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What We Owe the Future by William MacAskillAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 98 (1): 121-124. 2024.
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19The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. By Toby Ord (review)American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 97 (1): 147-150. 2023.
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19The trolley meta-problemThink 21 (62): 87-90. 2022.For many years, philosophers have argued about the Trolley Problem – but they've also argued about whether the problem ought to interest us. According to some, the artificiality of the situations means that they involve no complicating factors – and so we ought to take our intuitions about them especially seriously. According to others, though, the artificiality of the situations means that our intuitions about them are meaningless. I hereby name the puzzle of why our intuitions about this diffe…Read more
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The University as a Site of ResistanceSaints and Scholars: A Journal of Irish Studies 1. 2021.Saint John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University may not be the best meditation on higher education—Plato’s Republic has that honor—but it is nonetheless a classic. At its heart is a simple idea: to know any discipline well, one must also know well every other discipline—for only in knowing well every other discipline does one know the limits of that discipline. It is only by knowing history, for example, that one can know the limits of economics: the assumptions of economics are assumptions—and, …Read more
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13Beyond The Self: Virtue Ethics And The Problem Of Culture: Essays In Honor Of W. David Solomon (review)American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 96 (1): 149-152. 2022.
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Elizabeth Anscombe on RationalismIn Eugene Callahan & Kenneth B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism Revisited. forthcoming.Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” is rightly famous. In it, she argues explicitly for several theses and implicitly for several more; studying the essay, one gets the impression that these theses are related to one another by implication—but it’s not obvious precisely how they are related. In this chapter, I suggest—less controversially, perhaps—that at the heart of “Modern Moral Philosophy” is Anscombe’s rejection of what she calls “consequentialism.” I also suggest—more controvers…Read more
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1Ludwig Wittgenstein on RationalismIn Gene Callahan & Kenneth B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, Palgrave-macmillan. 2020.If "rationalism" refers to the thesis that there is a right way to do whatever it is that we do—a way that we, with our reason, can discover—then Ludwig Wittgenstein is a critic of rationalism. For our words and deeds are justified only by the rules of particular language-games—but these language-games are themselves justified only insofar as they meet our needs; certainly none of them need be justified by reference to any of the others. Together, our language-games constitute our form of life; …Read more
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11MacIntyre and Wyma on Investment AdvisingBusiness Ethics Journal Review 1 (7): 1-6. 2019.In “The Case for Investment Advising,” Keith Wyma argues that investment advising is what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a “practice”—that is, it is an activity marked by what MacIntyre calls an “internal good.” In this Commentary, though, I argue that Wyma seriously misunderstands what internal goods are.
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21Rationalism in Eric VoegelinIn Eugene Callahan & Lee Trepanier (eds.), Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, MacIntyre, Polanyi, Hayek, and Others, Lexington Books. 2018.In his New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin offers an analysis of modernity: at its heart, it is a radicalization of Christianity—a radicalization that counts as a betrayal. Like other movements of its time, Christianity judged this world in terms of another—one wherein all of us were brothers and sisters, wherein justice mattered more than victory and mercy more than justice. But rather than endure in patience their own limitations, those whom Voegelin calls “gnostics” tried to build heaven o…Read more
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10This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (review)American Political Thought 4 (2). 2015.
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25Monumental QuestionsNorthern Plains Ethics Journal 6 (1). 2018.In recent years, there has been renewed controversy about monuments to the Confederacy: these monuments, their detractors insist, are instruments of white supremacy—and, as such, ought to be lowered immediately. The dialectic is by now familiar: though some insist that these monuments are mere sites of memory, others note the relevant memory is that of the Confederacy—and that, because of this, the monuments are inevitably racist. Worse, the monuments were raised by racist individuals for racist…Read more
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69On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (review)Quarterly Review of Biology 86 (2): 137-138. 2011.
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384Elliott Sober, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin’s Theory. Amherst, NY: Prometheus (2011), 230 pp., $21.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 78 (4): 705-709. 2011.
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Applied Ethics |
Immanuel Kant |
Metaphilosophy |