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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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75Wittgenstein, Korsgaard and the Publicity of ReasonsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (5): 1-21. 2013.Wittgenstein, Korsgaard and the Publicity of Reasons. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/0020174X.2013.776297
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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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70Neopragmatist semanticsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1): 107-135. 2021.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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68Brute Rationality: Normativity and Human ActionCambridge University Press. 2004.This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's …Read more
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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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66Internalism and Hyperexternalism About ReasonsThe Journal of Ethics 16 (1): 15-34. 2012.Alan Goldman’s Reasons from Within is one of the most thorough recent defenses of what might be called ‘orthodox internalism’ about practical reasons. Goldman’s main target is an opposing view that includes a commitment to the following two theses: (O) that there are such things as objective values, and (E) that these values give rise to external reasons. One version of this view, which we can call ‘orthodox externalism’, also includes a commitment to the thesis (I) that rational people will be …Read more
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65Practical Rationality, Morality, and Purely Justificatory ReasonsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 37 (3). 2000.
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61Skepticism about Practical Reasons InternalismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 39 (1): 59-77. 2001.
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56Neo-pragmatism, morality, and the specification problemCanadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4): 447-467. 2018.A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the us…Read more
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54Information-Theoretic AdverbialismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4): 696-715. 2021.Adverbialism is the view that to have a conscious perceptual experience is to be consciously experiencing in a certain way, and that this way is not to be understood in relational or representational terms. We might compare what it is for a conscious being to be experiencing in a certain way with what it is for a string to be vibrating in a certain way. This paper makes a new case for adverbialism by appealing to the fact that we can pick out ways of experiencing by treating them as information-…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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51Desires, reasons, and rationalityAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 46 (4). 2009.Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, and T. M. S canlon, among others, all hold that reasons for action are provided by facts about those actions. They also hold that the fact that an action would promote or achieve the object of an agent's desire is not one of the relevant facts, and does not provide a reason. Rather, the facts that provide reasons are typically facts about valuable states of affairs that the action is likely to bring about, or valuable properties that the action itself will instantiate. …Read more
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51Moral Rationalism and Commonsense ConsequentialismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (1): 217-224. 2014.
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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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47Moral supervenience and distinctness: comments on DreierPhilosophical Studies 176 (6): 1409-1416. 2019.Jamie Dreier has argued that the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral requires explanation, and that attempts by the non-naturalist to provide it, or to sidestep the issue, have so far failed. These comments on Dreier first examine the notion of distinctness at work in the idea that non-natural properties are distinct from natural ones, pointing out that distinctness cannot be understood in modal terms if supervenience is to be respected. It then suggests that Dreier’s implicit commitment…Read more
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44Wittgenstein, Korsgaard and the Publicity of ReasonsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (5): 439-459. 2015.In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard tried to argue against what she called the ‘privacy’ of reasons, appealing to Wittgenstein's argument against the possibility of a private language. In recent work she continues to endorse Wittgenstein's perspective on the normativity of meaning, although she now emphasizes that her own argument was only meant to be analogous to the private language argument. The purpose of the present paper is to show that the Wittgensteinian perspective is not…Read more
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42Quality spaces: Mental and physicalPhilosophical Psychology 30 (5): 525-544. 2017.Perceptual-role theories of mental qualities hold that we can discover the nature of a being’s mental qualities by investigating that being’s capacity to make perceptual discriminations. Many advocates of perceptual-role theories hold that the best explanation of these capacities is that mental quality spaces are homomorphic to the spaces of the physical properties that they help to discriminate. This paper disputes this thesis on largely empirical grounds, and offers an alternative. The alterna…Read more
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42Fine-Grained Colour Discrimination without Fine-Grained ColourAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3): 602-605. 2015.René Jagnow [2012] argues that David Rosenthal's theory of consciousness cannot account for certain experiences that involve colours so fine-grained that we do not and cannot have concepts of them. Jagnow claims that an appeal to comparative concepts such as being slightly darker than cannot help Rosenthal, since, in order to apply such concepts, we would already need to be conscious of two distinct fine-grained colours. The present paper contests this claim. It appeals to the Cornsweet illusion…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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42Begging 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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40Normative Bedrock: Response-Dependence, Rationality, and ReasonsOxford University Press. 2012.Joshua Gert offers an original account of normative facts and properties, those which have implications for how we ought to behave. He argues that our ability to think and talk about normative notions such as reasons and benefits is dependent on how we respond to the world around us, including how we respond to the actions of other people
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39A Light Theory with Heavy BurdensPhilosophical Studies 126 (1): 57-70. 2005.In “ A Light Theory of Color”, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and David Sparrow argue that color is neither a primary quality of objects, nor a disposition that objects have, nor a property of our visual fields. Rather, according to the view they present, color is a property of light. The present paper aims to show, first, that the light theory is vulnerable to many of the very same objections that Sinnott-Armstrong and Sparrow raise against rival views. Second, the paper argues that the strategies th…Read more
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36Adverbialism and objectsPhilosophical Studies 179 (2): 699-710. 2021.Justin D’Ambrosio and I have recently and independently defended perceptual adverbialism from Frank Jackson’s well-known Many-Properties Problem. Both of us make use of a similar strategy: characterizing ways of perceiving by using the language of objects, and not just of properties. But while D’Ambrosio’s view does indeed validate the inferences that Jackson’s challenge highlights, it does so at the price of validating additional, invalid inferences, such as the inference from the claim that a …Read more
Williamsburg, Virginia, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |