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14Going Above and Beyond: Non-moral Analogues of Moral SupererogationIn David Heyd (ed.), Handbook of Supererogation, Springer Nature Singapore. pp. 255-270. 2023.Apparent analogues of moral supererogation can be found in other normative domains, such as the prudential domain and the epistemic domain. Vindicating moral supererogation requires a convincing response to the challenge of the ‘paradox of moral supererogation’: if some act would be morally best, why would it not be morally required? Vindicating putative non-moral types of supererogation requires responding to analogous challenges: if some act would be best by the lights of some normative domain…Read more
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4Mill and VirtueIn Christopher Macleod & Dale E. Miller (eds.), A Companion to Mill, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. 2016.This chapter examines Mill's remarks on the nature and value of virtue in Utilitarianism, before looking at where virtue fits in Mill's moral philosophy. The objection that utilitarians fail to do justice to virtue, and to the value of virtue in particular, is one of the two objections to utilitarianism that Mill takes most seriously (the other being that utilitarianism cannot give an adequate account of justice). Mill draws fine‐grained distinctions amongst virtues and vices, classifying traits…Read more
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20Should We de‐Moralize Ethical Theory?Ratio 23 (3): 308-321. 2010.Some philosophers, such as Roger Crisp and Alastair Norcross, have recently argued that the traditional moral categories of wrongness, permissibility and obligation should be avoided when doing ethical theory. I argue that even if morality does not itself provide reasons for action, the moral categories nevertheless have a central role to play in ethical theory: they allow us to make crucial judgements about how to feel about, and react to, agents who behave in anti‐social ways, and they help mo…Read more
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42Right and Wrong: Assessing Scalar ConsequentialismEthical Theory and Moral Practice 1-18. forthcoming.Demoralising ethical theory involves eschewing the deontic categories of moral obligation, moral permissibility, and moral impermissibility from our ethical thought. In this paper, I evaluate the case made in Alastair Norcross’s recent book, _Morality By Degrees_ (2020), for a consequentialist version of such demoralisation. Norcross defends scalar consequentialism, a radical variant of consequentialism which restricts fundamental normative verdicts to a scalar ranking of available actions, orde…Read more
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53Cost and Psychological Difficulty: Two Aspects of DemandingnessAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4): 920-935. 2023.The demandingness of a moral prescription is generally understood exclusively in terms of the welfare costs involved in complying with that prescription. I argue that psychological difficulty is a second aspect of demandingness, whose relevance cannot be reduced to that of welfare costs. Appeal to psychological difficulty explains intuitive verdicts about the permissibility of favouring oneself over others, favouring loved ones over strangers, and favouring one’s short-term good over one’s long-…Read more
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62The Ambitions of ConsequentialismJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 17 (2): 198--218. 2020.Consequentialism is most famously a theory of right action. But many consequentialists assume, and some have explicitly argued, that consequentialism is equally plausible as a direct theory of the right rules, motives, character traits, institutions, and even such things as climates and eye colours. In this paper, I call into question this ‘Global Consequentialist’ extension of consequentialist evaluation beyond the domain of action. Consequentialist treatments of evaluands other than action are…Read more
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32Allan Gibbard, Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics , pp. viii + 216Utilitas 24 (4): 563-566. 2012.
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175Demandingness Objections in EthicsPhilosophical Quarterly 67 (266): 84-105. 2017.It is common for moral philosophers to reject a moral theory on the basis that its verdicts are unreasonably demanding—it requires too much of us to be a correct account of our moral obligations. Even though such objections frequently strike us as convincing, they give rise to two challenges: Are demandingness objections really independent of other objections to moral theories? Do standard demandingness objections not presuppose that costs borne by the comfortably off are more important than cos…Read more
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149Supererogation Across Normative DomainsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (3): 505-516. 2017.The phenomenon of moral supererogation—action that goes beyond what moral duty requires—is familiar. In this paper, I argue that the concept of supererogation is applicable beyond the moral domain. After an introductory section 1, I outline in section 2 what I take to be the structure of moral supererogation, explaining how it comes to be an authentic normative category. In section 3, I show that there are structurally similar phenomena in other normative domains—those of prudence, etiquette, an…Read more
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27Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Theory, by Samuel SchefflerMind 124 (496): 1385-1388. 2015.
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70The Value of the VirtuesUtilitas 27 (1): 61-81. 2015.I argue that debates about virtue are best settled by clearly distinguishing two questions:What sort of character trait is there reason to cultivate?What sort of character trait is there reason to admire?With this distinction in mind, I focus on recent accounts of what consequentialists ought to say about virtue, arguing that:The instrumentalist view of virtue accepted by many prominent consequentialists should not be accepted as the default view for consequentialists to hold.The main rival view…Read more
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158Impartial Reasons, Moral DemandsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (4): 457-466. 2011.Consequentialism is often charged with demandingness objections which arise in response to the theory’s commitment to impartiality. It might be thought that the only way that consequentialists can avoid such demandingness objections is by dropping their commitment to impartialism. However, I outline and defend a framework within which all reasons for action are impartially grounded, yet which can avoid demandingness objections. I defend this framework against what might appear to be a strong obj…Read more
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176Consequentialism and permissibilityUtilitas 22 (2): 171-183. 2010.Scalar consequentialism, recently championed by Alastair Norcross, holds that the value of an action varies according to the goodness of its consequences, but eschews all judgements of moral permissibility and impermissibility. I show that the strongest version of scalar consequentialism is not vulnerable to the objection that it is insufficiently action-guiding. Instead, the principle objection to the scalar view is simply that it leaves out important and interesting ethical judgements. In demo…Read more
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102The Appeal of Self-OwnershipSocial Theory and Practice 36 (2): 213-232. 2010.In this paper, I argue that the appeal of a principle of self-ownership is grounded in the specially intimate relationship that each of us has with our body. I argue that once we appreciate the source of the appeal of a claim of self-ownership, we can see how a differently shaped set of strong rights over our body can do justice to the considerations that ground this appeal, without committing us to the most controversial implications of a claim of self-ownership.
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337Consequentialism, Demandingness and the Monism of Practical ReasonProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt3): 359-374. 2007.
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348The rights and wrongs of consequentialismPhilosophical Studies 151 (3). 2010.I argue that the strongest form of consequentialism is one which rejects the claim that we are morally obliged to bring about the best available consequences, but which continues to assert that what there is most reason to do is bring about the best available consequences. Such an approach promises to avoid common objections to consequentialism, such as demandingness objections. Nevertheless, the onus is on the defender of this approach either to offer her own account of what moral obligations w…Read more
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |