University of Southern California
School of Philosophy
PhD
Boulder, Colorado, United States of America
PhilPapers Editorships
Moral Semantics
  •  368
    Some Question-Begging Objections to Rule Consequentialism
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4): 904-919. 2023.
    This paper defends views like rule consequentialism by distinguishing between two sorts of ideal world objections. It aims to show that one of those sorts of objections is question-begging. Its success would open up a path forward for such views.
  •  341
    Formulating Moral Error Theory
    Journal of Philosophy 119 (5): 279-288. 2022.
    This paper shows how to formulate moral error theories given a contextualist semantics like the one that Angelika Kratzer pioneered, answering the concerns that Christine Tiefensee developed.
  •  448
    Solving the Ideal Worlds Problem
    Ethics 132 (1): 89-126. 2021.
    I introduce a new formulation of rule consequentialism, defended as an improvement on traditional formulations. My new formulation cleanly avoids what Parfit calls “ideal world” objections. I suggest that those objections arise because traditional formulations incorporate counterfactual comparisons about how things could go differently. My new formulation eliminates those counterfactual comparisons. Part of the interest of the new formulation is as a model of how to reformulate structurally simi…Read more
  •  740
    Presuppositions, Attitudes, and Why They Matter
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2): 363-381. 2020.
    This paper introduces and defends a high-level generalization about the way that presupposition triggers interact with attitude verbs. This generalization tells us a great deal about what an adequa...
  •  449
    Attributing error without taking a stand
    Philosophical Studies 176 (6): 1453-1471. 2019.
    Moral error theory is the doctrine that our first-order moral commitments are pervaded by systematic error. It has been objected that this makes the error theory itself a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards of competing first-order moral theories :87–139, 1996) and Kramer. Kramer: “the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. It is not something that can adequately be contested or confirmed through n…Read more
  •  365
    A User’s Guide to Hybrid Tools
    Mind 129 (513): 129-158. 2020.
    Hybrid metaethical theories have significant promise; they would have important upshots if they were true. But they also face severe problems. The problems are severe enough to make many philosophers doubt that they could be true. My ambition is to show that the problems are just instances of a highly general problem: a problem about what are sometimes called ‘intensional anaphora'. I'll also show that any adequate explanation of intensional anaphora immediately solves all the problems for the h…Read more
  •  427
    Might Moral Epistemologists Be Asking The Wrong Questions?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (3): 556-585. 2020.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  •  230
    This paper develops an argument that, if rule consequentialism is true, it’s not possible to defend it as the outcome of reflective equilibrium. Ordinary agents like you and me are ignorant of too many empirical facts. Our ignorance is a defeater for our moral intuitions. Even worse, there aren’t enough undefeated intuitions left to defend rule consequentialism. The problem I’ll describe won’t be specific to rule consequentialists, but it will be especially sharp for them.
  •  257
    Shifty Contextualism About Epistemics
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4. 2017.
  •  108
    An argument for temporalism and contingentism
    Philosophical Studies 172 (5): 1387-1417. 2015.
    Aristotle and Aquinas may have held that the things we believe and assert can have different truth-values at different times. Stoic logicians did; they held that there were “vacillating assertibles”—assertibles that are sometimes true and sometimes false. Frege and Russell endorsed the now widely accepted alternative, where the propositions believed and asserted are always specific with respect to time. This paper brings a new perspective to this question. We want to figure out what sorts of pro…Read more