•  2
    Moral Responsibility Must Look Back
    American Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
    I argue that to remove all backward-looking grounds and justification from the practice, as some theorists recommend, is to remove (not revise) moral responsibility. The most paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility must feature desert and retributive elements. So, moral responsibility must be (at least partially) backward-looking. When we hold people responsible, one reason we do so is that we believe that they deserve punishment or reward simply in virtue of the action for which we hold them…Read more
  •  20
    Giving Up Gratitude
    Analytic Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Resentment is a negative reaction to expressions of bad will. Gratitude is a positive reaction to expressions of good will. To give up resentment, when someone has wronged you, is to forgive them. We might expect an analog for giving up gratitude. The practice features in some ordinary and extraordinary moments in our lives. But it is unnamed and unstudied. I clarify what giving up gratitude is. I identify three types of ordinary and important cases. I then attend to implications; in particular,…Read more
  •  6
    Willpower and Well-Being
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (2): 114-121. 2022.
    How is willpower possible? Which desires are relevant to well-being? Despite a surge of interest in both questions, recent philosophical discussions have not connected them. I connect them here. In particular, the puzzle of synchronic self-control says that synchronic self-control requires a contradiction, namely, wanting not to do what we most want to do. Three responses have been developed: Sripada’s divided mind view, Mele’s motivational shift thesis, and Kennett and Smith’s non-actional appr…Read more
  •  10
    Sympathetic Joy
    Erkenntnis 1-11. forthcoming.
    Unlike Yiddish (fargin) and Sanskrit (muditā), English has no single word to describe the practice of sharing someone else’s joy at their success. Sympathetic joy has also escaped attention in philosophy. We are familiar with schadenfreude, begrudging, envy, jealousy, and other terms describing either (a) pleasure at someone else’s misfortune or (b) displeasure at someone else’s good fortune. But what, exactly, is sympathetic joy? I argue that it is a short-term or long-term feeling of great del…Read more
  •  17
    Sympathetic Joy
    Erkenntnis 1-11. forthcoming.
    Unlike Yiddish (fargin) and Sanskrit (muditā), English has no single word to describe the practice of sharing someone else’s joy at their success. Sympathetic joy has also escaped attention in philosophy. We are familiar with schadenfreude, begrudging, envy, jealousy, and other terms describing either (a) pleasure at someone else’s misfortune or (b) displeasure at someone else’s good fortune. But what, exactly, is sympathetic joy? I argue that it is a short-term or long-term feeling of great del…Read more
  •  13
    Willpower and Well-Being
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (2): 114-121. 2022.
    How is willpower possible? Which desires are relevant to well-being? Despite a surge of interest in both questions, recent philosophical discussions have not connected them. I connect them here. In particular, the puzzle of synchronic self-control says that synchronic self-control requires a contradiction, namely, wanting not to do what we most want to do. Three responses have been developed: Sripada’s divided mind view, Mele’s motivational shift thesis, and Kennett and Smith’s non-actional appr…Read more
  •  24
    Consistent Desires and Climate Change
    Analytic Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Philosophers have described the human perspective on climate change as a perfect moral storm. I take a new angle on that storm: I argue that our relevant desires feature a particularly problematic case of seemingly consistent but genuinely inconsistent desires. We have, first, non-indexical desires such as a desire to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our environment at some point. We have, second, indexical desires such as a desire not to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop …Read more
  •  42
    Indecision and Buridan’s Principle
    Synthese 200 (5): 1-18. 2022.
    The problem known as Buridan’s Ass says that a hungry donkey equipoised between two identical bales of hay will starve to death. Indecision kills the ass. Some philosophers worry about human analogs. Computer scientists since the 1960s have known about the computer versions of such cases. From what Leslie Lamport calls ‘Buridan’s Principle’—a discrete decision based on a continuous range of input-values cannot be made in a bounded time—it follows that the possibilities for human analogs of Burid…Read more
  •  15
    Correction to: Anger and Absurdity
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (4): 1073-1073. 2021.
    Tanaka, K. (2014) Anger and moral judgment. Australas J Philos 92:269–286 should be: Pettigrove, G. and Tanaka, K. (2014) Anger and moral judgment. Australas J Philos 92:269–286.
  •  16
    Aristotle on Flight: Air as an External Resting Point
    Rhizomata 9 (1): 123-138. 2021.
    I reconstruct Aristotle’s explanation for why and how birds are capable of natural flight. For Aristotle, air is a markedly different external resting point in comparison with water and earth, and nature has designed birds so as to take advantage of the unique way in which air affects the inequality between the pushing downward, that is, the downward force and the resistance. My discussion sheds some light on Aristotle’s anticipation of some aspects of modern fluid dynamics and aerodynamics.
  •  68
    Anger and Absurdity
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (3): 717-732. 2021.
    I argue that there is an interesting and underexplored sense in which some negative reactive attitudes such as anger are often absurd. I explore implications of this absurdity, especially for our understanding of forgiveness.
  •  59
    On the Practicality of Virtue Ethics
    Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (2): 295-318. 2021.
    Using research in social psychology, philosophers such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that human beings do not have – and cannot acquire – character traits such as virtues. Along with defenders of virtue ethics such as Julia Annas and Rachana Kamtekar, they assume that this constitutes a dangerous attack on virtue ethics. I argue that even if virtues and vices did not exist and everyone accepted that truth, (1) we would continue to make attributions of character traits in our ordinary pr…Read more
  •  56
    Zooming irresponsibly down the slippery slope
    Analysis 81 (3): 396-402. 2021.
    I show that some famous arguments against moral responsibility — most notably, Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument and Susan Wolf’s Troubling Train of Thought — reason in an unnatural way: if a clearly has some property that results in our saying that a is F, and if b less clearly has that property, then it is the case that b is F. I argue that this problem is not present in reasons-responsiveness theories of responsibility. I do so by applying Boolos’s elegant technique of generating spanning condi…Read more
  •  41
    Individually Sufficient and Disjunctively Necessary Conditions for Moral Responsibility
    with Garry Young
    Acta Analytica 36 (4): 501-515. 2020.
    In this paper, we motivate, propose and defend the following two conditions as individually sufficient and disjunctively necessary for moral responsibility: PODMA —originally proposed by Coren, Acta Analytica, 33, 145–159,, now cast as sufficient rather than necessary—and the TWC*, which amends versions presented by Young, 961–969, 2016; Philosophia, 45, 1365–1380, 2017). We explain why there is a need for new necessary and sufficient conditions, how these build on and improve existing ideas, pa…Read more
  •  65
    Resentment, Parenting, and Strawson’s Compatibilism
    Erkenntnis 88 (1): 43-65. 2020.
    Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible …Read more
  •  42
    In a brief and deeply interesting 2017 Acta Analytica paper, Peter Baumann argues that there are cases of necessarily incompatible but mutually consistent desires, that this is a common problem, and that there is no solution in sight. I’ll argue that Baumann fails to note certain non-trivial assumptions that must be made for the possibility of consistent incompatible desires; if consistent incompatible desires do exist then they’re sometimes beneficial; and if they are sometimes involved with pr…Read more
  •  56
    Aristotle on Motion in Incomplete Animals
    Apeiron 53 (3): 285-314. 2020.
    I explain what Aristotle means when, after puzzling about the matter of motion in incomplete animals (those without sight, smell, hearing), he suggests in De Anima III 11.433b31–434a5 that just as incomplete animals are moved indeterminately, desire and phantasia are present in those animals, but present indeterminately. I argue that self-motion and its directing faculties in incomplete animals differ in degree but not in kind from those of complete animals. I examine how an object of desire dif…Read more
  •  52
    Neither pardon nor blame: Reacting in the wrong way
    Analytic Philosophy 62 (2): 165-183. 2020.
    Why does someone, S, deserve blame or reproach for an action or event? One part of a standard answer since Aristotle: the event was caused, at least in part, by S’s bad will. But recently there’s been some insightful discussion of cases where the event’s causes do not include any bad will from S and yet it seems that S is not off the hook for the event. Cheshire Calhoun, Miranda Fricker, Elinor Mason, David Enoch, Randolph Clarke, and others include in this category some cases of glitches, forge…Read more
  •  54
    Non-Symmetric Awe: Why it Matters Even if We Don’t
    Philosophia 49 (1): 217-233. 2020.
    The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of…Read more
  • Non-symmetric awe: why it matters even if we don't
    Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel. forthcoming.
    The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars (in all their enormity) cannot think, human beings can. Through an explora…Read more
  •  1
    Aristotle on Motion in Incomplete Animals
    Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science. forthcoming.
    I explain what Aristotle means when, after puzzling about the matter of motion in incomplete animals (those without sight, smell, hearing), he suggests in De Anima III 11.433b31-434a5 that just as incomplete animals are moved indeterminately, desire and phantasia are present in those animals, but present indeterminately. I argue that self-motion and its directing faculties in incomplete animals differ in degree but not in kind from those of complete animals. I examine how an object of desire dif…Read more
  •  28
    Aristotle against (unqualified) self-motion
    Ancient Philosophy 39 (2): 363-380. 2019.
    Every thing that moves is caused to move by something else. Yet there are things that move themselves. How does Aristotle square those two commitments? This paper helps to answer that question. One argument in Physics VII 1 seems to pose a problem for the bare possibility of self-motion; in it he seems to argue that everything that moves must be moved by something else. The text in which this argument appears is itself vexed on a number of fronts, because it is not clear how Physics VII fits wit…Read more
  •  103
    Testing for intrinsic value, for us as we are
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (5): 773-798. 2023.
    Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Brentano, Moore, and Chisholm suggest marks of intrinsic value. Contemporary philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard have insightful discussions of intrinsic value. But how do we verify that some specific thing really is intrinsically valuable? I propose a natural way to test for intrinsic value: first, strip the candidate bare of all considerations of good consequences; and, second, see if what remains is still a good thing. I argue that we, as ordi…Read more
  •  62
    Aristotle on Self-Change in Plants
    Rhizomata 7 (1): 33-62. 2019.
    A lot of scholarly attention has been given to Aristotle’s account of how and why animals are capable of moving themselves. But no one has focused on the question, whether self-change is possible in plants on Aristotle’s account. I first give some context and explain why this topic is worth exploring. I then turn to Aristotle’s conditions for self-change given in Physics VIII.4, where he argues that the natural motion of the elements does not count as self-motion. I apply those conditions to nat…Read more
  •  94
    Epistemic conservatism and bare beliefs
    Synthese 198 (1): 743-756. 2018.
    My subject is the kind of Epistemic Conservatism (EC) that says that an agent is in some measure justified in maintaining a belief simply in virtue of the fact that the agent has that belief. Quine’s alternative to positivist foundationalism, Chisholmian particularism, Rawls’s reflective equilibrium, and Bayesianism all seem to rely on EC. I argue that, in order to evaluate EC, we must consider an agent holding a bare belief, that is, a belief stripped of all personal memory and epistemic contex…Read more
  •  55
    Evaluating epistemic virtues
    Synthese 198 (2): 1569-1578. 2019.
    Epistemic conservatism says that an agent is in some measure justified in maintaining a belief simply in virtue of the fact that the agent has that belief. In his new book On Evidence in Philosophy, William Lycan argues that there is no special objection to EC that does not also impugn the other epistemic virtues. In a forthcoming Synthese piece, Daniel Coren argues that, for us as we are, EC cannot be evaluated. Coren does not discuss Lycan, and vice versa. Here I connect these two discussions …Read more
  •  81
    Freedom, Gratitude, and Resentment: Olivi and Strawson
    Res Philosophica 96 (3): 1-21. 2019.
    I argue that by attending to a distinction among perspectives on the root causes of our reactive attitudes, we can better understand the bases and limitations of long-standing debates about free will and moral responsibility. I characterize this distinction as “objectivism vs. subjectivism.” I bring out this distinction by, first, scrutinizing an especially sharp divergence between Peter Strawson and Peter John Olivi: for Olivi, our ordinary human attitudes make it obvious that we have free will…Read more
  •  87
    Always Choose to Live or Choose to Always Live?
    Southwest Philosophy Review 34 (2): 89-104. 2018.
    Bernard Williams (1973) famously argued that if given the choice to relinquish our mortality we should refuse. We should not choose to always live. His piece provoked an entire literature on the desirability of immortality. Intending to contradict Williams, Thomas Nagel claimed that if given the choice between living for a week and dying in five minutes he would always choose to live. I argue that (1) Nagel’s iterating scenario is closer to the original Makropulos case (Čapek’s) that inspired Wi…Read more
  •  2
    It is well known that Aristotle tries to make room for self-motion – an idea he inherits to some extent from Plato – within his other commitments to causal determinism while at the same time modifying the idea. However, one argument in Physics VII 1 seems to pose a problem for the bare possibility of self-motion; in it he seems to argue that everything that moves must be moved by something else. The text in which this argument appears is itself vexed on a number of fronts, because it is not clea…Read more