•  341
    Against Vote Markets: A Reply To Freiman
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2): 1-5. 2014.
    No.
  •  84
    Modesty as Kindness
    Ratio 29 (1): 73-88. 2016.
    The trait of modesty has received significant philosophical attention in recent years. This is due, in part, to Julia Driver's claim that modesty is able to act as a counter-example to intellectualist accounts of the nature of virtue. In this paper I engage with the debate about the nature of modesty by proposing a new account. ‘Modesty as kindness’ states that the trait of modesty ought to be considered as intimately connected with the more fundamental virtue of kindness. I set out the account,…Read more
  •  79
    Honesty as a Virtue
    Metaphilosophy 49 (3): 262-280. 2018.
    Honesty is widely accepted as a prime example of a moral virtue. And yet, honesty has been surprisingly neglected in the recent drive to account for specific virtuous traits. This paper provides a framework for an increased focus on honesty by proposing success criteria that will need to be met by any plausible account of honesty. It then proposes a motivational account on which honesty centrally involves a deep motivation to avoid deception. It argues that this account satisfies the required su…Read more
  •  65
    Avoiding the Conflation of Moral and Intellectual Virtues
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (5): 1037-1050. 2017.
    One of the most pressing challenges facing virtue theorists is the conflation problem. This problem concerns the difficulty of explaining the distinction between different types of virtue, such as the distinction between moral virtues and intellectual virtues. Julia Driver has argued that only an outcomes-based understanding of virtue can provide an adequate solution to the conflation problem. In this paper, I argue against Driver’s outcomes-based account, and propose an alternative motivations-…Read more
  •  49
    A Dilemma for Neo-Aristotelian Supererogation
    Ethics 128 (1): 199-211. 2017.
    It has recently been argued that virtue ethics cannot accommodate the possibility of supererogation. In response, Rebecca Stangl proposes a neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation that, she argues, generates plausible verdicts, while also being compatible with the doctrine of the mean. I argue that Stangl’s response is unsuccessful. First, I demonstrate that the proposal in its current form is problematically indeterminate, meaning that we cannot know what verdicts would be produced in respon…Read more
  •  39
    The Virtue of Aesthetic Courage
    British Journal of Aesthetics 60 (4): 455-469. 2020.
    Theorists have recently been exploring the prospects for a virtue-centred approach to aesthetics. Virtue aesthetics encourages a re-focusing of philosophical attention onto the aesthetic character traits of agents, in the same way that virtue ethics and virtue epistemology have encouraged us to focus on moral and intellectual traits. In this paper, I aim to contribute to the development of virtue aesthetics by discussing aesthetic courage, the aesthetic analogue of one of the most widely acknowl…Read more
  •  36
    Unity of the intellectual virtues
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 9835-9854. 2021.
    The idea that moral virtues form some sort of “unity” has received considerable attention from virtue theorists. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of unity among intellectual virtues has been wrongly overlooked. My approach has two main components. First, I work to distinguish the variety of different views that are available under the description of a unity thesis. I suggest that these views can be categorised depending on whether they are versions of standard unity or of strong unity…Read more
  •  35
    Book review of A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics by Sandrine Berges (2015).
  •  33
    The use of deception for the purposes of research is a widespread practice within many areas of study. If we want to avoid either absolute acceptance or absolute rejection of this practice then we require some method of distinguishing between those uses of deception which are morally acceptable and those which are not. In this article I discuss the concept of counterfactual consent, and propose a related distinction between counterfactual-defeating deception and counterfactual-compatible decepti…Read more
  •  31
    Egalitarianism and Successful Moral Bioenhancement
    American Journal of Bioethics 14 (4): 35-36. 2014.
    Robert Sparrow (2014) argues that moral bioenhancement - the project of attempting to improving moral character via medical or biological means - ought to be of great concern to egalitarians. Importantly, Sparrow's argument is meant to apply regardless of whether such bioenhancement is likely to be successful. In this response, I argue against Sparrow's worries concerning successful moral bioenhancement. This response highlights that it may not be possible to separate moral questions of the perm…Read more
  •  28
    Vice-based accounts of moral evil
    Philosophical Studies 180 (9): 2825-2845. 2023.
    In this paper, I highlight three objections to vice-based accounts of moral evil: (1) the worry that vice-based accounts of evil are explanatorily inadequate; (2) the worry that even extreme vice is not sufficient for evil; and (3) the worry that not all vices are inversions of virtue (and so vice-based accounts will struggle to explain the “mirror thesis”). I argue that it is possible to respond to these objections by developing a vice-based account of evil that draws on insights from virtue (a…Read more
  •  27
    Book review of The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism and the Complexities of Ethics by Michael Slote (2011).
  •  26
    Review EssayExemplarist Moral Theory
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 16 (6): 755-768. 2019.
    This review essay provides a critical discussion of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory. We agree that emt is a book of impressive scope that will be of interest to ethical theorists, as well as epistemologists, philosophers of language, and philosophers of religion. Throughout the critical discussion we argue that exemplarism faces a number of important challenges, firstly, in dealing with the fallibility of admiration, which plays a central role in the theoretical framework, and secondl…Read more
  •  24
    Virtue (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 67 (269): 869-871. 2017.
    Book review of Virtue by Heather Battaly (2015).
  •  23
    Virtue Epistemology and Developmental Psychology
    with Christian B. Miller
    In Heather Battaly (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 483-495. 2018.
    Virtue theorists have recently been focusing on the important question of how virtues are developed, and doing so in a way that is informed by empirical research from psychology. However, almost all of this recent work has dealt exclusively with the moral virtues. In this paper, we present three empirically-informed accounts of how virtues can be developed, and we assess the merits of these accounts when applied specifically to intellectual (or epistemic) virtues.
  •  11
    Vice, Blameworthiness and Cultural Ignorance
    In Philip Robichaud & Jan Willem Wieland (eds.), Responsibility: The Epistemic Condition, Oxford University Press. pp. 82-100. 2017.
    Many have assumed that widespread cultural ignorance exculpates those who are involved in otherwise morally problematic practices, such as the ancient slaveholders, 1950s sexists or contemporary meat eaters. In this paper we argue that ignorance can be culpable even in situations of widespread cultural ignorance. However, it is not usually culpable due to a previous self-conscious act of wrongdoing. Nor can we always use the standard attributionist account of such cases on which the acts done in…Read more
  •  9
    Honesty as a Virtue
    In Michel Croce & Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (eds.), Connecting Virtues, Wiley. 2018.
    Honesty is widely accepted as a prime example of a moral virtue. And yet, honesty has been surprisingly neglected in the recent drive to account for specific virtuous traits. This paper provides a framework for an increased focus on honesty by proposing success criteria that will need to be met by any plausible account of honesty. It then proposes a motivational account on which honesty centrally involves a deep motivation to avoid deception. It argues that this account satisfies the required su…Read more
  •  9
    Book review of Neither Heroes Nor Saints: Ordinary Virtue, Extraordinary Virtue, and Self-Cultivation by Rebecca Stangl.
  •  3
    The concept of virtue is a vital one for many current debates within philosophy. In particular, both virtue ethics and virtue epistemology have come to be viewed as legitimate contenders within their respective domains. The task of virtue theory – of giving an account of the virtues – is therefore an especially pressing one. If we do not have a satisfactory account of the virtues, then we will be unable to evaluate those virtue-centric approaches that have come to be accepted as legitimate conte…Read more
  • Admiration and the Development of Moral Virtue
    In Alfred Archer & André Grahle (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Admiration, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 201-215. 2019.
    Philosophers and psychologists have recently been focusing on the important question of how positive character traits are developed. Within philosophy, these positive character traits are referred to as virtues. In this chapter, I examine one intuitively appealing proposal concerning virtue development - the idea that the path to moral virtue can begin with the experience of admiration for a moral exemplar. My aim is to provide a model of how this process might work by identifying the different …Read more