•  122
    Luck, blame, and desert
    Philosophical Studies 169 (2): 313-332. 2014.
    T.M. Scanlon has recently proposed what I term a ‘double attitude’ account of blame, wherein blame is the revision of one’s attitudes in light of another person’s conduct, conduct that we believe reveals that the individual lacks the normative attitudes we judge essential to our relationship with her. Scanlon proposes that this account justifies differences in blame that in turn reflect differences in outcome luck. Here I argue that although the double attitude account can justify blame’s being …Read more
  •  120
    Grief: A Philosophical Guide
    Princeton University Press. 2022.
    An engaging and illuminating exploration of grief—and why, despite its intense pain, it can also help us grow Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us—as universal as it is painful—is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we griev…Read more
  •  115
    Suicide intervention and non–ideal Kantian theory
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 19 (3). 2002.
    Philosophical discussions of the morality of suicide have tended to focus on its justifiability from an agent’s point of view rather than on the justifiability of attempts by others to intervene so as to prevent it. This paper addresses questions of suicide intervention within a broadly Kantian perspective. In such a perspective, a chief task is to determine the motives underlying most suicidal behaviour. Kant wrongly characterizes this motive as one of self-love or the pursuit of happiness. Psy…Read more
  •  115
    Justice in Human Capital
    In Julian David Jonker & Grant J. Rozeboom (eds.), Working as Equals: Relational Egalitarianism and the Workplace, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 113-131. 2023.
    Human capital is that body of skills, knowledge, or dispositions that enhances the value of individuals’ contributions to economic production. Because human capital is both a byproduct of, and an important ingredient in, cooperative productive activities, it is subject to demands of justice. Here I consider what comparative justice in human capital benefits and burdens amounts to, with a special concern for the place of equality in allocating such burdens and benefits. Identifying these demands…Read more
  •  110
    Suicide
    International Encyclopedia of Ethics. 2013.
    Suicide is a controversial ethical issue in large part because the reasonings of and above appear plausible but support contradictory conclusions. in effect asks: Why should we be granted an exemption to the prohibition on human killing when the person we kill is ourselves? What makes killing oneself so special? on the other hand starts from the intuition that there is something special or distinctive about the moral relationship we stand in to ourselves, a relationship that can at least sometim…Read more
  •  108
    A contractualist account of promising
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 40 (4): 475-91. 2002.
    T.M. Scanlon (1998) proposes that promise breaking is wrong because it shows manipulative disregard for the expectations for future behavior created by promising. I argue that this account of promissory obligation is mistaken in it own right, as well as being at odds with Scanlon's contractualism. I begin by placing Scanlon's account of promising within a tradition that treats the creation of expectations in promise recipients as central to promissory obligation. However, a counterexample to S…Read more
  •  101
    _Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights_ explores important issues at the nexus of two burgeoning areas within moral and social philosophy: procreative ethics and parental rights. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little scholarly engagement across these subdisciplinary boundaries, despite the fact that parental rights are paradigmatically ascribed to individuals responsible for procreating particular children. This collection thus aims to bring expert practitioners from these …Read more
  •  101
    David Boonin has recently argued that although no existing theory of legal punishment provides adequate moral justification for the practice of punishing criminal wrongdoing, compulsory victim restitution (CVR) is a morally justified response to such wrongdoing. Here I argue that Boonin’s thesis is false because CVR is a form of punishment. I first support this claim with an argument that Boonin’s denial that CVR is a form of punishment requires a groundless distinction between a state’s respons…Read more
  •  101
    The terminal, the futile, and the psychiatrically disordered
    International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 36. 2013.
    The various jurisdictions worldwide that now legally permit assisted suicide (or voluntary euthanasia) vary concerning the medical conditions needed to be legally eligible for assisted suicide. Some jurisdictions require that an individual be suffering from an unbearable and futile medical condition that cannot be alleviated. Others require that individuals must be suffering from a terminal illness that will result in death within a specified timeframe, such as six months. Popular and academic d…Read more
  •  96
    Belief attribution and the falsification of motive internalism
    Philosophical Psychology 19 (5). 2006.
    The metatethical position known as motive internalism (MI) holds that moral beliefs are necessarily motivating. Adina Roskies (in Philosophical Psychology, 16) has recently argued against MI by citing patients with injuries to the ventromedial (VM) cortex as counterexamples to MI. Roskies claims that not only do these patients not act in accordance with their professed moral beliefs, they exhibit no physiological or affective evidence of being motivated by these beliefs. I argue that Roskies' at…Read more
  •  96
    The Constitutive Approach to Kantian Rigorism
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3): 439-448. 2013.
    Critics often charge that Kantian ethics is implausibly rigoristic: that Kantianism recognizes a set of perfect duties, encapsulated in rules such as ‘don’t lie,’ ‘keep one’s promises,’ etc., and that these rules apply without exception. Though a number of Kantians have plausibly argued that Kantianism can acknowledge exceptions to perfect duties, this acknowledgment alone does not indicate how and when such exceptions ought to be made. This article critiques a recent attempt to motivate how suc…Read more
  •  86
    Among contemporary philosophers, David Benatar espouses a form of pessimism most closely aligned with Schopenhauer’s. Both maintain that human existence is a misfortune, such that each of us would have been better off having never existed at all. Here my concerns are twofold: First, I investigate why, despite these similarities, Schopenhauer and Benatar arrive at divergent positions regarding suicide. For whereas Benatar concludes that suicide is sometimes a moral wrong to others but is prudenti…Read more
  •  72
    Anti-conservative bias in education is real — but not unjust
    Social Philosophy and Policy 31 (1): 176-203. 2014.
    Conservatives commonly claim that systems of formal education are biased against conservative ideology. I argue that this claim is incorrect, but not because there is no bias against conservatives in formal education. A wide swath of psychological evidence linking personality and ideology indicates that conservatives and liberals differ in their learning orientations, that is, in the values, motivations, and beliefs they bring to learning tasks. These differences in operative epistemologies expl…Read more
  •  71
    In “On duties to oneself,” Marcus G. Singer argued that, contrary to long established philosophical tradition, there are no duties to oneself. Singer observes that to have a duty is to be accountable to someone for that duty’s fulfillment, and while she to whom a duty is owed may release the person who has the duty from being bound to fulfill it, the latter cannot release herself from the duty. For releasing oneself from a duty is no different from simply opting not to fulfill it, which would ma…Read more
  •  65
    'Self-manslaughter' and the forensic classification of self-inflicted deaths
    Journal of Medical Ethics 33 (3): 155-157. 2007.
    By emphasising the intentions underlying suicidal behaviour, suicidal death is distinguished from accidental death in standard philosophical accounts on the nature of suicide. A crucial third class of self-produced deaths, deaths in which agents act neither intentionally nor accidentally to produce their own deaths, is left out by such accounts. Based on findings from psychiatry, many life-threatening behaviours, if and when they lead to the agent’s death, are suggested to be neither intentional…Read more
  •  63
    Technological advances in computerization and robotics threaten to eliminate countless jobs from the labor market in the near future. These advances have reignited the debate about universal basic income. The essays in this collection offer unique and compelling perspectives on the ever-changing nature of work and the plausibility of a universal basic income to address the elimination of jobs from the workforce. The essays address a number of topics related to these issues, including the prospec…Read more
  •  61
    Agents, Patients, and Obligatory Self-Benefit
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (2): 159-184. 2014.
    Consequentialism is often criticized for rendering morality too pervasive. One somewhat neglected manifestation of this pervasiveness is the obligatory self-benefit objection. According to this objection, act-consequentialism has the counterintuitive result that certain self-benefitting actions turn out, ceteris paribus, to be morally obligatory rather than morally optional. The purposes of this paper are twofold. First, I consider and reject four strategies with which consequentialists might an…Read more
  •  60
    Contingency and Divine Knowledge in Ockham
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 77 (1): 81-91. 2003.
    Ockham appeared to maintain that God necessarily knows all true propositions, including future contingent propositions, despite the fact that such propositions have determinate truth values. While some commentators believe that Ockham’s attempt to reconcile divine omniscience with the contingency of true future propositions amounts to little more than a simple-minded assertion of Ockham’s Christian faith, I argue that Ockham’s position is more sophisticated than this and rests on attributing to …Read more
  •  59
    Moral belief attribution: A reply to Roskies
    Philosophical Psychology 19 (5). 2006.
    I here defend my earlier doubts that VM patients serve as counterexamples to motivational internalism by highlighting the difficulties of belief attribution in light of holism about the mental and by suggesting that a better understanding of the role of emotions in the self-attribution of moral belief places my earlier Davidsonian "theory of mind" argument in a clearer light.
  •  57
    This two-volume set addresses key historical, scientific, legal, and philosophical issues surrounding euthanasia and assisted suicide in the United States as well as in other countries and cultures. * Addresses the extended history of debates regarding the ethical justifiability of assisted suicide and euthanasia * Analyzes assisted suicide and euthanasia in many cultural, philosophical, and religious traditions * Provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the subject, including coverage of to…Read more
  •  54
    The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)
    with Brandon Hogan, Alex Madva, and Benjamin S. Yost
    Oxford University Press, Usa. 2021.
    The Movement for Black Lives has gained worldwide visibility as a grassroots social justice movement distinguished by a decentralized, non-hierarchal mode of organization. MBL rose to prominence in part thanks to its protests against police brutality and misconduct directed at black Americans. However, its animating concerns are far broader, calling for a wide range of economic, political, legal, and cultural measures to address what it terms a “war against Black people,” as well as the “shared …Read more
  •  53
    On hazing
    Public Affairs Quarterly 23 (2): 143-159. 2009.
    Hazing is a widespread moral phenomenon that has attracted little theoretical discussion. Here are my purposes are two fold: First, I provide a characterization of hazing that captures the features relevant to analyzing and evaluating hazing from a moral point of view. Hazing is harmful or humiliating transaction between members of a coveted group and an individual seeking membership in said group where the transaction bears no intrinsic relationship to the group’s mission. Second, I provide…Read more
  •  53
    Editor’s pick
    The Philosophers' Magazine 61 (61): 107-109. 2013.
  •  49
    Ethical issues in teaching
    International Encyclopedia of Ethics. 2013.
    Learning is any process that, by engaging with a person's rational powers, results in an improvement in that person's knowledge, skills, behaviors, or values. Learning can of course occur unaided. Teaching, however, is the deliberate effort to induce learning in another person. The ethics of teaching, then, addresses the ethical standards, values, or traits that govern deliberate efforts to induce learning in others.
  •  47
    The Case Against Death (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 826-828. 2022.
    The Case Against Death aims to show that what Linden calls the ‘Wise View’ regarding death and ageing should be rejected. Because the adherents of the Wise View.
  •  43
    Dialectical Refutation as a Paradigm of Socratic Punishment
    Journal of Philosophical Research 27 371-379. 2002.
    Evidence from the Apology, Crito, Protagoras, and Gorgias is mustered in defense of the claim that for Socrates, dialectic typifies just punishment: Dialectic benefits the punished by making her more just, since it disabuses her of the false beliefs that stand in the way of her acquiring knowledge of justice. Though painful and disorienting to the interlocutor, having one’s opinions refuted by Socrates—who is wiser than his interlocutors due to his awareness of the vastness of his ignorance—is i…Read more
  •  42
    Getting to the Rule of Law (review)
    Law and Politics Book Review 22 (1): 266-269. 2012.
  •  41
    Kantian Ethics: Value, Agency, and Obligation
    Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 189-192. 2019.
    Kantian Ethics: Value, Agency, and Obligation. By Robert Stern.
  •  36
    Introduction, Philosophy through Teaching
    In E. Esch R. Kraft & K. Hermberg (eds.), Philosophy through Teaching, Philosophy Documentation Center. 2014.