•  906
  •  610
    Without Taste: Psychopaths and the Appreciation of Art
    Nouvelle Revue d'Esthétique 6 151-63. 2010.
    Psychopaths are the bugbears of moral philosophy. They are often used as examples of perfectly rational people who are nonetheless willing to do great moral wrong without regret; hence the disorder has received the epithet “moral insanity” (Pritchard 1835). But whereas philosophers have had a great deal to say about psychopaths’ glaring and often horrifying lack of moral conscience, their aesthetic capacities have received hardly any attention, and are generally assumed to be intact or even enha…Read more
  •  73
    Practical reason and 'companions in guilt'
    Philosophical Investigations 26 (4). 2003.
    Since Phillipa Foot’s paper ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’ was published some twenty-five years ago, questions about categorical imperatives and the alleged rationality of acting morally have been of central concern to ethicists. For critics and friends of Kantian ethical theories, these questions have special importance. One of the distinctive features of Kantian ethical theories is that they claim that there are categorical imperatives: imperatives which dictate which action…Read more
  •  23
    Imagining Evil
    The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 12 7-14. 2007.
    In this paper, I explore a set of moral questions about the portrayal of evil characters in fiction: might the portrayal of evil in fiction ever be morally wrong? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons? What kinds of portrayals are morally wrong and what kinds are not? I argue that whether or not imagining evil is morally wrong depends on the formal and structural properties of the work.
  •  592
    Can Expressivists Tell the Difference Between Beauty and Moral Goodness?
    American Philosophical Quarterly 45 (3): 289-300. 2008.
    One important but infrequently discussed difficulty with expressivism is the attitude type individuation problem.1 Expressivist theories purport to provide a unified account of normative states. Judgments of moral goodness, beauty, humor, prudence, and the like, are all explicated in the same way: as expressions of attitudes, what Allan Gibbard calls “states of norm-acceptance”. However, expressivism also needs to explain the difference between these different sorts of attitude. It is possible t…Read more
  •  4815
    The Ethics of Non-Realist Fiction: Morality’s Catch-22
    Philosophia 35 (2): 145-159. 2007.
    The topic of this essay is how non-realistic novels challenge our philosophical understanding of the moral significance of literature. I consider just one case: Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. I argue that standard philosophical views, based as they are on realistic models of literature, fail to capture the moral significance of this work. I show that Catch-22 succeeds morally because of the ways it resists using standard realistic techniques, and suggest that philosophical discussion of ethics and li…Read more
  •  29
    Narrative vs. Theory
    American Journal of Bioethics 1 (1): 48-49. 2001.
  •  411
    Flexing the imagination
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61 (3). 2003.
    I explore the claim that “fictive imagining” – imagining what it is like to be a character – can be morally dangerous. In particular, I consider the controversy over William Styron’s imagining the revolutionary protagonist in his Confessions of Nat Turner. I employ Ted Cohen’s model of fictive imagining to argue, following a generally Kantian line of thought, that fictive imagining can be dangerous if one has the wrong motives. After considering several possible motives, I argue that only int…Read more
  •  454
    Sans goût : l'art et le psychopathe
    with H. Maibom
    Nouvelle Revue d'Esthétique 2 151-163. 2010.
    Résumé Si l’absence de moralité des psychopathes a été largement étudiée, il existe peu de recherches sur leurs capacités esthétiques. Pourtant, beaucoup d’études cliniques de cas montrent qu’ils présentent un grave déficit dans ce domaine. Cet article se propose d’en chercher les causes. Il analyse les forces et les limites de l’hypothèse d’un manque d’empathie pour expliquer ces carences esthétiques, et montre pourquoi l’hypothèse d’un manque de distance psychique se révèle plus féconde. Celle…Read more