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224Reasons for action: Agent-neutral vs. Agent-relativeThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.The agent-relative/agent-neutral distintion is widely and rightly regarded as a philosophically important one. Unfortunately, the distinction is often drawn in different and mutually incompatible ways. The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction has historically been drawn three main ways: the ‘principle-based distinction’, the ‘reason-statement-based distinction’ and the ‘perspective-based distinction’. Each of these approaches has its own distinctive vices (Sections 1-3). However, a slightly …Read more
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1Aesthetics and particularismIn Michael Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.
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56Kantian constructivism : something old, something newIn James Lenman & Yonatan Shemmer (eds.), Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 138. 2012.
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119The many moral particularismsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (1). 2005.What place, if any, moral principles should or do have in moral life has been a longstanding question for 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 rich 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 argue…Read more
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100Turning on default reasonsJournal of Moral Philosophy 4 (1): 55-76. 2007.Particularism takes an extremely ecumenical view of what considerations might count as reasons and thereby threatens to ‘flatten the moral landscape’ by making it seem that there is no deep difference between, for example, pain, and shoelace color. After all, particularists have claimed, either could provide a reason provided a suitable moral context. To avoid this result, some particularists draw a distinction between default and non-default reasons. The present paper argues that all but the mo…Read more
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173Agent-neutral Consequentialism from the Inside-out: Concern for Integrity without Self-indulgenceUtilitas 13 (2): 236-254. 2001.Consequentialists are sometimes accused of being unable to accommodate all the ways in which an agent should care about her own integrity. Here it is helpful to follow Stephen Darwall in distinguishing two approaches to moral theory. First, we might begin with the value of states of affairs and then work our way ‘inward’ to our integrity, explaining the value of the latter in terms of their contribution to the value of the former. This is the ‘outside-in’ approach, and Darwall argues that it is …Read more
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7Review: Posted 10/5/99 (review)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
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28Organic UnitiesIn David Bakhurst, Margaret Olivia Little & Brad Hooker (eds.), Thinking about reasons: themes from the philosophy of Jonathan Dancy, Oxford University Press. pp. 265. 2013.
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115Climb every mountain?Ratio 22 (1): 59-77. 2009.The central thesis of Derek Parfit's On What Matters is that three of the most important secular moral traditions – Kantianism, contractualism, and consequentialism – all actually converge in a way onto the same view. It is in this sense that he suggests that we may all be 'climbing the same mountain, but from different sides'. In this paper, I argue that Parfit's argument that we are all metaphorically climbing the same mountain is unsound. One reason his argument does not work is that he has m…Read more
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275What does holism have to do with moral particularism?Ratio 18 (1). 2005.Moral particularists are united in their opposition to the codification of morality, and their work poses an important challenge to traditional ways of thinking about moral philosophy. Defenders of moral particularism have, with near unanimity, sought support from a doctrine they call “holism in the theory of reasons.” We argue that this is all a mistake. There are two ways in which holism in the theory of reasons can be understood, but neither provides any support for moral particularism. Moral…Read more
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38Naïve Practical Reasoning and the Second-Person Standpoint: Simple Reasons for Simple People?Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (1-2): 17-30. 2015.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
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162The heroism paradox: another paradox of supererogationPhilosophical Studies 172 (6): 1575-1592. 2015.Philosophers are by now familiar with “the” paradox of supererogation. This paradox arises out of the idea that it can never be permissible to do something morally inferior to another available option, yet acts of supererogation seem to presuppose this. This paradox is not our topic in this paper. We mention it only to set it to one side and explain our subtitle. In this paper we introduce and explore another paradox of supererogation, one which also deserves serious philosophical attention. Peo…Read more
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65Impassioned BeliefOxford 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.
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147II—Michael Ridge: Epistemology for Ecumenical ExpressivistsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 81 (1): 83-108. 2007.
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126Sincerity and ExpressivismPhilosophical Studies 131 (2): 487-510. 2006.What is it for a speech-act to be sincere? A very tempting answer, defended by John Searle and others, is that a speech-act is sincere just in case the speaker has the state of mind it expresses. I argue that we should instead hold that a speech-act is sincere just in case the speaker believes that she has the state of mind she believes it expresses (Sections 1 and 2). Scenarios in which speakers are deluded about their own states of mind play an important role in arguing for this account. In th…Read more
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117Particularism and the contingent a prioriActa Analytica 21 (2): 3-11. 2006.Particularism renders the options for a sound moral epistemology few and the prospects dim. One leading approach treats basic knowledge of particular cases as derivable from an a priori moral principle and a posteriori knowledge of the contingent non-moral facts to which the principle applies. Particularists must forgo this approach because it requires principles. Yet a purely a posteriori moral epistemology is also implausible, especially when combined with particularism. Particularists such as…Read more
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167Mill's Intentions and MotivesUtilitas 14 (1): 54. 2002.One might have thought that any right-thinking utilitarian would hold that motives and intentions are morally on a par, as either might influence the consequences of one's actions. However, in a neglected passage of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill claims that the rightness of an action depends 'entirely upon the intention' but does not at all depend upon the motive. In this paper I try to make sense of Mill's initially puzzling remarks about the relative importance of intentions and motives in …Read more
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39How children learn the meanings of moral words: Expressivist semantics for childrenEthics 114 (2): 301-317. 2004.
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113The truth in ecumenical expressivismIn David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge University Press. 2009.Early expressivists, such as A.J. Ayer, argued that normative utterances are not truth-apt, and many found this striking claim implausible. After all, ordinary speakers are perfectly happy to ascribe truth and falsity to normative assertions. It is hard to believe that competent speakers could be so wrong about the meanings of their own language, particularly as these meanings are fixed by the conventions implicit in their own linguistic behavior. Later expressivists therefore tried to arrange a…Read more
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39Judith Jarvis Thomson, Goodness and Advice, edited by Amy Gutmann:Goodness and AdviceEthics 113 (2): 447-450. 2003.