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18Political deliberation under conditions of deception: The case of brexitThink 15 (44): 7-13. 2016.
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202[About the book] Ethics seeks answers to questions about the moral status of human actions and human lives. Actions and lives are temporal things. Thus, one would think that answers to ethical questions should take some account of their temporal features. And yet, while a number of authors have drawn attention to the relation between time and ethics, there has never been a systematic study of the impact of temporal considerations on ethical issues. There is a pressing need for an investigation i…Read more
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319On the very idea of criteria for personhoodSouthern Journal of Philosophy 49 (1): 1-27. 2011.I examine the familiar criterial view of personhood, according to which the possession of personal properties such as self-consciousness, emotionality, sentience, and so forth is necessary and sufficient for the status of a person. I argue that this view confuses criteria for personhood with parts of an ideal of personhood. In normal cases, we have already identified a creature as a person before we start looking for it to manifest the personal properties, indeed this pre-identification is part …Read more
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69Personal identity, r-relatedness, and the empty question argumentPhilosophical Quarterly 45 (178): 88-92. 1995.
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37Knowing What to Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in EthicsOxford University Press. 2017.Sophie Grace Chappell develops a picture of what philosophical ethics can be like, once set aside from the idealising and reductive pressures of conventional moral theory. Her question is 'How are we to know what to do?', and the answer she defends is 'By developing our moral imaginations'.
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11Kalou HenekaIn Julia Peters (ed.), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective, Routledge. pp. 158. 2013.
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40Moral Conscience Through The Ages by Richard Sorabji Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 288, £22.50 ISBN: 978-0-19-968554-7 (review)Philosophy 91 (2): 290-303. 2016.
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143Provided you start from suitable intuitions, it is easy enough to construct a whole range of arguments any or all of which might be called “the paradox of deontology.” Suppose you think that the role of agency is to bring about goodness, and that it's good to observe deontological constraints. Then it will follow that you should bring about the observing of deontological constraints. And if in some particular context the way to bring about such observings is via a breach of one or more deontolog…Read more
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115Tim the terrorist: We have Tim the terrorist in custody, and we know that he knows where the bomb is that his group have secretly planted somewhere in central London, and we know that if we torture him hard enough he will reliably tell us where it is in time for us to defuse it, and we know that there is no other way of getting him to tell us, and we know that if we don't defuse it the bomb will kill thousands of innocent people. So: what to do?
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45Glory in Sport (and Elsewhere)Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 73 99-128. 2013.There is a gap between what we think about ethics, and what we think we think about ethics. This gap appears when elements of our ethical reflection and our moral theories contradict each other, or otherwise come into logical tension. It also appears when something that is important in our ethical reflection is sidelined, or simply ignored, in our moral theories. The gap appears in both ways with an ethical idea that I shall label glory . This paper's exploration of the idea of glory, and its pl…Read more
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423Climbing Which Mountain? A Critical Study of Derek Parfit On What Matters(OUP 2011)Philosophical Investigations 35 (2): 167-181. 2012.
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35‘Impartial benevolence and partial love’ contributes, like the other essays in the edited collection ‘The Problem of Moral Demandingness’, to the discussion of that problem. Its contribution is to offer a phenomenological exploration of the place that these two ideas/ ideals actually have in our ethical life and experience. On the basis of this exploration I argue that neither ideal, neither impartial benevolence nor partial love, comprehensively “trumps” the other — both are important, and more…Read more
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38Enjoyment: The Moral Significance of Styles of Life, by John KekesMind 121 (483): 831-835. 2012.
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248In the Preface to his fine book, Paul Horwich deplores the “polar split” that he sees in academic philosophy today between most philosophers, who don’t care about Wittgenstein, and the Wittgensteinian minority, who don’t care about much else, and are “engaged in feuds with one other that no one else cares about”. Whether or not this picture is entirely fair either to Wittgensteinians or to non-Wittgensteinians, it is certainly true, and unfortunate, that Wittgenstein has been normalised by the a…Read more
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61“A logos that increases itself”: response to BurleyPhilosophy 85 (1): 105-108. 2010.Mikel Burley says that he thinks that the Makropoulos debate can make no sense unless talk about eternal life makes sense. Here is his most striking argument that it doesn't – that immortality is inconceivable: …the concepts [of birth, death, and sexual relations] are internally related to the concept of a human being in the sense that they form part of the complex system of interrelated concepts of which ‘human being’ is a member. To understand what a human being is, and hence to be able to ope…Read more
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36Book Review. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. By Christine M. Korsgaard (review)Philosophy 85 (3): 425-432. 2010.
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391“How encounters with values generate demandingness”, in Michael Kuehler and Marcel van Ackeren, The Limits of Obligation, Routledge.In Michael Kuehler and Marcel van Ackeren (ed.), The Limits of Obligation, Routledge., Routledge. 2015.I talk about the relation between the direct encounters with values that I take to be a key part of ordinary moral phenomenology, and the well-worn topic of demandingness. I suggest that an ethical philosophy based on (inter alia) such encounters sheds interesting light on some familiar problems.
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27Intuition, Theory, and Anti-Theory in Ethics (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2015.What form, or forms, might ethical knowledge take? In particular, can ethical knowledge take the form either of moral theory, or of moral intuition? If it can, should it? A team of experts explore these central questions for ethics, and present a diverse range of perspectives on the discussion.
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347Integrity and DemandingnessEthical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (3): 255-265. 2007.I discuss Bernard Williams’ ‘integrity objection’ – his version of the demandingness objection to unreasonably demanding ‘extremist’ moral theories such as consequentialism – and argue that it is best understood as presupposing the internal reasons thesis. However, since the internal reasons thesis is questionable, so is Williams’ integrity objection. I propose an alternative way of bringing out the unreasonableness of extremism, based on the notion of the agent’s autonomy, and show how an objec…Read more
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11Human Values: New Essays on Ethics and Natural Law. 1st Edition (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2004.In recent decades, the revival of natural law theory in modern moral philosophy has been an exciting and important development. Human Values brings together an international group of moral philosophers who in various respects share the aims and ideals of natural law ethics. In their diverse ways, these authors make distinctive and original contributions to the continuing project of developing natural law ethics as a comprehensive treatment of modern ethical theory and practice.
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517Ethical blind-spots: Why socrates was not a cosmopolitanRatio 23 (1): 17-33. 2010.Though Socrates can easily look like a cosmopolitan in moral and political theory, a closer reading of the relevant texts shows that, in the most important sense of the term as we now use it, he turns out – disappointingly, perhaps – not to be. The reasons why not are instructive and important, both for readers of Plato and for political theorists; they have to do with the phenomenon that I shall call ethical blind-spots.
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16Philosophy of the EnvironmentEdinburgh University Press. 2020.Environmental concerns and the complex issues and dilemmas raised by animal rights pose fundamental questions for philosophers. The essays in this welcome collection put environmental thinking into the broader context of philosophical thought. Distinguished contributions from key thinkers, including Mary Midgley, Stephen Clark, J.Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston, Dale Jamieson and John Haldane, focus on our attitudes to animals and the environment as critically determined by deeper philosophical …Read more
Areas of Interest
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Normative Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |