•  4
    The Cultural Evolution of Extended Benevolence
    In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library, Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 153-177. 2021.
    In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin proposed a speculative evolutionary explanation of extended benevolence—a human sympathetic capacity that extends to all nations, races, and even to all sentient beings. This essay draws on twenty-first century social science to show that Darwin’s explanation is correct in its broad outlines. Extended benevolence is manifested in institutions such as legal human rights and democracy, in behaviors such as social movements for human rights and the protection o…Read more
  •  414
    The Cultural Evolution of Extended Benevolence
    In Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics, Springer - Synthese Library. pp. 153-177. 2021.
    Abstract In The Descent of Man (1879), Charles Darwin proposed a speculative evolutionary explanation of extended benevolence—a human sympathetic capacity that extends to all nations, races, and even to all sentient beings. This essay draws on twenty-first century social science to show that Darwin’s explanation is correct in its broad outlines. Extended benevolence is manifested in institutions such as legal human rights and democracy, in behaviors such as social movements for human rights and …Read more
  •  100
    Non-negotiable: Why moral naturalism cannot do away with categorical reasons
    Philosophical Studies 173 (9): 2511-2528. 2016.
    Some versions of moral naturalism are faulted for implausibly denying that moral obligations and prescriptions entail categorical reasons for action. Categorical reasons for action are normative reasons that exist and apply to agents independently of whatever desires they have. I argue that several defenses of moral naturalism against this charge are unsuccessful. To be a tenable meta-ethical theory, moral naturalism must accommodate the proposition that, necessarily, if anyone morally ought to …Read more
  •  105
    How Moral Facts Cause Moral Progress
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (4): 429-448. 2019.
    Morally progressive social changes seem to have taken place with the onset of democratic governance, the abolition of slavery, the rise of gender equality, and other developments. This essay attempts to demonstrate that natural and objective moral facts are a plausible cause of some morally progressive social changes. Since this hypothesis is a version of naturalistic moral realism, I call it the Naturalist-Realist Hypothesis. To support the NRH, I argue that objective moral facts are natural fa…Read more
  •  1
    Normative reasons for action are facts or considerations that contribute to the justification of an action. Sometimes, normative reasons for action conflict: one reason may favor doing something, while another may favor not doing it. These conflicts can be so radical that it seems difficult, if not impossible, to judge which reason should ultimately guide one’s actions. According to a theory of practical rationality known as reasons pluralism, there are some radical cases of conflict among norma…Read more
  •  961
    Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures
    with Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossmann, Felipe De Brigard, and Joshua Knobe
    Cognitive Science 42 (S1): 134-160. 2018.
    People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question…Read more
  •  96
    The Definition of Morality: Threading the Needle
    Social Theory and Practice 40 (3): 361-387. 2014.
    This essay proposes and defends a descriptive definition of morality. Under this definition, a moral system is a system of rules, psychological states, and modes of character development that performs the function of enabling mutually beneficial social cooperation. I shall argue that the methodologies employed by two prominent moral psychologists to establish a descriptive definition of morality only serve to track patterns in people’s uses of moral terms. However, these methods at best reveal a…Read more
  •  29
    Humean Moral Motivation
    In Bert Musschenga & Anton van Harskamp (eds.), What Makes Us Moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral, Springer. pp. 131-150. 2013.
    Moral motivation refers to the psychological causes that motivate or explain moral action. Moral action refers to action that complies with the requirements of morality. In this essay, I lay out alternative views on moral motivation, giving particular attention the way each view conceives of the explanatory link between practical reasoning and moral conduct. In trying to understand this link, philosophers look to moral judgment. The main rival accounts of the relationship between practical reaso…Read more
  •  77
    In Book I of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus famously maintains that ideas of morality and justice are nothing more than an ideology indoctrinated in “the weaker” to benefit “the stronger.” This is Thrasymachus’s challenge to morality: the thesis that some social arrangements, including some moral norms, are products of ‘false consciousness.’ False consciousness occurs when a dominant social group shapes the beliefs and desires of a subordinate group in such a way that the subordinates act for th…Read more
  •  45
    Normative reasons and the possibility of motivation
    South African Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 47-63. 2014.
    This article defends a claim about the conditions under which agents possess normative reasons for action. According to this claim, an agent has a normative reason to φ only if it’s psychologically possible for that reason to motivate the agent to φ. The claim is called‘Williams’s explanatory constraint,’since it’s drawn from Bernard Williams’s work on the topic of practical reason. A two-premise‘master argument’ for Williams’s explanatory constraint is put forward. First, an agent has a normati…Read more