Australian National University
School of Philosophy
PhD, 2005
London, London, City of, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics
  •  931
    Consequentialize This
    Ethics 121 (4): 749-771. 2011.
    To 'consequentialise' is to take a putatively non-consequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialised. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to 'maximising the good', I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate…Read more
  •  729
    The composition of reasons
    Synthese 191 (5): 779-800. 2013.
    How do reasons combine? How is it that several reasons taken together can have a combined weight which exceeds the weight of any one alone? I propose an answer in mereological terms: reasons combine by composing a further, complex reason of which they are parts. Their combined weight is the weight of their combination. I develop a mereological framework, and use this to investigate some structural views about reasons, the main two being "Atomism" and "Holism". Atomism is the view that atomic rea…Read more
  •  409
    Minding the Is-Ought Gap
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (1): 53-69. 2014.
    The ‘No Ought From Is’ principle (or ‘NOFI’) states that a valid argument cannot have both an ethical conclusion and non-ethical premises. Arthur Prior proposed several well-known counterexamples, including the following: Tea-drinking is common in England; therefore, either tea-drinking is common in England or all New Zealanders ought to be shot. My aim in this paper is to defend NOFI against Prior’s counterexamples. I propose two novel interpretations of NOFI and prove that both are true
  •  402
    Reply to Benatar
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (3): 1-2. 2013.
    No abstract.
  •  367
    Still No Redundant Properties: Reply to Wielenberg
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (3): 1-6. 2012.
    No abstract.
  •  320
    Better never to have been believed: Benatar on the harm of existence
    Economics and Philosophy 27 (1): 45-52. 2011.
    In Better Never to Have Been, David Benatar argues that existence is always a harm. His argument, in brief, is that this follows from a theory of personal good which we ought to accept because it best explains several ‘asymmetries’. I shall argue here that Benatar's theory suffers from a defect which was already widely known to afflict similar theories, and that the main asymmetry he discusses is better explained in a way which allows that existence is often not a harm.
  •  314
    A good life, or a life worth living, is a one that is "better than nothing". At least that is a common thought. But it is puzzling. What does "nothing" mean here? It cannot be a quantifier in the familiar sense, yet nor, it seems, can it be a referring term. To what could it refer? This paper aims to resolve the puzzle by examining a number of analyses of the concept of a life worth living. Temporal analyses, which exploit the temporal structure of lives, are distinguished from non-temporal ones…Read more
  •  288
    Two Versions of Hume's Law
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (1): 2-7. 2015.
    Moral conclusions cannot validly be inferred from nonmoral premises – this principle, commonly called “Hume’s law,” presents a conundrum. On one hand, it seems obviously true, and its truth is often simply taken for granted. On the other hand, an ingenious argument by A. N. Prior seems to refute it. My aim here is a resolution. I shall argue, first, that Hume’s law is ambiguous, admitting both a strong and a weak interpretation; second, that the strong interpretation is false, as shown by Prior’…Read more
  •  210
    Priority or sufficiency …or both?
    Economics and Philosophy 21 (2): 199-220. 2005.
    Prioritarianism is the view that we ought to give priority to benefiting those who are worse off. Sufficientism, on the other hand, is the view that we ought to give priority to benefiting those who are not sufficiently well off. This paper concerns the relative merits of these two views; in particular, it examines an argument advanced by Roger Crisp to the effect that sufficientism is the superior of the two. My aim is to show that Crisp's argument is unsound. While I concede his objections aga…Read more
  •  207
    A New and Improved Supervenience Argument for Ethical Descriptivism
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 6, Oxford University Press. pp. 205-18. 2011.
    Ethical descriptivism is the view that all ethical properties are descriptive properties. Frank Jackson has proposed an argument for this view which begins with the premise that the ethical supervenes on the descriptive, any worlds that differ ethically must differ also descriptively. This paper observes that Jackson's argument has a curious structure, taking a linguistic detour between metaphysical starting and ending points, and raises some worries stemming from this. It then proposes an impro…Read more
  •  179
    Giving up levelling down
    Economics and Philosophy 19 (1): 111-134. 2003.
    The so-called “Levelling Down Objection” is commonly believed to occupy a central role in the debate between egalitarians and prioritarians. Egalitarians think that equality is good in itself, and so they are committed to finding value even in such equality as may only be achieved by “levelling down”–i.e., by merely reducing the better off to the level of the worse off. Although egalitarians might deny that levelling down could ever make for an all-things-considered improvement, they cannot deny…Read more
  •  171
    The best of all possible worlds
    Synthese 143 (3): 309-320. 2005.
    The Argument from Inferiority holds that our world cannot be the creation of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being; for if it were, it would be the best of all possible worlds, which evidently it is not. We argue that this argument rests on an implausible principle concerning which worlds it is permissible for an omnipotent being to create: roughly, the principle that such a being ought not to create a non-best world. More specifically, we argue that this principle is plausible only if we assum…Read more
  •  162
    The Utility of Knowledge
    Erkenntnis 77 (2): 155-65. 2012.
    Recent epistemology has introduced a new criterion of adequacy for analyses of knowledge: such an analysis, to be adequate, must be compatible with the common view that knowledge is better than true belief. One account which is widely thought to fail this test is reliabilism, according to which, roughly, knowledge is true belief formed by reliable process. Reliabilism fails, so the argument goes, because of the "swamping problem". In brief, provided a belief is true, we do not care whether or no…Read more
  •  156
    Maximalism and the Structure of Acts
    Noûs (4): 752-771. 2018.
    Suppose we believe that a property F is coextensive with moral permissibility. F may be, for example, the property of having the best consequences, if we are Consequentialists, or that of conforming to a universalisable maxim, if we are Kantians, and so on. This may raise the following problem. It is plausible that permissibility is “closed under implication”: any act that is implied by a permissible act must itself be permissible. Yet, in some cases, F might not be closed under implication. If …Read more
  •  147
    Prioritarianism for Variable Populations
    Philosophical Studies 134 (3): 325-361. 2007.
    Philosophical discussions of prioritarianism, the view that we ought to give priority to those who are worse off, have hitherto been almost exclusively focused on cases involving a fixed population. The aim of this paper is to extend the discussion of prioritarianism to encompass also variable populations. I argue that prioritarianism, in its simplest formulation, is not tenable in this area. However, I also propose several revised formulations that, so I argue, show more promise.
  •  126
    I can't make you worship me
    Ratio 18 (2). 2005.
    This paper argues that Divine Command Theory is inconsistent with the veiw, held by many theists, that we have a moral obligation to worship God.
  •  117
    Two kinds of holism about values
    Philosophical Quarterly 57 (228). 2007.
    I compare two kinds of holism about values: G.E. Moore's 'organic unities', and Jonathan Dancy's 'value holism'. I propose a simple formal model for representing evaluations of parts and wholes. I then define two conditions, additivism and invariabilism, which together imply a third, atomism. Since atomism is absurd, we must reject one of the former two conditions. This is where Moore and Dancy part company: whereas Moore rejects additivism, Dancy rejects invariabilism. I argue that Moore's view…Read more
  •  95
    Aggregation and Self-Sacrifice
    Ethics 132 (3): 730-735. 2022.
    Should harms to different individuals be aggregated? Moderate views answer yes and no. Aggregation is appropriate in some but not all cases. Such views need to determine a threshold at which aggregation switches from appropriate to inappropriate. Alex Voorhoeve proposes a method for determining this threshold which links other-regarding and self-regarding ethics. This proposal, however, implies a spurious correlation between favoring aggregation and egoism.
  •  95
    Bart Streumer argues that a certain variety of consequentialism – he calls it ‘semi-global consequentialism’ – is false on account of its falsely implying the possibility of ‘blameless wrongdoing’. This article shows (i) that Streumer's argument is nothing new; (ii) that his presentation of the argument is misleading, since it suppresses a crucial premiss, commonly called ‘agglomeration’; and (iii) that, for all Streumer says, the proponent of semi-global consequentialism may easily resist his a…Read more
  •  94
    Sex crimes and misdemeanours
    Philosophical Studies 177 (5): 1363-1379. 2020.
    How wrong is it to deceive a person into having sex with you? The common view seems to be that this depends on the nature of the deception. If it involves something very important, such as your identity, then the wrong done is very serious. But if it involves something more trivial, such as your natural hair colour, then the wrong seems less great. Tom Dougherty rejects this view. He argues that sexual deception is always seriously wrong. In this paper, I present a response to Doughterty’s argum…Read more
  •  74
    The Rightest Theory of Degrees of Rightness
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (1): 21-29. 2016.
  •  73
    Is close enough good enough?
    Economics and Philosophy 36 (1): 29-59. 2020.
    Should we allow grave harm to befall one individual so as to prevent minor harms befalling sufficiently many other individuals? This is a question of aggregation. Can many small harms ‘add up’, so that, collectively, they morally outweigh a greater harm? The ‘Close Enough View’ supports a moderate position: aggregation is permissible when, and only when, the conflicting harms are sufficiently similar, or ‘close enough’, to each other. This paper surveys a range of formally precise interpretation…Read more
  •  64
    The Significance of Value Additivity
    Erkenntnis 87 (6): 2547-2570. 2022.
    Whether value is “additive,” that is, whether the value of a whole must equal the sum of the values of its parts, is widely thought to have significant implications in ethics. For example, additivity rules out “organic unities,” and is presupposed by “contrast arguments.” This paper reconsiders the significance of value additivity. The main thesis defended is that it is significant only for a certain class of “mereologies”, roughly, those in which both wholes and parts are “complete”, in the sen…Read more
  •  48
    Campbell Brown is one of the most recent additions to our faculty. We thought we’d welcome him to the Department with some questions.
  •  48
    Immigration and Rights: On Wellman's “Stark” Conclusion
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (3): 232-235. 2019.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  42
    Adler’s Defence of Prioritarianism
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (5): 585-595. 2017.
    In his book Well-Being and Fair Distribution, Matthew Adler advances a sustained and comprehensive argument for a certain variety of prioritarianism. This essay provides a critical overview of the book. The main criticisms made are the following. First, the ‘intersection’ approach adopted by Adler, in order to allow incommensurability in well-being, may have problematic consequences. Second, that Adler’s preferred form of prioritarianism must be restricted to non-negative utilities may be a more…Read more
  •  17
    Ethical descriptivism is the view that all ethical properties are descriptive properties. Frank Jackson has proposed an argument for this view which begins with the premise that the ethical supervenes on the descriptive, any worlds that differ ethically must differ also descriptively. This paper observes that Jackson's argument has a curious structure, taking a linguistic detour between metaphysical starting and ending points, and raises some worries stemming from this. It then proposes an impro…Read more