•  37
    The Case for Voting to Change the Outcomes Is Weaker Than It May Seem: A Reply to Zach Barnett
    with Amir Liron
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (1). 2023.
    Because you are highly unlikely to cast the deciding vote in the next elections, it is often said that you don’t have a reason to vote in order to change the outcomes. In a recent paper, however, Zach Barnett forcefully argues that this is a mistake. He shows how it follows, from rather conservative assumptions, that in many real-life cases the expected social value of voting is higher than its cost. Barnett is successful, we believe, in showing that the commonly held belief – that voters do not…Read more
  •  51
    Politics and suffering
    Analytic Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Political philosophy should focus not on uplifting ideals, but rather, so I argue, on minimizing serious suffering. This is so not because other things do not ultimately matter (they do), but rather because in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high stakes carry most political decisions across the thresholds of the relevant deontological const…Read more
  •  93
    Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy betwe…Read more
  •  9
    In responding to Prof. Allen's paper, I make several general methodological points: about the use of hypothetical cases, about the point of theorizing, and about the role of idealization. Then I make some more specific points about his claims about (and against) previous work on statistical evidence.
  • Othello syndrome
    with Basant K. Puri and Hadrian Ball
    In Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes, Routledge. 2020.
  •  240
    Autonomy as Non‐alienation, Autonomy as Sovereignty, and Politics
    Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (2): 143-165. 2021.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 143-165, June 2022.
  •  842
    In virtue of what are we justified in employing the rule of inference Modus Ponens? One tempting approach to answering this question is to claim that we are justified in employing Modus Ponens purely in virtue of facts concerning meaning or concept-possession. In this paper, we argue that such meaning-based accounts cannot be accepted as the fundamental account of our justification.
  •  784
    How Are Basic Belief-Forming Methods Justified?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (3). 2008.
    In this paper, we develop an account of the justification thinkers have for employing certain basic belief-forming methods. The guiding idea is inspired by Reichenbach's work on induction. There are certain projects in which thinkers are rationally required to engage. Thinkers are epistemically justified in employing any belief-forming method such that "if it doesn't work, nothing will" for successfully engaging in such a project. We present a detailed account based on this intuitive thought and…Read more
  •  710
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 85-103, October 2021.
  •  19
    Reason-Giving and the Law
    In Leslie Green & Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 1, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-38. 2011.
    A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps legal philosophers more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law. Of the many different possible ways of understanding "the" problem of the normativity of law, I focus here on the one insisting on the need to explain the reason-giving force of the law. But, I ar…Read more
  •  1656
    There is no such thing as doxastic wrongdoing
    Philosophical Perspectives. forthcoming.
    People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, apologize for their own beliefs. In many mundane cases, people are morally criticized for their beliefs. Intuitively, then, beliefs seem to sometimes wrong people. Recently, the philosophical literature has picked up on this theme, and has started to discuss it under the heading of doxastic wrongdoing. In this paper we argue that despite the strength of such initial intuitions, at the end of the day they have to be rejected. I…Read more
  •  1095
    Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impu…Read more
  •  171
    Just because it’s a phobia doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be afraid
    Philosophical Studies 178 (7): 2425-2437. 2020.
  •  46
    In the original publication of the article, some of the references were published incorrectly. The corrected references are provided below
  •  284
    Thanks, We’re good: why moral realism is not morally objectionable
    Philosophical Studies 178 (5): 1689-1699. 2020.
    This paper responds to a recently popular objection to non-naturalist, robust moral realism. The objection is that moral realism is morally objectionable, because realists are committed to taking evidence about the distribution of non-natural properties to be relevant to their first-order moral commitments. I argue that such objections fail. The moral realist is indeed committed to conditionals such as “If there are no non-natural properties, then no action is wrong.” But the realist is not comm…Read more
  •  881
    The starting point regarding consent has to be that it is both extremely important, and that it is often suspicious. In this article, the author tries to make sense of both of these claims, from a largely liberal perspective, tying consent, predictably, to the value of autonomy and distinguishing between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as nonalienation. The author then discusses adaptive preferences, claiming that they suffer from a rationality flaw but that it's not clear that this flaw ma…Read more
  •  202
    How Principles Ground
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 14 1-22. 2019.
    Specific moral facts seem to be grounded in relevant natural facts, together with relevant moral principles. This picture—according to which moral principles play a role in grounding specific moral facts—is a very natural one, and it may be especially attractive to non-naturalist, robust realists. A recent challenge from Selim Berker threatens this picture, though. Moral principles themselves seem to incorporate grounding claims, and it’s not clear that this can be reconciled with according the …Read more
  •  524
    Sensitivity, safety, and the law: A reply to Pardo
    Legal Theory 25 (3): 178-199. 2019.
    ABSTRACTIn a recent paper, Michael Pardo argues that the epistemic property that is legally relevant is the one called Safety, rather than Sensitivity. In the process, he argues against our Sensitivity-related account of statistical evidence. Here we revisit these issues, partly in order to respond to Pardo, and partly in order to make general claims about legal epistemology. We clarify our account, we show how it adequately deals with counterexamples and other worries, we raise suspicions about…Read more
  •  72
    What you ought to do is sensitive to circumstances that are not under your control, or to luck. So plain luck is often morally significant. Still, some of us think that there's no moral luck - that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are not sensitive to luck. What explains this asymmetry between the luck-sensitivity of ought-judgments and the luck-insensitivity of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness judgments? I suggest an explanation, relying on the analogy to rational luck. I argue that so…Read more
  • How Objectivity Matters
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 5, Oxford University Press. 2010.
  •  265
    Does it count against a normative theory in political philosophy that it is in some important sense infeasible, that its prescriptions are unlikely to be complied with? Though a positive answer seems plausible, it has proved hard to defend against the claim that this is not how normative theories work - noncompliance shows a problem with the noncomplying agents, not with the normative theory. I think that this line of thought - this defense of Utopianism - wins the battle but loses the war. It’s…Read more
  •  36
    Luck Between Morality, Law, and Justice
    Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9 (1): 23-59. 2008.
    In this Article, I elaborate on and defend the following argument: There is no moral luck. If there is no moral luck, there should be no legal luck. Therefore, there should be no legal luck and ). If there is no normatively significant difference between the law doing and allowing, or intending and foreseeing, then there is no normatively significant difference between legal luck and just plain luck that has legal implications. There is no normatively significant difference between the law doing…Read more
  •  12
  •  218
    Hypothetical consent is puzzling. On the one hand, it seems to make a moral difference across a wide range of cases. On the other hand, there seem to be principled reasons to think that it cannot. In this article I put forward reasonably precise formulations of these general suspicions regarding hypothetical consent; I draw several distinctions regarding the ways in which hypothetical consent may make a moral difference; I distinguish between two autonomy-related concerns, nonalienation and sove…Read more
  •  82
    Recent political developments leave liberal elites heartbroken. Why is it that the masses keep making poor, morally unacceptable, irrational choices? Among the many voices heard in this context, there are also those criticising those elites from the left. The elites, these voices imply, are guilty not just of past wrongs that have gotten us here, but also of patronising the masses right now, arrogantly failing to take seriously the masses and their concerns. I argue that such complaints – perhap…Read more
  •  46
    Impartiality and Realism: Reply to Mancuso
    Topoi 37 (4): 603-606. 2018.
    In Chapter 2 of Taking Morality Seriously, I put forward an argument for morality's objectivity that is based on the first-order implications of denying such objectivity. In her contribution to this volume, Mancuso criticizes that argument. This paper is a response to some of her main points.