then attempt to sh…Read more
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156Review of Gerald Gaus's The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (review)Economics and Philosophy 30 (1): 103-116. 2014.This is a book review of Gerald Gaus's book The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World.
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1292Buck-passing accounts of valuePhilosophy Compass 4 (5): 768-779. 2009.This paper explores the so-called buck-passing accounts of value. These views attempt to use normative notions, such as reasons and ought to explain evaluative notions, such as goodness and value . Thus, according to Scanlon's well-known view, the property of being good is the formal, higher-order property of having some more basic properties that provide reasons to have certain kind of valuing attitudes towards the objects. I begin by tracing some of the long history of such accounts. I then de…Read more
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198Intentions, Blame, and Contractualism: A review of T.M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (review)Jurisprudence 2 (2): 561-573. 2011.This is a longer critical notice of T.M. Scanlon's book Moral Dimensions. The main crux of the article is to investigate how Scanlon's claims about the moral significance of intentions and reactive attitudes in this book fit with the earlier contractualist ethical theory which he presented in What We Owe to Each Other.
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445Contractualism and the Counter-Culture ChallengeOxford Studies in Normative Ethics 7 184-206. 2017.T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism attempts to give an account of right and wrong in terms of the moral code that could not be reasonably rejected. Reasonable rejectability is then a function of what kind of consequences the general adoption of different moral codes has for different individuals. It has been shown that moral codes should be compared at a lower than 100% level of social acceptance. This leads to the counter-culture challenge. The problem is that the cultural background of the individ…Read more
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505Contractualism and the Conditional FallacyOxford Studies in Normative Ethics 4 113-137. 2014.Most contractualist ethical theories have a subjunctivist structure. This means that they attempt to make sense of right and wrong in terms of a set of principles which would be accepted in some idealized, non-actual circumstances. This makes these views vulnerable to the so-called conditional fallacy objection. The moral principles that are appropriate for the idealized circumstances fail to give a correct account of what is right and wrong in the ordinary situations. This chapter uses two vers…Read more
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838Non-Naturalism and ReferenceJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 11 (2): 1-24. 2017.Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Non-naturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manag…Read more
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81Review of Errol Lord and Barry Maguire's (eds.) Weighing Reasons (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016 (7). 2016.This is a short review of a collection of articles entitled Weighing Reasons edited by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire
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490Contractualism as Restricted ConstructivismTopoi 37 (4): 571-579. 2018.Metaethics is often dominated by both realist views according to which moral claims are made true by either non-natural or natural properties and by non-cognitivist views according to which these claims express desire-like attitudes. It is sometimes suggested that constructivism is a fourth alternative, but it has remained opaque just how it differs from the other views. To solve this problem, this article first describes a clear constructivist theory based on Crispin Wright’s anti-realism. It t…Read more
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