•  1766
    Consequentialism in Environmental Ethics
    In Stephen M. Gardiner & Allen Thompson (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 199-210. 2017.
  •  1054
    Climate Change and Individual Responsibility
    The Monist 94 (3): 349-368. 2011.
    Several philosophers claim that the greenhouse gas emissions from actions like a Sunday drive are so miniscule that they will make no difference whatsoever with regard to anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) and its expected harms. This paper argues that this claim of individual causal inefficacy is false. First, if AGCC is not reducible at least in part to ordinary actions, then the cause would have to be a metaphysically odd emergent entity. Second, a plausible (dis-)utility calculation …Read more
  •  356
    Epistemic Structure in Non-Summative Social Knowledge
    Social Epistemology 37 (1): 30-46. 2023.
    How a group G can know that p has been the subject of much investigation in social epistemology in recent years. This paper clarifies and defends a form of non-supervenient, non-summative group knowledge: G can know that p even if none of the members of G knows that p, and whether or not G knows that p does not locally supervene on the mental states of the members of G. Instead, we argue that what is central to G knowing that p is whether G has an epistemic structure that is functioning appropr…Read more
  •  348
    A ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ for Climate Change?
    Public Affairs Quarterly 1 (28): 19-39. 2014.
  •  299
    Object-Dependence
    Essays in Philosophy 14 (1): 33-55. 2013.
    There has been much work on ontological dependence in recent literature. However, relatively little of it has been dedicated to the ways in which individual physical objects may depend on other distinct, non-overlapping objects. This paper gives several examples of such object-dependence and distinguishes between different types of it. The paper also introduces and refines the notion of an n-tet. N-tets (typically) occur when there are object-dependence relations between n objects. I claim that …Read more
  •  287
    System Consequentialism
    In Avram Hiller, Leonard Kahn & Ramona Ilea (eds.), Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics. pp. 85-111. 2013.
  •  284
    Individual Climate Risks at the Bounds of Rationality
    In Adriana Placani & Stearns Broadhead (eds.), _Risk and Responsibility in Context_, Routledge. pp. 249-271. 2023.
    All ordinary decisions involve some risk. If I go outside for a walk, I may trip and injure myself. But if I don’t go for a walk, I slightly increase my chances of cardiovascular disease. Typically, we disregard most small risks. When, for practical purposes, is it appropriate for one to ignore risk? This issue looms large because many activities performed by those in wealthy societies, such as driving a car, in some way risk contributing to climate harms. Are these activities morally appropriat…Read more
  •  284
    Safety and epistemic luck
    with Ram Neta
    Synthese 158 (3). 2007.
    There is some consensus that for S to know that p, it cannot be merely a matter of luck that S’s belief that p is true. This consideration has led Duncan Pritchard and others to propose a safety condition on knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the safety condition is not a proper formulation of the intuition that knowledge excludes luck. We suggest an alternative proposal in the same spirit as safety, and find it lacking as well.
  •  266
    Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) find that “the degree to which people mispredicted their objectively measured intelligence was equal across the whole spectrum of objectively measured intelligence”. This Comment shows that Gignac and Zajenkowski’s (2020) finding of homoscedasticity is likely the result of a recoding choice by the experimenters and does not in fact indicate that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a mere statistical artifact. Specifically, Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) recoded test subject…Read more
  •  211
    The question of how disability affects wellbeing has occupied a number of philosophers in recent years. However, this literature has proceeded without a careful examination of the fairly vast empirical research on the topic. In this paper, I review the scholarly literature and discuss some philosophically-relevant aspects of it. On average, those with disabilities have a significantly lower level of wellbeing than those without disabilities. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that this reduct…Read more
  •  200
    Hume on Animals and the Rest of Nature
    In John Hadley & Elisa Aaltola (eds.), Animal Ethics and Philosophy: Questioning the Orthodoxy, Rowman and Littlefield International. 2014.
    This paper develops a Humean environmental meta-ethic to apply to the animal world and, given some further considerations, to the rest of nature. Our interpretation extends Hume’s account of sympathy, our natural ability to sympathize with the emotions of others, so that we may sympathize not only with human beings but also animals, plants and ecosystems as well. Further, we suggest that Hume has the resources for an account of environmental value that applies to non-human animals, non-sentient …Read more
  •  183
    Vagueness and Normativity
    Dissertation, Duke University. 2005.
    [Author's note: I am posting this dissertation since it may be of interest to some people working on vagueness and related topics. It does not represent my current views on the topic. I have never attempted to publish any of this work, though I hope some day to return to it.] Philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to vagueness in recent years, but there is still no general consensus about how to resolve the Sorites paradox. Timothy Williamson‘s epistemic view, which claims that our vague t…Read more
  •  154
    Pluralism About Group Knowledge: A Reply to Jesper Kallestrup
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 12 (1): 39-45. 2023.
    Jesper Kallestrup has provided an insightful response to our paper, “Epistemic Structure in Non-Summative Social Knowledge”. Kallestrup identifies some important issues pertaining to our non-summative, non-supervenient account of group knowledge which we did not address in our original paper. Here, we develop our view further in light of Kallestrup’s helpful reply.
  •  147
    Knowledge Essentially Based Upon False Belief
    Logos and Episteme 4 (1): 7-19. 2013.
    Richard Feldman and William Lycan have defended a view according to which a necessary condition for a doxastic agent to have knowledge is that the agent’s belief is not essentially based on any false assumptions. I call this the no-essential-false-assumption account, or NEFA. Peter Klein considers examples of what he calls “useful false beliefs” and alters his own account of knowledge in a way which can be seen as a refinement of NEFA. This paper shows that NEFA, even given Klein’s refinement, i…Read more
  •  131
    In this article, we re-examine Pascal’s Mugging, and argue that it is a deeper problem than the St. Petersburg paradox. We offer a way out that is consistent with classical decision theory. Specifically, we propose a “many muggers” response analogous to the “many gods” objection to Pascal’s Wager. When a very tiny probability of a great reward becomes a salient outcome of a choice, such as in the offer of the mugger, it can be discounted on the condition that there are other symmetric, non-salie…Read more
  •  120
    Morally Significant Effects of Ordinary Individual Actions
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 14 (1): 19-21. 2011.
    John Nolt argues in ‘How harmful are the average American's greenhouse gas emissions?’ that, on average, individual Americans are responsible for the severe suffering and/or death of...
  •  76
    Valuing the “Afterlife”
    Topoi 43 (1): 65-73. 2024.
    To what extent do we value future generations? It may seem from our behavior that we don’t value future generations much at all, at least in relation to how much we value present generations. However, in his book _Death and the Afterlife_, Samuel Scheffler argues that we value the future even _more_ than we value the present, even though this is not immediately apparent to us. If Scheffler’s argument is sound, then it has important ramifications: It would give us a strong motivation to put more …Read more
  •  56
    The Unusual Logic of Hurka's Recursive Account
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (1): 1-6. 2012.
    Thomas Hurka, in his book Virtue, Vice, and Value, and elsewhere, develops a recursive analysis of higher-order pleasures and pains. The account leads Hurka to some potentially controversial conclusions. For instance, Hurka argues on its basis that some states are both good and evil and also that the view he calls the conditionality view is false. In this paper, I argue that Hurka’s formulation of the recursive account is unusual and inelegant, and that Hurka reaches his conclusions only becaus…Read more
  •  39
    The Best Incentives in Combating Climate Change
    Ethics, Policy and Environment 15 (2). 2012.
    Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 230-233, June 2012
  •  30
    Ben Hale, The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature (review)
    Environmental Values 27 (4): 447-449. 2018.