•  31
    For Want of a Nail
    Christian Bioethics 14 (2): 187-205. 2008.
    In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Elizabeth Anscombe charged that Sidgwick's failure to distinguish intended from merely foreseen consequences of an action counted as a very bad degeneration of thought. Sidgwick's failure is endemic to contemporary normative models of decision and choice. There are three components to rational decision making on these models: what the agent wants the prospective actions or policies under consideration and what the agent expects will happen as a result of taking spec…Read more
  •  23
    Seeking the Common Good in Education Through a Positive Conception of Social Justice
    with James Arthur and Kristján Kristjánsson
    British Journal of Educational Studies 69 (1): 101-117. 2021.
    Many Faculties of Education in the UK and elsewhere have ‘social justice’ written into their mission statements. But are they concerned by questions of social justice in education, or has the term become somewhat vacuous and devoid of substantive meaning? The present article subjects recent discourses about social justice in education to scrutiny and finds them wanting in various respects, in particular when juxtaposed with historical accounts of justice by philosophers such as Aristotle or Aqui…Read more
  •  76
  • Ch. 14. Aristotle, Aquinas, Anscombe, and the new virtue ethics
    In Tobias Hoffmann, Jörn Müller & Matthias Perkams (eds.), Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics, Cambridge University Press. 2013.
  •  41
    The Moral of the Story
    Critical Inquiry 34 (1): 5. 2007.
  •  15
    Recent research in the humanities and social sciences suggests that individuals who understand themselves as belonging to something greater than the self--a family, community, or religious or spiritual group--often feel happier, have a deeper sense of purpose or meaning in their lives, and have overall better life outcomes than those who do not. Some positive and personality psychologists have labeled this location of the self within a broader perspective "self-transcendence." This book presents…Read more
  •  10
    Giving Our Humanity Its Due
    The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 21 (3): 391-396. 2021.
    In this paper, the author takes the perspective of the patient who is very ill and facing death and examines the traditional ethical question of whether forgoing medical treatment, including artificial hydration and nutrition, is equivalent to suicide. She approaches this question by way of a discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and via a critical look at David Hume. At the end, she turns to Elizabeth Anscombe for the light that this twentieth-century philosopher sheds on the question.
  •  54
    Aristotelian Necessity
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 87 101-110. 2020.
    At the center of contemporary neo-Aristotelian naturalism is the thought that we can account for a great deal of ethics by thinking about what is needful in human life generally. When we think about practices like promising, virtues like justice or courage, and institutions that serve to produce, maintain, and help to reproduce well-ordered social life we can make some headway we consider the sense in which our topic makes some forms of human good possible and even, in some cases, actualizes the…Read more
  •  17
    The Intellectual Animal
    New Blackfriars 100 (1090): 663-676. 2019.
  •  32
    The New Science of Practical Wisdom
    with Dilip V. Jeste, Ellen E. Lee, Charles Cassidy, Rachel Caspari, Pascal Gagneux, Danielle Glorioso, Bruce L. Miller, Katerina Semendeferi, Howard Nusbaum, and Dan Blazer
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 62 (2): 216-236. 2019.
    We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.Are the smartest people also the wisest? Not necessarily. While traditional intellectual reasoning and procedural knowledge have helped build the communities we live in, there is a growing scientific understanding that we need emotionally balanced and better-fitting prosocial frameworks for coping with the uncertainties and complexities of life and addressing new challenges of the modern world. We are now poised on the edge of a new scien…Read more
  •  1
    The Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1994.
    My thesis is an investigation of moral psychology, where 'moral' is roughly synonymous with 'practical', and psychology is bound by an understanding of action on one side, and by some thoughts about reasonableness or rationality on the other. The form my investigation takes is one of arguing against an instrumentalist conception of practical reason, with its attendant belief-desire philosophical psychology, and suggesting a different way of thinking about practical rationality, and, through it, …Read more
  •  307
    Anscombe on Practical Inference
    In Elijah Millgram (ed.), Varieties of Practical Reasoning, Mit Press. pp. 437--464. 2001.
  •  53
    Reasonably vicious
    Harvard University Press. 2002.
    Is unethical conduct necessarily irrational? Answering this question requires giving an account of practical reason, of practical good, and of the source or point of wrongdoing. By the time most contemporary philosophers have done the first two, they have lost sight of the third, chalking up bad action to rashness, weakness of will, or ignorance. In this book, Candace Vogler does all three, taking as her guides scholars who contemplated why some people perform evil deeds. In doing so, she sets o…Read more
  •  51
    In Praise of In Praise of Desire
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2): 504-508. 2014.
  •  17
    We Were Never in Paradise
    In Christopher W. Morris & Arthur Ripstein (eds.), Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier, Cambridge University Press. pp. 209. 2001.
  •  61
    Nothing Added
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2): 229-247. 2016.
    Although most work in contemporary Anglophone philosophical action theory understands Elizabeth Anscombe’s monograph on Intention as the work that inaugurates the field, action theory often operates by setting out to understand intentional action by investigating the psychological antecedents of intention action. Now, Anscombe has no quarrel with moral psychology. Intention is a work of moral psychology, but it is a kind of moral psychology in which we attend to the act of deliberately making so…Read more
  •  62
    Sex and Talk
    Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 328-365. 1998.
  •  9
    First published in 2001, this book sets out to shed light on traditional controversies in Mill scholarship, underscore the significance of the contribution Mill made to associationist psychology, argue he is not entirely successful in explaining why art matters, and that this failure is linked to a deep tension in his mature work — rooted in his unwillingness to shake off the moral psychology he was raised on. The book examines various episodes and tensions in Mill’s life and work and how they r…Read more
  •  19
    Xiv*—Modern Moral Philosophy Again: Isolating the Promulgation Problem
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (3): 345-362. 2006.
  •  97
    Good and Bad in Human Action
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 87 57-68. 2013.
    According to Aristotle, every action is aimed at some good. Neo-Aristotelians argue that all intentional actions are pursued “under the guise of the good.” Contemporary critics find this thesis either perplexing or obviously false. In this essay, I survey a recent attempt to defend the guise of the good thesis, urge that the critic will reject the defense, and sketch a novel direction for defense of the thesis based on the thought that practical reason’s orientation to the future is fundamentall…Read more
  •  78
    Some remarks on Robert Audi's the good in the right
    In Mark Timmons (ed.), Rationality and the Good, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Robert Audi’s The Good in the Right undertakes the magisterial work of reviving the intuitionism of W.D. Ross, rescuing Ross from the overlapping shadows of Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and, to a lesser extent, H. A. Prichard, marrying Ross to Kant, and so working to produce "a full-scale moral philosophy providing both an account of moral principles and judgments—a metaethical account—and a set of basic moral standards" that might be employed in moral reasoning. The book is magnificent in ambit…Read more
  •  133
    Modern moral philosophy again: Isolating the promulgation problem
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (3). 2006.
    There are different ways of understanding the place of virtue in ethics. I will be interested in certain of the most ambitious, those neo-Aristotelian views that take it that right action is action from and for the sake of virtue, that right practical reasoning is virtuous practical reasoning, that the virtues are corrective,[i] and that, as Philippa Foot put it, "not every man who has a virtue has something that is a virtue in him."[ii] Virtues regulate individual action and response (tending t…Read more
  •  24
    Xiv*—Modern Moral Philosophy Again: Isolating the Promulgation Problem
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (3): 345-362. 2006.
  •  19
    Philosophical Feminism, Feminist Philosophy
    Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 295-319. 1995.
  •  25
    Good and Bad in Human Action
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 87 57-68. 2013.
    According to Aristotle, every action is aimed at some good. Neo-Aristotelians argue that all intentional actions are pursued “under the guise of the good.” Contemporary critics find this thesis either perplexing or obviously false. In this essay, I survey a recent attempt to defend the guise of the good thesis, urge that the critic will reject the defense, and sketch a novel direction for defense of the thesis based on the thought that practical reason’s orientation to the future is fundamentall…Read more
  •  31
    Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency by Nomy Arpaly
    Journal of Philosophy 103 (9): 472-477. 2006.