•  88
    Relaxing Realism or Deferring Debate?
    Journal of Philosophy 116 (3): 149-173. 2019.
    In this paper I argue that so-called “Relaxed Realism” of the sort defended by T. M. Scanlon fails on its own terms by failing to distinguish itself from its putative rivals—in particular, from Quasi-Realism. On a whole host of questions, Relaxed Realism and Quasi-Realism give exactly the same answers, and these answers make up much of the core of the view. Scanlon offers three possible points of contrast, each of which I argue is not fit for purpose. Along the way I argue that Quasi-Realists ca…Read more
  •  87
    Saving the ethical appearances
    Mind 115 (459): 633-650. 2006.
    An important worry about what Simon Blackburn has called ‘quasi-realism’ is that it collapses into realism full-stop. Edward Harcourt has recently pressed the worry about collapse into realism in an original way. Harcourt presents the challenge in the form of a dilemma. Either ethical discourse appears to ordinary speakers to express representational states or not. If the former then expressivism means that this appearance is not saved after all, in which case quasi-realism fails in its own term…Read more
  •  86
    Moral assertion for expressivists
    Philosophical Issues 19 (1): 182-204. 2009.
    No Abstract
  •  83
    Normative certitude for expressivists
    Synthese 197 (8): 3325-3347. 2020.
    Quasi-realists aspire to accommodate core features of ordinary normative thought and discourse in an expressivist framework. One apparent such feature is that we can be more or less confident in our normative judgments—they vary in credence. Michael Smith has argued that quasi-realists cannot plausibly accommodate these distinctions simply because they understand normative judgments as desires, but desires lack the structure needed to distinguish these three features. Existing attempts to meet S…Read more
  •  82
    Play and games: An opinionated introduction
    Philosophy Compass 14 (4). 2019.
    Philosophy has a schizophrenic relationship with games. On the one hand, philosophers love using games as model, arguing that phenomena as diverse as linguistic meaning, meta‐ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, law, and aesthetics can be illuminated via an analogy with games. On the other hand, there is scant focused discussion of the concept of a game as such. This is problematic; the appeal to games as a model to clarify philosophically puzzling questions has limited utility if games the…Read more
  •  81
    Non-Cognitivist Pragmatics and Stevenson’s "Do So As Well!"
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (4): 563-574. 2003.
    Meta-ethical non-cognitivism makes two claims—a negative one and a positive one. The negative claim is that moral utterances do not express beliefs which provide the truth-conditions for those utterances. The positive claim is that the primary function of such utterances is to express certain of the speaker’s desire-like states of mind. Non-cognitivism is officially a theory about the meanings of moral words, but non-cognitivists also maintain that moral states of mind are themselves at least pa…Read more
  •  79
    Meeting constitutivists halfway
    Philosophical Studies 175 (12): 2951-2968. 2018.
    Constitutivism is best understood as a strategy for meeting a set of related metanormative challenges, rather than a fully comprehensive metanormative theory in its own right, or so many have plausibly argued. Whether this strategy succeeds may depend, in part, on which broader metanormative theory it is combined with. In this paper I argue that combining constitutivism with expressivism somewhat surprisingly provides constitutivists with their best chances for success, and that this combination…Read more
  •  73
    Back in the bad old days, it was easy enough to spot non-cognitivists. They pressed radical doctrines with considerable bravado. Intoxicated by the apparent implications of logical positivism, early noncognitivsts would say things like, "in saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I am not making any factual statement..." (Ayer 1936: 107) Like most rebellious youths, non-cognitivism eventually grew up. Later non-cognitivists developed the position into a more subtle doctrine, no l…Read more
  •  72
    Moral realism: A defence (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3). 2004.
    Book Information Moral Realism: A Defence. Moral Realism: A Defence Russ Shafer-Landau , Oxford : Clarendon Press , 2003 , x + 322 , £35 ( cloth ) By Russ Shafer-Landau. Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. x + 322. £35 (cloth:).
  •  68
    Consequentialist kantianism
    Philosophical Perspectives 23 (1): 421-438. 2009.
  •  65
    Having It Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    In twelve new essays, contributors explore hybrid theories in metaethics and other normative domains.
  •  64
    Ethics without Principles
    with Sean McKeever
    Philosophical Review 116 (1): 124-128. 2007.
  •  60
    Modesty as a Virtue
    American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (3). 2000.
  •  60
    II—Michael Ridge: Epistemology for Ecumenical Expressivists
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 81 (1): 83-108. 2007.
  •  59
    Voting for Less than the Best
    Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (3): 404-426. 2021.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  59
    Impassioned Belief
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    Michael Ridge presents an original expressivist theory of normative judgments--Ecumenical Expressivism--which offers distinctive treatments of key problems in metaethics, semantics, and practical reasoning. He argues that normative judgments are hybrid states partly constituted by ordinary beliefs and partly constituted by desire-like states.
  •  57
    Universalizability for Collective Rational Agents: A Critique of Agentrelativism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (1): 34-66. 2007.
    This paper contends that a Kantian universalizability constraint on theories of practical reason in conjunction with the possibility of collective rational agents entails the surprisingly strong conclusion that no fully agent‐relative theory of practical reason can be sound. The basic point is that a Kantian universalizability constraint, the thesis that all reasons for action are agent‐relative and the possibility of collective rational agents gives rise to a contradiction. This contradiction c…Read more
  •  56
    Illusory attitudes and the playful stoic
    Philosophical Studies 178 (9): 2965-2990. 2021.
    What we might usefully call “playing full-stop” and playing games plausibly figure in a well-lived life. Yet there are reasons to worry that the two not only do not naturally go hand in hand, but are in fact deeply opposed. In this essay I investigate the apparent tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games. I argue that the nature of this tension is easily exaggerated. While there is a psychological tension between simultaneously engaging in earnest competitive game play and…Read more
  •  55
    Games and the Good Life
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 19 (1). 2021.
    It is widely agreed that play and games contribute to the good life. One might naturally wonder how games in particular so contribute? Granted, games can be very good, what exactly is so good about them when they are good? Although a natural starting point, this question is perhaps naive. Games come in all shapes and sizes, and different games are often good in very different ways. Chess, Bridge, Bingo, Chutes and Ladders, Football, Spin the Bottle, Dungeons & Dragons, Pac-Man, Minecraft and Cha…Read more
  •  53
    Kantian constructivism : something old, something new
    In James Lenman & Yonatan Shemmer (eds.), Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 138. 2012.
  •  47
    David Hume, Paternalist
    Hume Studies 36 (2): 149-170. 2010.
    Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them…Read more
  •  43
    Individuating games
    Synthese 198 (9): 8823-8850. 2020.
    Games, which philosophers commonly invoke as models for diverse phenomena, are plausibly understood in terms of rules and goals, but this gives rise to two puzzles. The first concerns the identity of a single game over time. Intuitively one and the same game can undergo a change in rules, as when the rules of chess were modified so that a pawn could be moved two squares forward on its first move. Yet if games are individuated in terms of their constitutive rules and goals, this is incoherent—new…Read more
  •  42
    Internalists Relax: We Can’t All Be Amoralists!
    Philosophia 47 (3): 845-850. 2019.
    In “Internalists Beware – We Might All Be Amoralists!” Gunnar Björnsson and Ragnar Francén Olinder [henceforth B&O] offer an original objection to motivational internalism, which promises to move the debate beyond the seeming stalemate between externalists and internalists. The main idea behind this objection is that to pose a challenge to internalists, amoralists need not fail to be motivated to do the right thing – they might reliably be motivated to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. M…Read more
  •  42
    Are there really games in Utopia? A reinterpretation of Suits’s The Grasshopper
    with Melanie Erspamer
    Analysis 81 (3): 405-410. 2021.
    In this essay we argue that there is a contradiction lurking at the heart of Bernard Suits's seminal book on the philosophy of games, The Grasshopper, which has oddly gone unnoticed for 43 years. Suits argues that games need inefficiency and defines inefficiency such that it wouldn't exist in Utopia. This trivially entails that there could be no games in Utopia, yet the whole normative point of The Grasshopper is that games would be the only worthwhileactivity in Utopia. We then diagnose Suits's…Read more
  •  42
    Expressivism and Collectives
    Mind 127 (507): 833-861. 2018.
    Expressivists have a problem with collectives. I initially illustrate the problem against the background of Allan Gibbard’s expressivist theory, where it is especially stark. I then argue that the problem generalizes. Gibbard’s account entails that judgments about what collective agents ought to do are contingency plans for what to do if one is in the circumstances facing the relevant collective agent. So, for example, my judgment that the United States ought not to have invaded Iraq is a contin…Read more