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28Crazy RelationsCroatian Journal of Philosophy 12 (3): 315-330. 2012.In The Red and the Real, Jonathan Cohen defends a relationalist view of color: the view that colors are constituted by relations between objects, perceivers, and circumstances. Cohen’s defense of relationalism is often ingenious, but it also commits him to some extremely counterintuitive—one might say “crazy”—claims. The present paper argues that the phenomena that are captured by Cohen’s ingenious defense of his interesting view can be captured equally well by a more “boring” view. Such a view …Read more
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106Putting particularism in its placePacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (3): 312-324. 2008.Abstract: The point of this paper is to undermine the support that particularism in the domain of epistemic reasons might seem to give to particularism in the domain of practical reasons. In the epistemic domain, there are two related notions: truth and the rationality of belief. Epistemic reasons are related to the rationality of belief, and not directly to truth. In the domain of practical reasons, however, the role of truth is taken by the notion of objective rationality. Practical reasons ar…Read more
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96Breaking the law of desireErkenntnis 62 (3): 295-319. 2005.This paper offers one formal reason why it may often be inappropriate to hold, of two conflicting desires, that the first must be weaker than, stronger than, or of the same strength as the second. The explanation of this fact does not rely on vagueness or epistemological problems in determining the strengths of desires. Nor does it make use of the problematic notion of incommensurability. Rather, the suggestion is that the motivational capacities of many desires might best be characterized by tw…Read more
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Naturalistic metaethics at half priceIn Michael Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.
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99Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, by Daniel KellyMind 121 (484): 1077-1080. 2012.
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161A realistic colour realismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (4). 2006.Whether or not one endorses realism about colour, it is very tempting to regard realism about determinable colours such as green and yellow as standing or falling together with realism about determinate colours such as unique green or green31. Indeed some of the most prominent representatives of both sides of the colour realism debate explicitly endorse the idea that these two kinds of realism are so linked. Against such theorists, the present paper argues that one can be a realist about the det…Read more
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51Moral Rationalism and Commonsense ConsequentialismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (1): 217-224. 2014.
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167Requiring and justifying: Two dimensions of normative strength (review)Erkenntnis 59 (1). 2003.Many contemporary accounts of normative reasons for action accord a single strength value to normative reasons. This paper first uses some examples to argue against such views by showing that they seem to commit us to intransitive or counterintuitive claims about the rough equivalence of the strengths of certain reasons. The paper then explains and defends an alternate account according to which normative reasons for action have two separable dimensions of strength: requiring strength, and justi…Read more
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79Perform a Justified OptionUtilitas 26 (2): 206-217. 2014.In a number of recent publications, Douglas Portmore has defended consequentialism, largely on the basis of a maximizing view of practical rationality. I have criticized such maximizing views, arguing that we need to distinguish two independent dimensions of normative strength: justifying strength and requiring strength. I have also argued that this distinction helps to explain why we typically have so many rational options. Engaging with these arguments, Portmore has (a) developed his own novel…Read more
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53Review of Normativity and the will by R. Jay Wallace (review)Philosophical Quarterly 58 (232). 2008.
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72A Fitting End to the Wrong Kind of Reason ProblemEthics 126 (4): 1015-1042. 2016.This article uses a particular view of the basic emotions in order to develop and defend an account of paradigmatic emotion-linked evaluative properties. The view is that felt emotions are constituted by an awareness that one is about to behave in a certain way. This view provides support for a fitting-attitude account of certain evaluative properties. But the relevant sense of fittingness is not to be understood in terms of reasons. The account therefore sidesteps the well-known Wrong Kind of R…Read more
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42Mistaken expressionsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (4): 459-479. 2006.Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1500 USA.
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24Intentional action and nearly certain successRatio 17 (2). 2004.Many philosophers have argued that a necessary condition on an action's being intentional is that the agent has the ability to alter the probabilities of the relevant outcome. These philosophers would hold that this condition is what allows us to deny that an agent, for example, intentionally rolls something other than five fives with a set of dice, despite that agent's being virtually sure that this will be the outcome of the roll. The current paper uses some examples to cast this explanation, …Read more
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61Skepticism about Practical Reasons InternalismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 39 (1): 59-77. 2001.
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67Disgust, Moral Disgust, and MoralityJournal of Moral Philosophy 11 (4): 33-54. 2014.This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and the …Read more
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65Practical Rationality, Morality, and Purely Justificatory ReasonsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 37 (3). 2000.
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40Begging the Question: A Qualified DefenseThe Journal of Ethics 18 (3): 279-297. 2014.This discussion examines two of the central notions at work in Sterba’s From Rationality to Equality: question-beggingness, and the notion of a rational requirement. I point out that, against certain unreasonable positions, begging the question is a perfectly reasonable option. I also argue that if we use the sense of “rational requirement” that philosophers ought to have in mind when defending the idea that morality is rationally required, then Sterba has not succeed in defending this idea. Rat…Read more
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51Neo‐pragmatism, Representationalism and the EmotionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (2): 454-478. 2017.This paper offers a neo-pragmatist account of the representational character of the emotions, for those emotions that have such a character. Put most generally, neo-pragmatism is the view that language should not be conceived primarily in terms of a robust relation of reference to or representation of antecedently given objects and properties. Rather, we should view it as a social practice that lets us do various quite different sorts of things. One of those things might be called ‘assessing rep…Read more
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86Avoiding the conditional fallacyPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (206): 88-95. 2002.Over-simple internalist accounts of practical reasons imply that we cannot have reasons to become more rational, because they claim that we have a reason to φ only if we would have some desire to φ if we were fully rational. But if we were fully rational, we would have no desire to become more rational. Robert Johnson has recently argued that in their attempts to avoid this problem, existing versions of internalism yield reasons which do not have an appropriate connection with potential explanat…Read more
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11Moral Reasons and Rational StatusCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 33 (sup1): 171-196. 2007.The question “Why be moral?” is open to at least three extremely different interpretations. One way to distinguish these interpretations is by picturing the question as being asked by, respectively, Allan, who is going to act immorally unless he can be convinced to act otherwise, Beth, who is perfectly happy to do what is morally required on a certain occasion but who wants to know what is it about the act that makes it morally required, and Charles, who is trying to understand why rational peop…Read more
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185Korsgaard’s Private-Reasons ArgumentPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2): 303-324. 2002.In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard presents and defends a neo-Kantian theory of normativity. Her initial account of reasons seems to make them dependent upon the practical identity of the agent, and upon the value the agent must place on her own humanity. This seems to make all reasons agent-relative. But Korsgaard claims that arguments similar to Wittgenstein’s private-language argument can show that reasons are in fact essentially agent-neutral. This paper explains both of Kors…Read more
Williamsburg, Virginia, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |