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Roles and reasonsIn Tim Dare & Christine Swanton (eds.), Perspectives in Role Ethics: Virtues, Reasons, and Obligation, Routledge. 2019.
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45Epiphanies: An Ethics of ExperienceOxford University Press. 2022.Epiphanies is a philosophical exploration of epiphanies, peak experiences, 'wow moments', or ecstasies as they are sometimes called. What are epiphanies, and why do so many people so frequently experience them? Are they just transient phenomena in our brains, or are they the revelations of objective value that they very often seem to be? What do they tell us about the world, and about ourselves? How, if at all, do epiphanies fit in with our moral systems and our theories of how to live? And how …Read more
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Inwardness in EthicsIn Silvia Caprioglio Panizza & Mark Hopwood (eds.), The Murdochian Mind, Routledge. 2022.I begin with a summary statement of what I call “the Manifesto”, which is a succinct expression of an entire, and extremely influential, ideology of philosophical ethics: the one that I call “systematic moral theory”, and have been writing against for a decade now. My paper is about why Iris Murdoch rejects the Manifesto; and why anyone should. Murdoch quotes with approval Paul Valéry’s “A difficulty is a light; an insuperable difficulty is a sun.” It sounds paradoxical to suggest that philosoph…Read more
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30Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the philosophy of value by David Wiggins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). 1Philosophy 97 (3): 397-402. 2022.
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114Transgender and adoption: An analogyThink 20 (59): 25-30. 2021.Maybe we should think of it like this: trans women/men are to women/men as adoptive parents are to parents. There are disanalogies of course, and the morality of adoption is a large issue in itself which I can't do full justice to here. Still, the analogies are, I think, important and instructive.
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30To Live Outside the Law You Must Be HonestAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 95 (1): 233-252. 2021.Elizabeth Swann: Wait! You have to take me to shore.According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren—
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102The Problem of Moral Demandingness: New Philosophical Essays (edited book)Palgrave Macmillan. 2009.How much can morality demand of well-off Westerners as a response to the plight of the poor and starving in the rest of the world, or in response to environmental crises? Is it wrong to put your friends and family first? And what do the answers to these questions tell us about the nature of morality? This collection of eleven new essays from some of the world's leading moral philosophers brings the reader to the cutting edge of this contemporary ethical debate. With essays from Kantians, utilita…Read more
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46Cora Diamond: Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to EthicsEthics 130 (4): 588-608. 2020.
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70Introducing EpiphaniesZeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 2 (1): 95-121. 2019.I propose a programme of research in ethical philosophy, into the peak-experiences or wow-moments that I, following James Joyce and others, call epiphanies. As a first pass, I characterize an epiphany as an (1) overwhelming (2) existentially significant manifestation of (3) value, (4) often sudden and surprising, (5) which feels like it “comes from outside” – it is something given, relative to which I am a passive perceiver – which (6) teaches us something new, which (7) “takes us out of ourselv…Read more
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15Does Protagoras refute himself?Classical Quarterly 45 (2): 333-338. 1995.Protagoras believes that all beliefs are true. Since Protagoras' belief that all beliefs are true is itself a belief, it follows from Protagoras' belief that all beliefs are true that Protagoras' belief is true. But what about the belief that Protagoras' belief is false? Doesn't it follow, by parallel reasoning and not at all trivially, that if all beliefs are true and there is a belief that Protagoras' belief is false, then Protagoras' belief is false?
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50Knowledge and Truth in Plato: Stepping Past the Shadow of Socrates, by Catherine RowettMind 129 (513): 291-299. 2020.Knowledge and Truth in Plato: Stepping Past the Shadow of Socrates, by RowettCatherine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 305.
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18Aristotle and Augustine on voluntary action and freedom and weakness of the willDissertation, University of Edinburgh. 1992.
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37Ethics Beyond the Limits: New Essays on Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2018.Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is widely regarded as one of the most important works of moral philosophy in the last fifty years. In this outstanding collection of new essays, fourteen internationally-recognised philosophers examine the enduring contribution that Williams's book continues to make to ethics. Required.
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26PaulHorwich, Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy (Oxford University Press, 2012). 225 pp., price £46.00 (review)Philosophical Investigations 37 (3): 258-271. 2014.
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127Book Review: Acts amid Precepts: The Aristotelian Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory (review)Studies in Christian Ethics 16 (2): 96-101. 2003.
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9IntroductionCités 19 123-124. 2004.[About the book] Natural law theory says that humans can only live well if they recognise the goods that are natural for humans, and understand how those goods generate the system of practical guidance that we call morality. Natural law is a long-established and flourishing ethical tradition, with roots in Aristotle and Aquinas, which is increasingly recognised as a worthy competitor to Kantianism, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. The new essays in this collection represent the latest thinking …Read more
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439What Have I Done?Diametros 38 86-111. 2013.An externalist view of intention is developed on broadly Wittgensteinian grounds, and applied to show that the classic Thomist doctrine of double effect, though it has good uses in casuistry, has also been overused because of the internalism about intention that has generally been presupposed by its users. We need a good criterion of what counts as the content of our intentional actions; I argue, again on Wittgensteinian grounds, that the best criterion comes not from foresight, nor from foresig…Read more
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356The fear of deathThink 11 (30): 57-71. 2012.Of course there is a long history of such sayings in all the world’s main spiritual traditions. Socrates’ remark reminds us at once of Solon’s doleful doctrine that we should call no man happy until he is dead (Herodotus Histories Book 1; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1100a11). And Bonhoeffer’s famous saying, while it echoes the typical teaching of many Christian spiritual masters, for instance St Thomas à Kempis and Bianco da Siena (the author of that beautiful hymn “Come down O Love Divine”), i…Read more
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301Utrum Sit Una Tantum Vera Enumeratio Virtutum MoraliumMetaphilosophy 49 (3): 207-215. 2018.As its Latin title says, this article inquires whether there is a single correct list of the moral virtues. Virtue ethics tells us to “act in accordance with the virtues” but can often be accused, for example in Aristotle's Ethics, of helping itself without argument to an account of what the virtues are. This paper is, stylistically, an affectionate tribute to the Angelic Doctor, and it works with a correspondingly Thomistic background and approach. It argues for the view that there is at least …Read more
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546I explore, explain, and expound the history of the debates about virtue and virtue ethics in twentieth-century anglophone philosophy
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106Utopias and the Art of the PossibleAnalyse & Kritik 30 (1): 179-203. 2008.I begin this paper by examining what MacIntyre has to tell us about radical disagreements: how they have arisen, and how to deal with them, within a polity. I conclude by radically disagreeing with Macintyre: I shall suggest that he offers no credible alternative to liberalism’s account of radical disagreements and how to deal with them. To put it dilemmatically: insofar as what MacIntyre says is credible, it is not an alternative to liberalism; insofar as he presents a genuine alternative to li…Read more
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456Examines the place of rules in virtue ethics, and concludes by reviewing examples that the idea that virtue ethics can have no place for rules is groundless
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339The Objectivity of Ordinary LifeEthical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (4): 709-721. 2017.Metaethics tends to take for granted a bare Democritean world of atoms and the void, and then worry about how the human world that we all know can possibly be related to it or justified in its terms. I draw on Wittgenstein to show how completely upside-down this picture is, and make some moves towards turning it the right way up again. There may be a use for something like the bare-Democritean model in some of the sciences, but the picture has no standing as the basic objective truth about the w…Read more
Areas of Interest
1 more
Normative Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |