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The Normative Significance of SelfJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 10 (1): 1-25. 2016.A number of recent works in the metaethics of practical rationality have suggested that features of a person’s character, commitments, projects, practical identities and social roles have important normative consequences. For instance, I might commit to caring for a loved one, or I might become an artist, or take on the role of father to a child. In each case, it seems right to say that the normative landscape I face has been altered by this new fact – to put them under one general heading, the …Read more
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Procreative Ethics and the Problem of EvilIn Sarah Hannan, Samantha Brennan & Richard Vernon (eds.), Permissible Progeny?: The Morality of Procreation and Parenting, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 65-86. 2015.Many people think that the amount of evil and suffering we observe provides important and perhaps decisive evidence against the claim that a loving God created our world. Yet almost nobody worries about the ethics of human procreation. Can these attitudes be consistently maintained? This chapter argues that the most obvious attempts to justify a positive answer fail. The upshot is not that procreation is impermissible, but rather that we should either revise our beliefs about the severity of glo…Read more
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Radical Skepticism and Epistemic IntuitionOxford University Press. 2021.Radical skepticism endorses the extreme claim that large swaths of our ordinary beliefs, such as those produced by perception or memory, are irrational. The best arguments for such skepticism are, in their essentials, as familiar as a popular science fiction movie and yet even seasoned epistemologists continue to find them strangely seductive. Moreover, although most contemporary philosophers dismiss radical skepticism, they cannot agree on how best to respond to the challenge it presents. In th…Read more
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Neo-Aristotelian SupererogationEthics 126 (2): 339-365. 2016.I develop and defend the following neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation: an action is supererogatory if and only if it is overall virtuous and either the omission of an overall virtuous action in that situation would not be overall vicious or there is some overall virtuous action that is less virtuous than it and whose performance in its place would not be overall vicious. I develop this account from within the virtue-ethical tradition. And I argue that it is intuitively defensible and ful…Read more
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Equal Moral Opportunity: A Solution to the Problem of Moral LuckAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 386-404. 2022.
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Three Paradoxes of SupererogationNoûs 55 (3): 699-716. 2021.
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Moral Obligation, Self-Interest and The Transitivity ProblemUtilitas 28 (4): 441-464. 2016.Is the relation ‘is a morally permissible alternative to’ transitive? The answer seems to be a straightforward yes. If Act B is a morally permissible alternative to Act A and Act C is a morally permissible alternative to B then how could C fail to be a morally permissible alternative to A? However, as both Dale Dorsey and Frances Kamm point out, there are cases where this transitivity appears problematic. My aim in this paper is to provide a solution to this problem. I will then investigate Kamm…Read more
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Moral Worth and SupererogationEthics 126 (3): 690-710. 2016.Morally supererogatory actions are traditionally conceived of as actions that are nonobligatory but distinctively morally worthy. Here I challenge the assumption that supererogatory actions are distinctively praiseworthy and offer an alternative definition of moral supererogation. This alternative definition complements, and is complemented by, a novel account of moral praiseworthiness, which I call the Two-Step view. My Two-Step view of moral worth, which I develop in some detail, accounts for …Read more
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Circular and question-begging responses to religious disagreement and debunking argumentsPhilosophical Studies 178 (3): 785-809. 2021.Disagreement and debunking arguments threaten religious belief. In this paper, I draw attention to two types of propositions and show how they reveal new ways to respond to debunking arguments and disagreement. The first type of proposition is the epistemically self-promoting proposition, which, when justifiedly believed, gives one a reason to think that one reliably believes it. Such a proposition plays a key role in my argument that some religious believers can permissibly wield an epistemical…Read more
Williamsburg, Virginia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Supererogation |
Normative Ethics |
Maximizing and Satisficing Consequentialism |
Moral Rationality |
Epistemology |
Divine Goodness |
The Argument from Evil |
Areas of Interest
1 more
Normative Ethics |
Reasons and Rationality |
Moral Normativity |
Epistemology |
Divine Goodness |
The Argument from Evil |