•  395
    The Collaborative Care Model: Realizing Healthcare Values and Increasing Responsiveness in the Pharmacy Workforce
    with Paul Forsyth
    Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy. forthcoming.
    Abstract The values of the healthcare sector are fairly ubiquitous across the globe, focusing on caring and respect, patient health, excellence in care delivery, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Many individual pharmacists embrace these core values. But their ability to honor these values is significantly determined by the nature of the system they work in. The paper starts with a model of the prevailing pharmacist workforce model in Scotland, in which core roles are predominantly separated…Read more
  •  697
    Efficient Markets and Alienation
    Philosophers Imprint 14 (n/a). 2022.
    Efficient markets are alienating if they inhibit us from recognizably caring about one another in our productive activities. I argue that efficient market behaviour is both exclusionary and fetishistic. As exclusionary, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care alongside their market behaviour. As fetishistic, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care in their market behaviour. The conjunction entails that efficient market behavior inhibits care. It doesn’t follow that efficient market beh…Read more
  •  120
    Normative metaphysics for accountants
    Philosophical Studies 178 (2): 363-384. 2020.
    We use normative reasons in a bewildering variety of different ways. And yet, as many recent theorists have shown, one can discern systematic distinctions underlying this complexity. This paper is a contribution to this project of constructive normative metaphysics. We aim to bring a black sheep back into the flock: the balancing model of weighing reasons. This model is threatened by a variety of cases in which distinct reasons overlap, in the sense that they do not contribute separate weight fo…Read more
  •  827
    An ethical theory is alienating if accepting the theory inhibits the agent from fitting participation in some normative ideal, such as some ideal of integrity, friendship, or community. Many normative ideals involve non-consequentialist behavior of some form or another. If such ideals are normatively authoritative, they constitute counterexamples to consequentialism unless their authority can be explained or explained away. We address a range of attempts to avoid such counterexamples and argue t…Read more
  •  1306
    The Game of Belief
    with Jack Woods
    Philosophical Review 129 (2): 211-249. 2020.
    It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between types o…Read more
  • Review of Scanlon's Being Realistic about Reasons (review)
    Times Literary Supplement 1. 2014.
  •  3
    An Opinionated Guide to the Weight of Reasons
    with Errol Lord
    In Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons, Oup Usa. 2016.
  •  379
    Extrinsic Value and the Separability of Reasons
    Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 6. 2016.
    This paper presents a puzzle for Act Consequentialists who do not want to shoot Pelé. The puzzle arises from cases involving the promotion of virtue, and motivates a systematic restriction on the separability of reasons.
  •  126
    Semiotic objections to market exchange of a good or service maintain that such exchanges signal an inappropriate attitude to the good or to associated individuals, and that this provides a weighty reason against having or participating in such markets. This style of argument has recently come under withering attack from Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (2015a, 2015b). They point out that the significance of any market exchange is explained by a contingent semiotic norm. Given the tremendous valu…Read more
  •  435
    Model Theory, Hume's Dictum, and the Priority of Ethical Theory
    with Jack Woods
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4 419-440. 2017.
    It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum…Read more
  •  117
    The Autonomy of Ethics
    In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 431-442. 2017.
    This chapter discusses the prospects for logical, semantic, metaphysical, and epistemic characterisations of the autonomy of ethics.
  •  272
    There Are No Reasons for Affective Attitudes
    Mind 127 (507): 779-805. 2018.
    A dogma of contemporary ethical theory maintains that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is the very same as the nature of normative support for actions. The prevailing view is that normative reasons provide the support across the board. I argue that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is importantly different from the nature of normative support for actions. Actions are indeed supported by reasons. Reasons are gradable and contributory. The support relat…Read more
  •  97
    Weighing Reasons (edited book)
    with Errol Lord
    Oxford University Press USA. 2016.
    Normative reasons have become a popular theoretical tool in recent decades. One helpful feature of normative reasons is their weight. The fourteen new essays in this book theorize about many different aspects of weight. Topics range from foundational issues to applications of weight in debates across philosophy
  •  177
    Defending David Lewis’s modal reduction
    Philosophical Studies 166 (1): 129-147. 2013.
    David Lewis claims that his theory of modality successfully reduces modal items to nonmodal items. This essay will clarify this claim and argue that it is true. This is largely an exercise within ‘Ludovician Polycosmology’: I hope to show that a certain intuitive resistance to the reduction and a set of related objections misunderstand the nature of the Ludovician project. But these results are of broad interest since they show that would-be reductionists have more formidable argumentative resou…Read more
  •  117
    Love in the Time of Consequentialism
    Noûs 51 (4): 686-712. 2017.
    There are several powerful motivations for neutral value‐based deontic theories such as Act Consequentialism. Traditionally, such theories have had great difficulty accounting for partiality towards one's personal relationships and projects. This paper presents a neutral value‐based theory that preserves the motivations for Act Consequentialism while vindicating some crucial intuitions about reasons to be partial. There are two central ideas. The first is that when it comes to working out what y…Read more
  •  38
    Grounding the Autonomy of Ethics
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 10. 2015.
    There are various ways of characterising Hume’s dictum that ‘you can’t get an ought from an is.’ Contributors to the literature directly addressing this question focus on logical characterisations of autonomy theses. Such theses maintain that certain logical relations do not obtain between ethical and non-ethical sentences, for instance that no non-ethical sentences logically entail an ethical sentence. I argue that this focus on logical autonomy is a mistake. The thesis so important to our meta…Read more
  •  1213
    The Value-Based Theory of Reasons
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3. 2016.
    This paper develops the Value-Based Theory of Reasons in some detail. The central part of the paper introduces a number of theoretically puzzling features of normative reasons. These include weight, transmission, overlap, and the promiscuity of reasons. It is argued that the Value-Based Theory of Reasons elegantly accounts for these features. This paper is programmatic. Its goal is to put the promising but surprisingly overlooked Value-Based Theory of Reasons on the table in discussions of norma…Read more