-
12Comments on “The Impossibility of Hypocritical Advice”Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 79-83. 2023.
-
10Killing and Letting DieIn R. G. Frey & Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics, Wiley-blackwell. 2003.
-
9
-
7Letters to the EditorProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67 (6). 1994.
-
Two dogmas of deontology : aggregation, rights, and the separateness of personsIn Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Dycus Miller & Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Utilitarianism: the aggregation question, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
-
5Killing and Letting Die (edited book)Fordham University Press. 1994.This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller…Read more
-
37The Impotence of the Causal Impotence ObjectionSouthwest Philosophy Review 36 (1): 161-168. 2020.Many significant harms, such as the mass suffering of animals on factory farms, can only be prevented, or at least lessened, by the collective action of thousands, or in some cases millions, of individual agents. In the face of this, it can seem as if individuals are powerless to make a difference, and thus that they lack reasons, at least from the consequentialist perspective, to refrain from eating meat. This has become known as the “causal impotence” problem. The standard response is to appea…Read more
-
13Morality by Degrees: Reasons Without DemandsOxford University Press. 2020.Alastair Norcross argues that the basic judgments of morality are essentially comparative: alternatives are judged to be better or worse than each other. Notions such as right and wrong are not part of the fundamental subject matter of moral theory, but are constructed in a context-relative fashion out of the basic comparative judgments.
-
1Moral Conflicts and Moral PsychologyDissertation, Syracuse University. 1991.I examine several claims about the nature of values that have been made with respect to moral conflict, i.e., that the existence of moral conflict shows that values are incomparable; values are incommensurable but comparable; there are plural values. ;Strong moral conflicts involve an agent in a choice between two or more impermissible alternatives. They have been thought to pose serious problems for ethical theories, in particular for consequentialist theories. According to consequentialist eth…Read more
-
3Scalar ActUtilitarianismIn Henry West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 217. 2008.
-
48Puppies, pigs, and people: Eating meat and marginal casesPhilosophical Perspectives 18 (1). 2004.
-
6Great harms from small benefits grow: how death can be outweighed by headachesAnalysis 58 (2): 152-158. 1998.
-
5Contractualism and the Ethical Status of AnimalsSouthwest Philosophy Review 17 (1): 137-143. 2000.
-
6Animal experimentationIn Bonnie Steinbock (ed.), The Oxford handbook of bioethics, Oxford University Press. 2007.This article takes the central issue concerning the ethics of animal experimentation to be the moral status of animals. Since most animal experimentation involves treating experimental subjects in ways that would clearly not be morally acceptable if the subjects were human, and since no animal experimentation involves the informed consent of the experimental subject, any attempt to justify such experimentation must include a defense of the claim that the moral status of animals differs significa…Read more
-
5Rationality and the sure-thing principleAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (2). 1996.This Article does not have an abstract
-
15Killing, abortion, and contraception: A reply to MarquisJournal of Philosophy 87 (5): 268-277. 1990.
-
4Death for animalsIn Jens Johansson Fred Feldman Ben Bradley (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, Oxford University Press. pp. 465. 2013.
-
9Speed Limits, Human Lives, and Convenience: A Reply to RidgePhilosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1): 59-64. 1998.
-
13Puppies, Pigs, and Potency: A Response to Galvin and HarrisEthics, Policy and Environment 15 (3). 2012.
-
9Contextualism for consequentialistsActa Analytica 20 (2): 80-90. 2005.If, as I have argued elsewhere, consequentialism is not fundamentally concerned with such staples of moral theory as rightness, duty, obligation, moral requirements, goodness (as applied to actions), and harm, what, if anything, does it have to say about such notions? While such notions have no part to play at the deepest level of the theory, they may nonetheless be of practical significance. By way of explanation I provide a linguistic contextualist account of these notions. A contextualist app…Read more
-
11Aggregation, Rights, and the Separateness of PersonsSouthwest Philosophy Review 22 (1): 1-15. 2006.
-
30“The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism”In Henry West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 217--32. 2008.This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Demandingness Objection Scalar Utilitarianism Wrongness as Blameworthiness Rightness and Goodness as Guides to Action.
-
20Good and bad actionsPhilosophical Review 106 (1): 1-34. 1997.It is usually assumed to be possible, and sometimes even desirable, for consequentialists to make judgments about both the rightness and the goodness of actions. Whether a particular action is right or wrong is one question addressed by a consequentialist theory such as utilitarianism. Whether the action is good or bad, and how good or bad it is, are two others. I will argue in this paper that consequentialism cannot provide a satisfactory account of the goodness of actions, on the most natural …Read more
Boulder, Colorado, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |