•  40
    I Might be Fundamentally Mistaken
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (3): 1-22. 2015.
    Quasi-realism aspires to preserve the intelligibility of the realist-sounding moral judgments of ordinary people. These judgments include ones of the form, “I believe that p, but I might be mistaken,” where “p” is some moral content. The orthodox quasi-realist strategy is to understand these in terms of the agent’s worrying that some improving change would lead one to aban-don the relevant moral belief. However, it is unclear whether this strate-gy generalizes to cases in which the agent takes t…Read more
  •  37
    Much contemporary first-order moral theory revolves around the debate between consequentialists and deontologists. Depressingly, this debate often seems to come down to irresolvable first-order intuition mongering about runaway trolleys, drowning children in shallow ponds, lying to murderers at doors, and the like. Prima facie, common sense morality contains both consequentialist and deontological elements, so it may be no surprise that direct appeal to first-order intuitions tend towards stalem…Read more
  •  37
    Replies to Critics
    Analysis 75 (3): 471-488. 2015.
  •  36
    Fun and (striving) games: playfulness and agential fluidity
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 48 (3): 403-413. 2021.
    Games: Agency as Art is wonderful, and in my opinion the most important book in the philosophy of games since Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper. In effect, Nguyen takes Suits’ idea of ‘reverse English...
  •  35
    II—Michael Ridge: Epistemology for Ecumenical Expressivists
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 81 (1): 83-108. 2007.
  •  33
    According to one formulation of Scanlon ’s contractualist principle, certain acts are wrong if they are permitted by principles that are reasonably rejectable because they permit such acts. According to the redundancy objection, if a principle is reasonably rejectable because it permits actions which have feature F, such actions are wrong simply in virtue of having F and not because their having F makes principles permitting them reasonably rejectable. Consequently Scanlon ’s contractualist prin…Read more
  •  30
    Summary
    Analysis 75 (3): 433-442. 2015.
  •  29
    The Many Moral Particularisms
    with Sean McKeever
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (1): 83-106. 2005.
    What place, if any, moral principles should or do have in moral life has been a longstanding question f or moral philosophy. For some, the proposition that moral philosophy should strive to articulate moral principles has been an article of faith. At least since Aristotle, however, there has been a rieh counter-tradition that questions the possibility or value of trying to capture morality in principled terms. In recent years, philosophers who question principled approaches to morality have argu…Read more
  •  27
    Organic Unities
    In David Bakhurst, Margaret Olivia Little & Brad Hooker (eds.), Thinking About Reasons: Themes From the Philosophy of Jonathan Dancy, Oxford University Press. pp. 265. 2013.
  •  27
    Elusive Reasons 1
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 7. 2012.
    The present chapter attempts to resolve a puzzle about normative testimony. On the one hand, agents act on the advice of others, advice which purports to tell them what they have reason to do. When they do so, they can act for good reason. This thought, though, sits uneasily with another: that the mere fact that someone has advised a course of action is not itself a reason. An interesting view of reasons recently defended by Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star offers a resolution to the puzzle. On th…Read more
  •  15
  •  7
    JP argue that expressivists must admit that becoming competent with ethical utterances involves learning to make them only when one believes one has the relevant attitude. For expressivists hold that communicating our attitudes is the function of ethical utterances, in which case sincerity demands that we not utter an ethical sentence unless we believe we have the relevant attitude. So (b) is false, as long as we suppose that this commitment, as reflected in well-entrenched and clear-cut (hencef…Read more
  •  5
    Midlife: A Philosophical Guide by Kieran Setiya, Princeton University Press, 2017
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 32 (1): 118-122. 2023.
    CQ ReviewThe main goal of the Book Review Section of Cambridge Quarterly is to cultivate a place where scholars can share their thoughts on broad philosophical topics sparked by noteworthy books. Instead of focusing narrowly on works in healthcare ethics, our reviews cast a wider net so that we may reflect on diverse ideas. Please email [email protected] if you have book recommendations or if you are interested in writing a review.
  •  4
    Revolutionary expressivism
    In Bart Streumer (ed.), Irrealism in Ethics, Wiley-blackwell. 2014.
    While the meta‐ethical error theory has been of philosophical interest for some time now, only recently a debate has emerged about the question what is to be done if the error theory turns out to be true. This paper argues for a novel answer to this question, namely revolutionary expressivism: if the error theory is true, we should become expressivists. Additionally, the paper explores certain important but largely ignored methodological issues that arise for reforming definitions generally and …Read more
  •  3
    Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles (review)
    Philosophical Review 116 (1): 124-128. 2007.
  •  3
    Climb Every Mountain?
    In Jussi Suikkanen & John Cottingham (eds.), Essays on Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Ideal World Objection Climbing the Mountain: Parfit's Master Argument Multiple Moral Codes and Nihilism for the Wrong Reasons Variable‐Rate Rule‐Utilitarianism Climb Every Mountain? Conclusion.
  •  2
    Book Reviews (review)
    Ethics 113 (2): 447-450. 2003.
  • Agent-Neutral Vs. Agent-Relative Reasons
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. forthcoming.
  • Moral assertion for expressivists
    In Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Metaethics, Wiley Periodicals. 2009.
  • The Shape of Practical Reasons: A Defense of Agent-Neutralism
    Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 1999.
    Theories of practical reason can be divided in terms of a distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons for action. A reason is agent-relative just in case a full explanation of why it counts as a reason necessarily makes an ineliminable, non-trivial, pronominal back-reference to the agent who has the reason. By contrast, a reason is agent-neutral if the practical principle underwriting it needs make no such back-reference. Theories which hold that all reasons for acting are agent…Read more
  • Fairness and Non-Compliance
    In Brian Feltham & John Cottingham (eds.), Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World, Oxford University Press. 2010.