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6The Fundamentality of FitIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 14, Oxford Studies in Metaethics. 2019.Many authors, including Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, and Mark Schroeder, favor a “reasons-first” ontology of normativity, which treats reasons as normatively fundamental. Others, most famously G.E. Moore, favor a “value-first” ontology, which treats value or goodness as normatively fundamental. I argue that both the reasons-first and value-first ontologies should be rejected because neither can account for all of the normative reasons that, intuitively, there are. I advance an ontology of normati…Read more
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165Forever fitting feelingsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1): 80-98. 2022.This paper addresses a recent puzzle in the ethics of emotions concerning the fitting duration of emotions. On the one hand, many of our emotions tend to fade with time and can seem to do so fittingly. Think of attitudes like anger, grief, and regret. On the other hand, it's difficult to see how it could be fitting for these feelings to fade since the facts that make them fitting can seem to persist. This is the puzzle in brief; that of explaining how certain feelings can fittingly fade with tim…Read more
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911Fittingness: A User’s GuideIn Chris Howard & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Fittingness, Oup. 2023.The chapter introduces and characterizes the notion of fittingness. It charts the history of the relation and its relevance to contemporary debates in normative and metanormative philosophy and proceeds to survey issues to do with fittingness covered in the volume’s chapters, including the nature and epistemology of fittingness, the relations between fittingness and reasons, the normativity of fittingness, fittingness and value theory, and the role of fittingness in theorizing about responsibili…Read more
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8"Mobile Lifeworlds illustrates how the imaginaries and ideals of Western travellers, especially those of untouched nature and spiritual enlightenment, are consistent with media representations of the Himalayan region, romanticism and modernity at large. Blending tourism and pilgrimage, travel across Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and Northern India is often inspired and oriented by a search for authenticity, adventure and Otherness. Such valued ideals are shown, however, to be contested by the very force…Read more
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197Consequentialists Must KillEthics 131 (4): 727-753. 2021.Many contemporary act consequentialists define facts about what we should do in terms of facts about what we should prefer. They claim that we should perform an action if and only if we should prefer its outcome to the outcome of any available alternative. Some of these theorists claim they can accommodate deontic constraints, such as a constraint against killing the innocent. I argue that they can’t. If there’s a constraint against killing, then when we can prevent five killings only by killing…Read more
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171The Fundamentality of FitOxford Studies in Metaethics 14. 2019.Many authors, including Derek Parfit, T. M. Scanlon, and Mark Schroeder, favor a “reasons-first” ontology of normativity, which treats reasons as normatively fundamental. Others, most famously G. E. Moore, favor a “value-first” ontology, which treats value or goodness as normatively fundamental. Chapter 10 argues that both the reasons-first and value-first ontologies should be rejected because neither can account for all of the normative reasons that, intuitively, there are. It advances an ontol…Read more
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226Weighing epistemic and practical reasons for beliefPhilosophical Studies 177 (8): 2227-2243. 2020.This paper is about how epistemic and practical reasons for belief can be compared against one another when they conflict. It provides a model for determining what one ought to believe, all-things-considered, when there are conflicting epistemic and practical reasons. The model is meant to supplement a form of pluralism about doxastic normativity that I call ‘Inclusivism’. According to Inclusivism, both epistemic and practical considerations can provide genuine normative reasons for belief, and …Read more
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436FittingnessPhilosophy Compass 13 (11). 2018.The normative notion of fittingness figures saliently in the work of a number of ethical theorists writing in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and has in recent years regained prominence, occupying an important place in the theoretical tool kits of a range of contemporary writers. Yet the notion remains strikingly undertheorized. This article offers a (partial) remedy. I proceed by canvassing a number of attempts to analyze the fittingness relation in other terms, arguing that non…Read more
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136Transparency and the ethics of beliefPhilosophical Studies 173 (5): 1191-1201. 2016.A central dispute in the ethics of belief concerns what kinds of considerations can be reasons for belief. Nishi Shah has recently argued that the correct explanation of transparency in doxastic deliberation—the psychological phenomenon that only considerations taken to bear on the truth of p can be deliberated from to conclude in believing that p—settles this debate in favor of strict evidentialism, the view that only evidence can be a reason for belief. I argue that Shah’s favored explanation …Read more
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166In Defense of the Wrong Kind of ReasonThought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (1): 53-62. 2016.Skepticism about the ‘wrong kind’ of reasons—the view that wrong-kind reasons are reasons to want and bring about certain attitudes, but not reasons for those attitudes—is more often assumed than argued for. Jonathan Way sets out to remedy this: he argues that skeptics about, but not defenders of, wrong-kind reasons can explain a distinctive pattern of transmission among such reasons and claims that this fact lends significant support to the skeptical view. I argue that Way's positive case for w…Read more
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28Schroeder, Mark. Expressing Our Attitudes: Explanation and Expression in Ethics. Vol. 2.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 272. $70.00 (review)Ethics 127 (3): 806-812. 2017.
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Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Epistemology |
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Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
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