•  142
    Can Morality Do Without Prudence?
    Philosophia 39 (2): 311-326. 2011.
    This paper argues that morality depends on prudence, or more specifically, that one cannot be a moral person without being prudent. Ethicists are unaware of this, ignore it, or imply it is wrong. Although this thesis is not obvious from the current perspective of ethics, I believe that its several implications for ethics make it worth examining. In this paper I argue for the prudence dependency thesis by isolating moral practice from all reliance on prudence. The result is that in the actual wor…Read more
  •  85
    The end of the sea battle story
    Philosophia 29 (1-4): 277-286. 2002.
  •  61
    Moral Knowledge Without Knowledge of Moral Knowledge
    The Journal of Ethics 26 (1): 155-172. 2021.
    Most people believe some moral propositions are true. Most people would say that they know that rape is wrong, torturing people is wrong, and so on. But despite decades of intense epistemological study, philosophers cannot even provide a rudimentary sketch of moral knowledge. In my view, the fact that we have very strong epistemic confidence in some fundamental moral propositions and the fact that it is extremely difficult for us to provide even the basics of an account of moral knowledge gives …Read more
  •  45
    Utilitarianism (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 34 (1): 92-95. 2011.
  •  36
    Synthetic Concerns About Intuitionism
    Southwest Philosophy Review 25 (1): 119-126. 2009.
  •  36
    How We Decide in Moral Situations
    Philosophy 90 (1): 59-81. 2015.
    The role normative ethics has in guiding action is unclear. Once moral theorists hoped that they could devise a decision procedure that would enable agents to solve difficult moral problems. Repeated attacks by anti-theorists seemingly dashed this hope. Although the dispute between moral theorists and anti-theorists rages no longer, no decisive victor has emerged. To determine how we ought to make moral decisions, I argue, we must first examine how we do decide in moral situations. Intuitionism …Read more
  •  29
    The Natures of Moral Acts
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (1): 117-135. 2019.
    Normative ethics asks: What makes right acts right? W. D. Ross attempted to answer this question inThe Right and the Good(1930). Most theorists have agreed that Ross provided no systematic explanatory answers. Ross's intuitionism lacks any decision procedure, and, as McNaughton (2002: 91) states, it ‘turns out after all to have nothing general to say about the relative stringency of our basic duties’. Here I will show that my own Rossian intuitionism does have a systematic way of explaining what…Read more
  •  28
    Intuitionism and Nihilism
    Philosophia 46 (2): 319-336. 2018.
    Intuitionism and nihilism, according to nihilists, have key features in common: the same semantics and the same phenomenology. Intuitionism is the object of nihilism’s attack. The central charge nihilism lodges against intuitionism is that its nonnatural moral properties are queer. Here I’ll examine what ‘queer’ might mean in relation to the doctrines nihilism uses to support this charge. My investigation reveals that nihilism’s queerness charge lacks substance and resembles a tautology served w…Read more
  •  28
  •  23
    Ross’s place in the history of analytic philosophy
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (4): 657-674. 2016.
    ABSTRACTWith the recent revival of moral intuitionism, the work of W. D. Ross has grown in stature. But if we look at some recent well-regarded histories, anthologies and companions of analytic philosophy, Ross is noticeably absent. This discrepancy of assessments raises the question of Ross’s place in the history of analytic philosophy. Hans-Johann Glock has recently claimed that Ross is not an analytic philosopher at all, but is instead a ‘traditional philosopher’. In this article, I will iden…Read more
  •  16
    Richard Kraut, Against Absolute Goodness
    Social Theory and Practice 39 (4): 718-723. 2013.
  •  15
    Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 72 (2). 2018.
  •  12
    Rossian Intuitionism without Self-Evidence?
    Philosophies 7 (3): 68. 2022.
    The first phase of the recent intuitionist revival left untouched Ross’s claim that fundamental moral truths are self-evident. In a recent article, Robert Cowan attempts to explain, in a plausible way, how we know moral truths. The result is that, while the broad framework of Ross’s theory appears to remain in place, the self-evidence of moral truths is thrown into doubt. In this paper, I examine Cowan’s Conceptual Intuitionism. I use his own proposal to show how he arrives at a skeptical positi…Read more
  •  11
    Intuitionism
    Continuum. 2012.
    Thinking about morality -- Story of contemporary intuitionism -- Moral knowledge -- New challenges to intuitionism -- Grounds of morality -- Right and the good reconsidered -- Intuitionism's rivals -- Being moral: how and why.
  •  9
    Robert Kane , Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom . Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 32 (4): 288-290. 2012.
  •  7
    Utilitarianism (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 34 (1): 92-95. 2011.
  •  7
    Explorations in Ethics (edited book)
    Palgrave-Macmillan. 2020.
    Explorations in Ethics is a collection of essays with a speculative bent. Its twelve contributors attempt to take ethics thinking in new directions. Ethics is fundamentally a speculative discipline. We sometimes lose sight of that because of our current scholarly practices, which include reliance on a set of traditional works in ethics, deferring to the scholarly literature, drawing from the evidential sources afforded us. This volume breaks the mold. It is committed, first and foremost, to expl…Read more
  •  1
    No Title available: Reviews
    Philosophy 89 (1): 176-180. 2014.
  • Wise Action: An Examination of Prudence and Morality
    Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo. 2003.
    Morality is dependent upon prudence. To put the matter differently, one cannot be moral without being prudent. While this central contention of Wise Action is evident to common sense, contemporary moral theory is unable to accept it for two reasons. Morality is supposed to be the supreme normative consideration in any given situation. Moreover, since immoral actions often are guided by self-interested---and therefore prudent---reasons, prudence can't but be opposed to morality. While each of the…Read more