•  503
    ABSTRACTIn a series of articles, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen and Nick Zangwill argue that, since propositional attitude ascription judgements do not behave like normative judgements in being subject to a priori normative supervenience and the Because Constraint, PAs cannot be constitutively normative.1 I argue that, for a specific version of normativism, according to which PAs are normative commitments, these arguments fail. To this end, I argue that commitments and obligations should be distingui…Read more
  •  39
    Transparency and the truth norm of belief
    Synthese 200 (3): 1-18. 2022.
    That it can explain the phenomenon of transparency, namely the fact that if you resolve whether p, you have thereby resolved whether to believe that p, was originally put forward as a great virtue of normativist conceptions of belief. However, non-normativists have convincingly shown that the permissive version of the truth norm of belief, which is one of the most plausible and promising versions of it, cannot in fact accommodate this phenomenon. Alarmed by this situation, in this paper I re-ass…Read more
  •  23
    Commitment, Norm-Governedness and Guidance
    Acta Analytica 36 (2): 213-228. 2020.
    A number of philosophers have argued that there is a basic problem in the no-guidance argument against content normativism. The problem is that the argument restricts the essential normativity of intentional states to the formation of these states being guided by certain norms. But it is suggested that the essential norm-governedness of intentional states can be equally plausibly construed as the assessability of these states by norms, which does not imply complying with them. Although I concur …Read more
  •  21
    Still committed to the normativity of folk psychology
    Philosophical Explorations 25 (1): 58-74. 2021.
    ABSTRACT In what sense can one claim that intentional explanations are essentially normative, given that people’s actions and thinking are replete with various irrationalities, yet are still pretty well explained by this explanatory framework? This article provides a novel response to this enduring objection. First, following Brandom, it is suggested that, to understand the normativity of intentional states, we should countenance and distinguish between two normative categories of commitment and…Read more
  •  14
    Abraham’s Dilemma is the conjunction of three jointly inconsistent propositions: God’s commands are never morally wrong, God has commanded Abraham to kill his innocent son, and killing innocent people is morally wrong. Drawing on an overlooked point from the Qur’an regarding the content of the command as well as a conceptual analysis of intentional action, this paper proposes a novel solution to the dilemma by discarding proposition in a new way. Current approaches to rejecting proposition tend …Read more
  •  10
    The Norms of Belief as the Norms of Commitment: A Case for Pluralism
    Southern Journal of Philosophy (00): 1-17. 2023.
    Much of the discussion on the normativity of belief rests on the presupposition that there is a single fundamental truth norm governing belief that explains all of its normative features. Building on the committive conception of belief proposed by some normativists, this article takes issue with this presupposition. In particular, it is argued that belief, construed as cognitive commitment, is governed by three fundamental-cum-irreducible norms, which I call the “entitlement norm,” the “fulfillm…Read more
  •  10
    Still committed to the normativity of folk psychology
    Philosophical Explorations 25 (1): 58-74. 2021.
    In what sense can one claim that intentional explanations are essentially normative, given that people’s actions and thinking are replete with various irrationalities, yet are still pretty well exp...
  •  10
    The norms of belief as the norms of commitment: A case for pluralism
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 61 (3): 474-490. 2023.
    Much of the discussion on the normativity of belief rests on the presupposition that there is a single fundamental truth norm governing belief that explains all of its normative features. Building on the committive conception of belief proposed by some normativists, this article takes issue with this presupposition. In particular, it is argued that belief, construed as cognitive commitment, is governed by three fundamental-cum-irreducible norms, which I call the “entitlement norm,” the “fulfillm…Read more
  •  5
    Reasoning and commitment
    Synthese 202 (3): 1-21. 2023.
    I argue for a commitment-discharging condition of reasoning, according to which to engage in reasoning is to discharge the theoretical and practical commitments one has undertaken. I highlight the ways in which this condition is distinct from other proposals, particularly the Taking Condition, and argue that it can explain certain intuitions about reasoning that otherwise remain elusive. In particular, I argue that the commitment-discharging condition can provide a unified account of attitude-fo…Read more
  • Scarce Resources and Priority Ethics: Why Should Maximizers be More Conservative?
    with Afroogh Saleh and A. Seyedkazemi
    Ethics, Medicine, and Public Health 18. 2021.
    Summary Background The principle of maximization, which roughly means that we should save more lives and more years of life, is usually taken for granted by the health community. This principle is even more forceful in crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, where we have scarce resources which can be allocated only to some patients. However, the standard consequentialist version of this principle can be challenging particularly when we have to reallocate a resource that has already been given to a p…Read more