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16What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and ChoiceSt. Martin's Press. 2024.The book investigates childbearing ambivalence and the philosophical resources available to overcome it by analyzing the nuances of the contemporary anxiety about having children while focusing on the moral and intellectual shifts that have occurred in how we think of the value and goodness of human life. Peeling back the layers of resistance, What Are Children For? argues that when we make the individual decision whether or not to have children we confront a profound philosophical question, tha…Read more
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121Evil or Only Immature? Kant and the Complexity of Moral EvilIn Edgar Valdez (ed.), Rethinking Kant Volume 6, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 174-193. 2022.In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason Kant famously argues that the moral quality of an an agent’s actions depends on the moral quality of their moral character and since their moral character can be either absolutely good or absolutely bad, all of an agent’s actions share the same moral quality: good or evil (R 6: 22). This claim, which implies that any agent who is not wholly good must therefore be wholly evil, has vexed Kant’s readers. Ordinary moral intuitions suggest that differences…Read more
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283Kant and the Freedom to Do What We WantIn James Conant & Dawa Ometto (eds.), Practical Reason in Historical and Systematic Perspective, De Gruyter. pp. 211-236. 2023.Even a morally good practical agent does not act solely from the recog- nition of the abstract demands of moral duty. Often, she acts to satisfy desires for particular ends that are not intrinsically moral. But if freedom, as Kant claims, consists in acting from universal principles one adopts from respect for the moral law, how can agents freely act to satisfy desires for particular ends? The standard answer to this question, the so-called Incorporation Thesis, is, I argue, unsatisfactory both …Read more
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Freedom, Feeling and Character: The Unity of Reason and Sensibility in Kant's Practical PhilosophyDissertation, Chicago. 2017.
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82Kant on moral self‐opacityEuropean Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 567-585. 2020.It has been widely accepted that Kant holds the “Opacity Thesis,” the claim that we cannot know the ultimate grounds of our actions. Understood in this way, I shall argue, the Opacity Thesis is at odds with Kant's account of practical self-consciousness, according to which I act from the (always potentially conscious) representation of principles of action and that, in particular, in acting from duty I act in consciousness of the moral law's determination of my will. The Opacity Thesis thus thre…Read more
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83Kant on Moral RespectArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103 (4): 730-760. 2021.Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a mere effect or the motivating cau…Read more
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50Kant on reflection and virtue: by Melissa Merritt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018,pp. 234, £75.00 , ISBN: 9781-108424714 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (6): 1247-1251. 2019.Volume 27, Issue 6, December 2019, Page 1247-1251.
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Feminist Philosophy |
Morality of Procreation |
Population Ethics |
The Value of Lives, Misc |