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52ParticularismIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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114Deontology and valueRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 47 197-208. 2000.Integration and coherence are central values in human existence. It would be a serious objection to any proposed way of life that it led to us being alienated or cut off from others or from some importan part of ourselves. Morality, with the strenuous demands it makes on us, is one area in which alienation is both particularly threatening and peculiarly undesirable. If morality cuts us off from some important part of ourselves then it appears unattractive, and if it cuts us off from others then …Read more
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Vaughn R. McKim and Stephen P. Turner, eds., Causality in Crisis? Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the Social Sciences Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 19 (2): 127-129. 1999.
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276Achievement, welfare and consequentialismAnalysis 61 (2). 2001.significant role for accomplishment thereby admits a ‘Trojan Horse’ (267).1 To abandon hedonism in favour of a conception of well-being that incorporates achievement is to take the first step down a slippery slope toward the collapse of the other two pillars of utilitarian morality: welfarism and consequentialism. We shall argue that Crisp’s arguments do not support these conclusions. We begin with welfarism. Crisp defines it thus: ‘Well-being is the only value. Everything good must be good for …Read more
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87Reasonable doubt and the presumption of innocence: The case of the bayesian jurorTopoi 18 (2): 117-126. 1999.There is a substantial literature on the Bayesian approach, and the application of Bayes'' theorem, to legal matters. However, I have found no discussion that explores fully the issue of how a Bayesian juror might be led from an initial "presumption of innocence" to the judgment (required for conviction in criminal cases) that the suspect is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". I shall argue here that a Bayesian juror, if she acts in accord with what the law prescribes, will virtually never reach…Read more
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85The Oxford handbook of rationality (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2004.Rationality has long been a central topic in philosophy, crossing standard divisions and categories. It continues to attract much attention in published research and teaching by philosophers as well as scholars in other disciplines, including economics, psychology, and law. The Oxford Handbook of Rationality is an indispensable reference to the current state of play in this vital and interdisciplinary area of study. Twenty-two newly commissioned chapters by a roster of distinguished philosophers…Read more
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44I—David McNaughton and Piers Rawling: Descriptivism, Normativity and the Metaphysics of ReasonsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (1): 23-45. 2003.Simon Blackburn can be seen as challenging those committed to sui generis moral facts to explain the supervenience of the moral on the descriptive. We hold that normative facts in general are sui generis. We also hold that the normative supervenes on the descriptive, and we here endeavour to answer the generalization of Blackburn's challenge. In the course of pursuing this answer, we suggest that Frank Jackson's descriptivism rests on a conception of properties inappropriate to discussions of no…Read more
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225Can Scanlon avoid redundancy by passing the buck?Analysis 63 (4). 2003.Scanlon suggests a buck-passing account of goodness. To say that something is good is not to give a reason to, say, favour it; rather it is to say that there are such reasons. When it comes to wrongness, however, Scanlon rejects a buck-passing account: to say that j ing is wrong is, on his view, to give a sufficient moral reason not to j. Philip Stratton-Lake 2003 argues that Scanlon can evade a redundancy objection against his (Scanlon’s) view of wrongness by adopting a buck-passing account of …Read more
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32The exchange paradox, finite additivity, and the principle of dominancePoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 71 49-76. 2000.
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144Conditional and Conditioned ReasonsUtilitas 14 (2): 240. 2002.This paper is a brief reponse to some of Douglas Portmore's criticisms of our version of the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction
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Akeel Bilgrami, Belief and MeaningInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 3 (2): 353-354. 1995.
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261The making/evidential reason distinctionAnalysis 71 (1): 100-102. 2011.Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star have made the following interesting proposal concerning the relation between practical reasons and evidence : Necessarily: A fact F is a reason for you to φ iff F is evidence that you ought to φ We're not sure about this. Although moving from left to right might be OK, the converse is problematic. For example, the fact that your reliable friend told you that you have overriding moral reason to φ is …
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28Duty, rationality, and practical reasonsIn Piers Rawling & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 110--131. 2004.McNaughton and Rawling present a view on which practical reasons are facts, such as the fact that the rubbish bin is full. This is a non-normative fact, but it is a reason for you to do something, namely take the rubbish out. They see rationality as a matter of consistency. And they see duty as neither purely a matter of rationality nor of practical reason: on the one hand, the rational sociopath is immoral; but, on the other, morality does not require that we always act on the weightiest moral …Read more
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144Deontology and AgencyThe Monist 76 (1): 81-100. 1993.Any adequate account of the distinction between consequentialist and deontological moral systems must take account of the central place given to constraints in the latter. Constraints place limits on what each of us may do in the pursuit of any goal, including the maximisation of the good. There is some debate, however, both over how constraints are to be characterised, and over the rationale for their inclusion in a moral system. Some authors view constraints as agent-relative: a constraint sup…Read more
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51Expected Utility, Ordering, and Context FreedomEconomics and Philosophy 13 (1): 79. 1997.The context-free weak ordering principle is viewed by many as a cornerstone of rational choice theory. McClennen, for example, claims that this principle is one of a pair on which '[t]he theory of rational choice and preference, as it has been developed in the past few decades by economists and decision theorists, rests', and Sen characterizes a version of context freedom as ‘a very basic requirement of rational choice’. But this principle is certainly not uncontroversial: there are examples of …Read more
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The Logical Status of Conditionalization and its Role in Confirmation CommentaryPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 71 77-94. 2000.
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212Value and Agent-Relative ReasonsUtilitas 7 (1): 31. 1995.In recent years the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons has been taken by many to play a key role in distinguishing deontology from consequentialism. It is central to all universalist consequentialist theories that value is determined impersonally; the real value of any state of affairs does not depend on the point of view of the agent. No reference, therefore, to the agent or to his or her position in the world need enter into a consequentialist understanding of what ma…Read more
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Psychology and Newtonian MethodologyJournal of Mind and Behavior 16 (1): 35-43. 1995.According to Newton, the goals of natural philosophy comprise quantitative generalizations and causal knowledge, the latter being paramount. Quantitative generalizations are sometimes explanatory, in psychology as elsewhere . However, in psychology, they are not explanatory when the human subject is considered qua bearer of psychological states , but only when she is considered qua physical system. In the former case quantitative generalizations are, rather, to be causally explained. In this sen…Read more
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156Unprincipled EthicsIn Brad Hooker & Margaret Olivia Little (eds.), Moral particularism, Oxford University Press. 2000.
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82Benefits, holism, and the aggregation of valueSocial Philosophy and Policy 26 (1): 354-374. 2009.We reject Moorean holism about value—the view that the value of the whole does not equal the sum of the values of its parts. We propose an alternative aggregative holism according to which the value of a state of affairs is the sum of the values of its constituent states. But these constituents must be evaluated in situ
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1Steven Rappaport, Models and Reality in Economics Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 20 (4): 279-281. 2000.
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