University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America
  • After Metaethics
    Philosophers' Imprint. forthcoming.
  •  14
    Throughout his career, Michael Bratman has developed a detailed model of individual ‘planning agency’, and, more recently, models of joint action and aspects of social life that he argues such planning agency helps support. How might we empirically investigate whether these models capture what is going on in actual human lives? In this article, we critically engage with this broad question by focusing on what Bratman calls the ‘core capacity thesis’, which is at the center of his most recent dis…Read more
  •  49
    In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguis…Read more
  •  53
    Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence (edited book)
    with Toh Kevin and Shapiro Scott
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Understood one way, the branch of contemporary philosophical ethics that goes by the label "metaethics" concerns certain second-order questions about ethics-questions not in ethics, but rather ones about our thought and talk about ethics, and how the ethical facts (insofar as there are any) fit into reality. Analogously, the branch of contemporary philosophy of law that is often called "general jurisprudence" deals with certain second order questions about law- questions not in the law, but rath…Read more
  •  37
    Are there really any dual‐character concepts?
    Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1): 340-369. 2023.
    There has been growing excitement in recent years about “dual‐character” concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual‐character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use either the descriptive features or the abstract value for determining the extension of the concep…Read more
  •  41
    Varieties of Metalinguistic Negotiation
    Topoi 42 (4): 983-999. 2023.
    In both co-authored and solo-authored work over the past decade, we have developed the idea of “metalinguistic negotiation”. On our view, metalinguistic negotiation is a type of dispute in which speakers appear to use (rather than explicitly mention) a term in conflicting ways to put forward views about how that very term should be used. In this paper, we explore four possible dimensions of variation among metalinguistic negotiations, and the interactions among those dimensions. These types of v…Read more
  •  31
    Normative roles, conceptual variance, and ardent realism about normativity
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (5): 509-534. 2020.
    ABSTRACT In Choosing Normative Concepts, Eklund considers a “variance thesis” about our most fundamental normative concepts. This thesis raises the threat of an alarming symmetry between different sets of normative concepts. If this symmetry holds, it would be incompatible with “ardent realism” about normativity. Eklund argues that the ardent realist should appeal to the idea of “referential normativity” in response to this challenge. I argue that, even if Eklund is right in his core arguments o…Read more
  •  159
    The Disunity of Legal Reality
    Legal Theory 28 (3): 235-267. 2022.
    Take “legal reality” to be the part of reality that actual legal thought and talk is dis- tinctively about, such as legal institutions, legal obligations, and legal norms. Our goal is to explore whether legal reality is disunified. To illustrate the issue, consider the possibility that an important metaphysical thesis such as positivism is true of one part of legal reality (legal institutions), but not another (legal norms). We offer two arguments that suggest that legal reality is disunified: o…Read more
  •  13
    When legal theorists ask questions about legal interpretation—such as what it fundamentally is, what it aims at, or how it should work—they often do so in ways closely tethered to existing legal practice. For example: they try to understand how an activity legal actors (purportedly) already engage in should be done better, such as how judges can better learn about the content of the law. In this paper, I discuss a certain kind of “conceptual ethics” approach to thinking about legal interpretatio…Read more
  •  2
    Authoritative Normativity
    In David Copp & Connie Rosati (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Meta-Ethics, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  1
    The Fragmentation of Authoritative Normativity
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies of Metaethics 19, Oxford University Press Usa. 2024.
  •  6
    Counterfactual Genealogy and Metaethics in Pettit’s The Birth of Ethics
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    One of the primary goals of Pettit’s The Birth of Ethics is to offer a novel defense of a form of naturalistic realism in metaethics, drawing on a kind of “counterfactual genealogy” for ethical thought and talk, in a community he dubs “Erewhon”. We argue that Pettit’s argument faces a deep dilemma. The dilemma begins by noting the reasonable controversy about which metaethical view is true of our ethical thought and talk. We then ask: is the thought and talk in Pettit’s Erewhon apt for the same …Read more
  •  1
    Legal Antipositivism and the Reliability Challenge in Metaethics
    In Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki, Francesca Poggi & Izabela Skoczeń (eds.), Interpretivism and the Limits of Law, Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 23-42. 2022.
    Many legal positivists have argued that legal antipositivists, due to the central explanatory role they grant authoritatively normative facts, end up saddled with deep problems in their proposed epistemology about how we learn about the law, problems which positivists (and especially "exclusive" legal positivists) can avoid. In this chapter, I put forward a version of this kind of argument. I argue that there is an explanatory challenge tied to the epistemology of law that positivist theories ar…Read more
  •  60
    Ground, Essence, and the Metaphysics of Metanormative Non-Naturalism
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (26): 674-701. 2022.
    The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary revival of interest in metanormative non-naturalism. Despite this interest, it is still unclear how to understand the distinctive metaphysical commitments of this view. We illustrate the relevant difficulties by examining what is arguably the most prominent class of contemporary attempts to formulate non-naturalism’s metaphysical commitments. This class of proposals, exemplified in work by Gideon Rosen and Stephanie Leary, characterizes the di…Read more
  •  11
    This paper addresses an important but relatively unexplored question about the relationship between conceptual ethics and other philosophical inquiry: how does the epistemology of conceptual ethics relate to the epistemology of other, more “traditional” forms of philosophical inquiry? This paper takes as its foil the optimistic thought that the epistemology of conceptual ethics will be easier and less mysterious than relevant “traditional” philosophical inquiry. We argue against this foil by foc…Read more
  •  31
    Legal Positivism and the Real Definition of Law
    Jurisprudence 13 (3): 317-348. 2022.
    We explore an underappreciated tension at the heart of the debate over legal positivism. On the one hand, many legal philosophers aspire for the debate to tell us what law is, and the nature of law. But on the other hand, the positions in the debate are generally formulated such that they’re about something else: what law is necessarily connected to or dependent on. This is a genuine tension, because theses about what law is necessarily connected to or dependent on do not by themselves state or …Read more
  •  24
    The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary revival of interest in metanormative non-naturalism. Despite this interest, it is still unclear how to understand the distinctive metaphysical commitments of this view. We illustrate the relevant difficulties by examining what is arguably the most prominent class of contemporary attempts to formulate non-naturalism’s metaphysical commitments. This class of proposals, exemplified in work by Gideon Rosen and Stephanie Leary, characterizes the di…Read more
  •  70
    Topic Continuity in Conceptual Engineering and Beyond
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-27. forthcoming.
    One important activity in conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering involves proposing to associate a new semantics with an existing word. Many philosophers think that one important way to evaluate such a proposal concerns whether it preserves the “topic” picked out by the existing word, and several have offered competing proposals concerning what is required to preserve topic. Our paper is focused on the conceptual ethics question of how conceptual engineers should use the term ‘topic contin…Read more
  •  13
    In his later work, such as “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin Heidegger puts forward a critique of modern technology. Alongside this critique, Heidegger presents a kind of positive alternative through his discussion of “dwelling”. I put forward a reading of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and his embrace of “dwelling”. On my reading, Heidegger’s thinking centers on the idea that modern technology’s form of “world-disclosure” prevents human beings from encountering (and then l…Read more
  •  52
    Metalinguistic Negotiation and Matters of Language: A Response to Cappelen
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-25. forthcoming.
    In previous work, we have developed the idea that, in some disputes, speakers appear to use (rather than mention) a term in order to put forward views about how that term should be used. We call such disputes “metalinguistic negotiations”. Herman Cappelen objects that our model of metalinguistic negotiation makes implausible predictions about what speakers really care about, and what kinds of issues they would take to settle their disputes. We highlight a distinction (which we have emphasized in…Read more
  •  20
    Are societies required to pursue continual economic growth as a matter of justice? In “The Value of Economic Growth”, Julie Rose considers three arguments in favor of the need for continual economic growth, each of which revolves around the instrumental value of economic growth for promoting an important good that is needed for a just society. In each case, Rose argues that there are mechanisms other than economic growth that could allow a society to deliver the relevant goods, and thus meet the…Read more
  •  56
    Conceptual Ethics, Metaepistemology, and Normative Epistemology
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-33. forthcoming.
    This paper advertises the importance of distinguishing three different foundational projects about epistemic thought and talk, which we call “systematic normative epistemology”, “metaepistemology”, and “the conceptual ethics of epistemology”. We argue that these projects can be distinguished by their contrasting constitutive success conditions. This paper is motivated by the idea that the distinctions between these three projects matter for epistemological theorizing in ways that have been under…Read more
  •  29
    An important challenge for non-naturalistic moral realism is that it seems hard to reconcile it with the (purported) fact of our reliability in forming correct moral beliefs. Some philosophers (including Cuneo and Shafer-Landau) have argued that we can appeal to conceptual truths about our moral concepts in order to respond to this challenge. Call this “the conceptual strategy”. The conceptual strategy faces a problem: it isn’t clear that the relevant moral concepts are “extension-revealing” in …Read more
  •  115
    Conceptual Ethics and The Methodology of Normative Inquiry
    In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 274-303. 2019.
    This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around conce…Read more
  •  107
    Robust Normativity, Morality, and Legal Positivism
    In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence, Oxford University Press. pp. 105-136. 2019.
    This chapter discusses two different issues about the relationship between legal positivism and robust normativity (understood as the most authoritative kind of normativity to which we appeal). First, the chapter argues that, in many contexts when discussing “legal positivism” and “legal antipositivism”, the discussion should be shifted from whether legal facts are ultimately partly grounded in moral facts to whether they are ultimately partly grounded in robustly normative facts. Second, the ch…Read more
  •  484
    Quasi-Expressivism about Statements of Law: A Hartian Theory
    In John Gardner, Leslie Green & Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, vol. 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 49-86. 2018.
    Speech and thought about what the law is commonly function in practical ways, to guide or assess behavior. These functions have often been seen as problematic for legal positivism in the tradition of H.L.A. Hart. One recent response is to advance an expressivist analysis of legal statements (Toh), which faces its own, familiar problems. This paper advances a rival, positivist-friendly account of legal statements which we call “quasi-expressivist”, explicitly modeled after Finlay’s metaethical…Read more
  •  16
    Locating Practical Normativity
    Dissertation, University of Michigan. 2010.
    A central feature of ethical thought is that it appears to involve not only descriptive belief, belief about what is the case, but also normative belief about what should be done. Suppose we take this at face value and understand normative thought in ethics to consist of attitudes that, at the most basic explanatory level, are genuine beliefs. What then should we say about the basic nature of the normative properties that such beliefs are about? I argue that normative properties are complex natu…Read more