•  41
    In print, the central objection to expressivism has been the Frege–Geach problem. Yet most cognitivists seem to be motivated by “deeper” worries, ones they have spent comparatively little time pursuing in print. Part of the explanation for this mismatch between motivation and rhetoric is likely that those deeper worries are largely metaphysical. Since expressivism is not a metaphysical view, it can be hard to see how to mount a relevant attack. The strategy in this chapter is to introduce claims…Read more
  •  145
    Many philosophers hold out hope that some final condition on knowledge will allow us to overcome the limitations of the classic "justified true belief" analysis. The most popular intuitive glosses on this condition frame it as an absence of epistemic coincidence. In this paper, I lay the groundwork for an explanationist account of epistemic coincidence—one according to which, roughly, beliefs are non-coincidentally true if and only if they bear the right sort of explanatory relation to the truth…Read more
  •  107
    Wage Exploitation and the Nonworseness Claim: Allowing the Wrong, To Do More Good
    Business Ethics Quarterly 29 (2): 169-188. 2019.
    Many believe that employment can be wrongfully exploitative, even if it is consensual and mutually beneficial. At the same time, it may seem third parties should not do anything to preclude or eliminate such arrangements, given these same considerations of consent and benefit. I argue that there are perfectly sensible, intuitive ethical positions that vindicate this ‘Reasonable View’. The view requires such defense because the literature often suggests that there is no theoretical space for it. …Read more
  •  144
    Barry Maguire argues that there are no reasons for affective attitudes. ‘There is no reason for your incredulous reaction to’ this thesis, he claims. In this paper, I argue that we have no reason to accept his thesis. I first examine Maguire's purported differences between reasons for action and so-called reasons for affective attitudes. In each case, I argue that the differences are exaggerated and that to the extent they obtain, they are best explained by differences between actions and affect…Read more
  •  74
    Hybrid Non-Naturalism Does Not Meet the Supervenience Challenge
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (3). 2017.
    It is widely agreed that normative properties supervene on natural properties. Non-naturalists face a distinctive challenge to explain this relation. Stephanie Leary argues that non-naturalists can meet this explanatory demand by positing the existence of hybrid normative properties. I argue that this proposal does not meet the supervenience challenge.
  •  61
    Explanation in Ethics and Mathematics: Debunking and Dispensability (review)
    Analysis 78 (2): 377-381. 2018.
    Explanation in Ethics and Mathematics: Debunking and Dispensability By LeibowitzUri D. and SinclairNeilOxford University Press, 2016. x + 258 pp. £45.00.
  •  491
    Good Selves, True Selves: Moral Ignorance, Responsibility, And The Presumption Of Goodness
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3): 606-622. 2017.
    According to the Good True Self (GTS) theory, if an action is deemed good, its psychological source is typically viewed as more reflective of its agent’s true self, of who the agent really is ‘deep down inside’; if the action is deemed bad, its psychological source is typically viewed as more external to its agent’s true self. In previous work, we discovered a related asymmetry in judgments of blame- and praiseworthiness with respect to the mitigating effect of moral ignorance via childhood depr…Read more
  •  111
    Moral Perception and the Reliability Challenge
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 16 (1): 63-73. 2019.
    Given a traditional intuitionist moral epistemology, it is notoriously difficult for moral realists to explain the reliability of our moral beliefs. This has led some to go looking for an alternative to intuitionism. Perception is an obvious contender. I previously argued that this is a dead end, that all moral perception is dependent on a priori moral knowledge. This suggests that perceptualism merely moves the bump in the rug where the reliability challenge is concerned. Preston Werner respond…Read more
  •  855
    Ethical Judgment and Motivation
    In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 308-323. 2017.
    This chapter explores the relationship between ethical judgement writ large (as opposed to merely moral judgement) and motivation. We discuss arguments for and against views on which ethical judgement entails motivation, either alone or under conditions of rationality or normalcy, either at the individual or community level.
  •  184
    A hard look at moral perception
    Philosophical Studies 172 (8): 2055-2072. 2015.
    This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under the c…Read more
  •  172
    Huck vs. Jojo: Moral Ignorance and the (A)symmetry of Praise and Blame
    Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy 7-27. 2014.
    Presentation and discussion of two new experimental studies surveying intuitions about cases of moral ignorance due to childhood deprivation. Discussion of resulting asymmetry between negative and positive cases and proposal of speculative hypothesis to explain results, The Difficulty Hypothesis.
  •  81
    Brown on Mackie: Echoes of the Lottery Paradox
    Philosophia 41 (3): 751-755. 2013.
    In “The possibility of morality,” Phil Brown considers whether moral error theory is best understood as a necessary or contingent thesis. Among other things, Brown contends that the argument from relativity, offered by John Mackie—error theory’s progenitor—supports a stronger modal reading of error theory. His argument is as follows: Mackie’s is an abductive argument that error theory is the best explanation for divergence in moral practices. Since error theory will likewise be the best explanat…Read more
  •  404
    Insanity, Deep Selves, and Moral Responsibility: The Case of JoJo
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3). 2010.
    Susan Wolf objects to the Real Self View (RSV) of moral responsibility that it is insufficient, that even if one’s actions are expressions of one’s deepest or “real” self, one might still not be morally responsible for one’s actions. As a counterexample to the RSV, Wolf offers the case of JoJo, the son of a dictator, who endorses his father’s (evil) values, but who is insane and is thus not responsible for his actions. Wolf’s data for this conclusion derives from what she takes to be our “preth…Read more
  •  54
    To Inspect and Make Safe: On the Morally Responsible Liability of Property Owners
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4): 697-709. 2014.
    There is currently a stalemate over the correct approach to legal liability. To take a prominent example, it remains a point of contention whether land owners should be held liable for injuries to trespassers. Many of those who insist that land owners should be held liable for injuries to trespassers maintain this for purely economic or pragmatic reasons. In contrast, those on the other side frequently defend their view on the grounds that, in such trespass cases, owners are not morally responsi…Read more
  •  195
    In “Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality,” Nicholas Southwood proposes that rational requirements are best understood as demands of one’s “first-personal standpoint.” Southwood argues that this view can “explain the normativity or reason-giving force” of rationality by showing that they “are the kinds of thing that are, by their very nature, normative.” We argue that the proposal fails on three counts: First, we explain why demands of one’s first-personal standpoint cannot be both reason-g…Read more
  •  72
    Do Property Rights Presuppose Scarcity?
    Journal of Business Ethics 125 (3): 531-537. 2014.
    There is a common view, dating back at least to Hume, that property rights presuppose scarcity. This paper is a critical examination of that thesis. In addition to questioning the thesis, the paper highlights the need to divorce the debate over this thesis from the debate over Intellectual Property (IP) rights (the area where it is most frequently applied). I begin by laying out the thesis’ major line of defense. In brief, the argument is that (1) property rights are legitimate only when necessa…Read more