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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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107The 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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19Does 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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37PaulHorwich, Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy (Oxford University Press, 2012). 225 pp., price £46.00 (review)Philosophical Investigations 37 (3): 258-271. 2014.
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126Book 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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431What 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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453Examines 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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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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298Utrum 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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544I 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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334The 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
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60Understanding Human GoodsIn Patrick Riordan (ed.), Values in Public Life, Lit Verlag. pp. 77-96. 2007.
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671Virtues and rulesIn S. van Hooft, N. Athanassoulis, J. Kawall, J. Oakley & L. van Zyl (eds.), The handbook of virtue ethics, Acumen Publishing. 2014.
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65The implications of incommensurabilityPhilosophy 76 (1): 137-148. 2001.Agents have aims. Any aim can be either simple or complex. If an aim is complex, then its different components make irreducibly different demands on the agent. The agent cannot rationally respond to all these demands by promoting all her different component aims at once. She must recognise a distinction between the rational response to any component aim of promoting it, and the rational response of respecting it. If the goods are incommensurable, then rational agents have complex aims. So if the…Read more
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9Reason, Passion, and Action: the Third Condition of the VoluntaryPhilosophy 70 (273): 453-459. 1995.1. ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office, but to serve and obey them.’ 2.3.3) Unfortunately, Hume uses ‘reason’ to mean ‘discovery of truth or falsehood‘ as well as discovery of logical relations. So suppose we avoid, as Hume I think does not, prejudging the question of how many ingredients are requisite for action, by separating these two claims out:A. Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.B. Reason ) is and ought only t…Read more
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142“Thin concepts” are dubious entities. Careful analysis of the usual examples of thick and thin raises serious doubts about both their conceptuality and their thinness. Confusions aside, there is little obvious use for them in ethics or metaethics. The very idea that there could be a naturally-occurring purely evaluative moral concept, with no descriptive content, no cultural setting, and no capacity for distanced or ironic use, is as chimerical as any other ahistorical illusion. Our concentratio…Read more
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33The Future-Person StandpointPhilosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche. 2014.Download
Areas of Interest
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Normative Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |