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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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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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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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12Moral 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
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18Engaging Reason (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3): 745-748. 2003.First, some stage setting is necessary. According to Raz, what makes us into rational agents is our ability to perceive normative aspects of the world, appreciate their normative significance, and respond appropriately. Although he concentrates on the rationality of action, our beliefs, feelings, and emotions also demonstrate this ability. This characterization of his view already indicates that, according to Raz, the world indeed has normative aspects. What this means is that aspects of the wor…Read more
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105Response-dependence and normative bedrockPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3): 718-742. 2009.No Abstract
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129Colour, emotion and objectivityAnalysis 69 (4): 714-721. 2009.1. IntroductionThe Emotional Construction of Morals is a tour de force that combines empirical data and philosophical argument in an impressively coherent way. Certainly it resists any sweeping assessment; a mere presentation of the principal lines of argument would itself take the space of an article. Also, and despite its systematic structure, I do not think Prinz's view places decisive weight on any small number of points. Consequently, I do not think it can be refuted in any wholesale way. N…Read more
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160Problems for Moral Twin Earth ArgumentsSynthese 150 (2): 171-183. 2006.Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently presented a series of papers in which they argue against what has come to be called the ‘new wave’ moral realism and moral semantics of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, and a number of other philosophers. The central idea behind Horgan and Timmons’s criticism of these ‘new wave’ theories has been extended by Sean Holland to include the sort of realism that drops out of response-dependent accounts that make use of an analogy between moral prope…Read more
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21Normativity and the Will: Selected Essays in Moral Psychology and Practical Reason – R. Jay WallacePhilosophical Quarterly 58 (232): 559-563. 2008.
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88A Functional Role Analysis of ReasonsPhilosophical Studies 124 (3): 353-378. 2005.One strategy for providing an analysis of practical rationality is to start with the notion of a practical reason as primitive. Then it will be quite tempting to think that the rationality of an action can be defined rather simply in terms of ‘the balance of reasons’. But just as, for many philosophical purposes, it is extremely useful to identify the meaning of a word in terms of the systematic contribution the word makes to the meanings of whole sentences, this paper argues that it is extremel…Read more
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Mistaken ExpressionsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (4): 459-479. 2006.It is a suggestive feature of English and other languages that an indicative sentence such as ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ can be described not only as an expression of the belief that premarital sex is wrong, but also as an expression of disapproval of premarital sex. Disapproval is plausibly regarded as an attitude that is distinct from belief, in that it does not have truth conditions. What sort of attitude, then, should we take ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ to express: disapproval, belief, or perha…Read more
Williamsburg, Virginia, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |