University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America
  •  1944
    A Guided Tour Of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics
    In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-26. 2019.
    In this Introduction, we aim to introduce the reader to the basic topic of this book. As part of this, we explain why we are using two different expressions (‘conceptual engineering’ and ‘conceptual ethics’) to describe the topics in the book. We then turn to some of the central foundational issues that arise for conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, and finally we outline various views one might have about their role in philosophy and inquiry more generally.
  •  1063
    Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms
    Philosophers' Imprint 13 (23): 1-37. 2013.
    In constructing semantic theories of normative and evaluative terms, philosophers have commonly deployed a certain type of disagreement -based argument. The premise of the argument observes the possibility of genuine disagreement between users of a certain normative or evaluative term, while the conclusion of the argument is that, however differently those speakers employ the term, they must mean the same thing by it. After all, if they did not, then they would not really disagree. We argue that…Read more
  •  805
    Non-Consequentialism Demystified
    with John Ku and Howard Nye
    Philosophers' Imprint 15 (4): 1-28. 2015.
    Morality seems important, in the sense that there are practical reasons — at least for most of us, most of the time — to be moral. A central theoretical motivation for consequentialism is that it appears clear that there are practical reasons to promote good outcomes, but mysterious why we should care about non-consequentialist moral considerations or how they could be genuine reasons to act. In this paper we argue that this theoretical motivation is mistaken, and that because many arguments for…Read more
  •  792
    Conceptual Ethics I
    Philosophy Compass 8 (12): 1091-1101. 2013.
    Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy…Read more
  •  703
    The Nature and Explanatory Ambitions of Metaethics
    In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 1-28. 2017.
    This volume introduces a wide range of important views, questions, and controversies in and about contemporary metaethics. It is natural to ask: What, if anything, connects this extraordinary range of discussions? This introductory chapter aims to answer this question by giving an account of metaethics that shows it to be a unified theoretical activ- ity. According to this account, metaethics is a theoretical activity characterized by an explanatory goal. This goal is to explain how actual …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
  •  422
    Legal Positivism and the Moral Aim Thesis
    Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 33 (3): 563-605. 2013.
    According to Scott Shapiro’s Moral Aim Thesis, it is an essential feature of the law that it has a moral aim. In short, for Shapiro, this means that the law has the constitutive aim of providing morally good solutions to morally significant social problems in cases where other, less formal ways of guiding the activity of agents won’t work. In this article, I argue that legal positivists should reject the Moral Aim Thesis. In short, I argue that although there are versions of the Moral Aim Thesis…Read more
  •  406
    Which Concepts Should We Use?: Metalinguistic Negotiations and The Methodology of Philosophy
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8): 828-874. 2015.
    This paper is about philosophical disputes where the literal content of what speakers communicate concerns such object-level issues as ground, supervenience, or real definition. It is tempting to think that such disputes straightforwardly express disagreements about these topics. In contrast to this, I suggest that, in many such cases, the disagreement that is expressed is actually one about which concepts should be employed. I make this case as follows. First, I look at non-philosophical, every…Read more
  •  385
    Many of us care about the existence of ethical facts because they appear crucial to making sense of our practical lives. On one tempting line of thought, this idea can also play a central role in justifying our belief in those facts. David Enoch has developed this thought into a formidable new proposal in moral epistemology: that the deliberative indispensability of ethical facts gives us epistemic justification for believing in such facts. This chapter argues that Enoch’s proposal fails because…Read more
  •  343
    Conceptual Ethics II
    Philosophy Compass 8 (12): 1102-1110. 2013.
    Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world, and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosoph…Read more
  •  298
    Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics are branches of philosophy concerned with questions about how to assess and ameliorate our representational devices (such as concepts and words). It's a part of philosophy concerned with questions about which concepts we should use (and why), how concepts can be improved, when concepts should be abandoned, and how proposals for amelioration can be implemented. Central parts of the history of philosophy have engaged with these issues, but the focus of …Read more
  •  214
    Metalinguistic Negotiation and Speaker Error
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2): 142-167. 2021.
    In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers – including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves – are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze …Read more
  •  186
    Expressivism, Representation, and the Nature of Conceptual Analysis
    Philosophical Studies 156 (1): 15-31. 2011.
    Philosophers often hold that the aim of conceptual analysis is to discover the representational content of a given concept such as freewill, belief, or law. In From Metaphysics to Ethics and other recent work, Frank Jackson has developed a theory of conceptual analysis that is one of the most advanced systematizations of this widespread idea. I argue that this influential way of characterizing conceptual analysis is too narrow. I argue that it is possible that an expressivist account could turn …Read more
  •  158
    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
  •  156
    In this paper, I argue that facts about the history or genealogy of concepts (facts about what I call “conceptual history”) can matter for normative inquiry. I argue that normative and evaluative issues about concepts (such as issues about which concepts an agent should use, in a given context) matter for all forms of inquiry (including normative inquiry) and that conceptual history can help us when we engage in thinking about these normative and evaluative issues (which I call issues in “concep…Read more
  •  152
    Metaethics and the Conceptual Ethics of Normativity
    with Tristram McPherson
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-34. forthcoming.
    This paper argues for the value of distinguishing two projects concerning our normative and evaluative thought and talk, which we dub “metanormative inquiry” and “the conceptual ethics of normativity” respectively. The first half of the paper offers a substantive account of each project and of the relationship between them. Roughly, metanormative inquiry aims to understand actual normative and evaluative thought and talk, and what (if anything) it is distinctively about, while the conceptual eth…Read more
  •  143
  •  143
    Reasons Internalism
    with Errol Lord
    In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 324-339. 2017.
  •  132
    In recent years, there has been growing discussion amongst philosophers about “conceptual engineering”. Put roughly, conceptual engineering concerns the assessment and improvement of concepts, or of other devices we use in thought and talk (e.g., words). This often involves attempts to modify our existing concepts (or other representational devices), and/or our practices of using them. This paper explores the relation between conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, where conceptual ethics …Read more
  •  129
    The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (edited book)
    with Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett
    Routledge. 2017.
    This Handbook surveys the contemporary state of the burgeoning field of metaethics. Forty-four chapters, all written exclusively for this volume, provide expert introductions to: 1) the central research programs that frame metaethical discussions, 2) the central explanatory challenges, resources, and strategies that inform contemporary work in those research programs, an 3) debates over the status of metaethics, and the appropriate methods to use in metaethical inquiry. This is essential reading…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
  •  113
    One of Ronald Dworkin's most distinctive claims in legal philosophy is that law is an interpretative concept, a special kind of concept whose correct application depends neither on fixed criteria nor on an instance-identifying decision procedure but rather on the normative or evaluative facts that best justify the total set of practices in which that concept is used. The main argument that Dworkin gives for interpretivism about some conceptis a disagreement-based argument. We argue here that Dwo…Read more
  •  106
    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
  •  91
    One of the central debates in legal philosophy is the debate over legal positivism. Roughly, positivists say that law is ultimately grounded in social facts alone, whereas antipositivists say it is ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts. In this paper, I argue that philosophers involved in the dispute over legal positivism sometimes employ distinct concepts when they use the term “law” and pick out different things in the world using these concepts. Because of this, what positi…Read more
  •  75
    It is not an exaggeration to say that Allan Gibbard is one of the most significant contributors to philosophy over the last five decades. Gibbard's work covers an impressive number of subfields within philosophy, including ethics, philosophy of language, decision theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. It also engages with, and makes significant contributions to, work from the natural and social sciences. This volume is not a collection of artifacts from past decades of philosophy. Instead, it is…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
  •  67
    The conceptual ethics of normativity involves normative reflection on normative thought and talk. One motive for engaging in this project is to seek to either vindicate or improve one’s existing normative concepts. This paper clarifies and addresses a deep challenge to the conceptual ethics of normativity, when it is motivated in this way. The challenge arises from the fact that we need to use some of our own normative concepts in order to evaluate our normative concepts. This might seem ob…Read more
  •  65
    In this article, we propose a novel account of general jurisprudence by situating it within the broader project of metanormative inquiry. We begin by showing how general jurisprudence is parallel to another well-known part of that project, namely, metaethics. We then argue that these projects all center on the same task: explaining how a certain part of thought, talk, and reality fits into reality overall. Metalegal inquiry aims to explain how legal thought, talk, and reality fit into reality. G…Read more
  •  64
    A Positivist Route for Explaining How Facts Make Law
    Legal Theory 18 (2): 139-207. 2012.
    In “How Facts Make Law” and other recent work, Mark Greenberg argues that legal positivists cannot develop a viable constitutive account of law that meets what he calls the “the rational-relation requirement.” He argues that this gives us reason to reject positivism in favor of antipositivism. In this paper, I argue that Greenberg is wrong: positivists can in fact develop a viable constitutive account of law that meets the rational-relation requirement. I make this argument in two stages. First,…Read more