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1168Well-Being as the Object of Moral ConsiderationEconomics and Philosophy 14 (2): 249. 1998.The proposal I offer attempts to remedy the inadequacies of exclusive focus on well-being for moral purposes. The proposal is this: We should allow the agent to decide for herself where she wants to throw the weight that is her due in moral reflection, with the proviso that she understands the way that her weight will be aggregated with others in reaching a moral outcome. I will call this the "autonomy principle." The autonomy principle, I claim, provides the consequentialist's best prospect for…Read more
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1101The Ethics of Eating MeatPhilosophic Exchange 46 (1). 2017.I explore the ethical issues involved in eating meat.
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927Disagreeing about how to disagreePhilosophical Studies 168 (3): 823-34. 2014.David Enoch, in Taking Morality Seriously, argues for a broad normative asymmetry between how we should behave when disagreeing about facts and how we should behave when disagreeing due to differing preferences. Enoch claims that moral disputes have the earmarks of a factual dispute rather than a preference dispute and that this makes more plausible a realist understanding of morality. We try to clarify what such claims would have to look like to be compelling and we resist his main conclusions.
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797The impotence of the demandingness objectionPhilosophers' Imprint 7 1-17. 2007.Consequentialism, many philosophers have claimed, asks too much of us to be a plausible ethical theory. Indeed, the theory's severe demandingness is often claimed to be its chief flaw. My thesis is that as we come to better understand this objection, we see that, even if it signals or tracks the existence of a real problem for Consequentialism, it cannot itself be a fundamental problem with the view. The objection cannot itself provide good reason to break with Consequentialism, because it must …Read more
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765Subjectivism and blameCanadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (5). 2007.My favorite thing about this paper is that I think I usefully explicate and then mess with Bernard Williams's attempt to explain how his internalism is compatible with our ordinary practices of blame. There are a surprising number of things wrong with Williams's position. Of course that leaves my own favored subjectivism in a pickle, but still...
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647Self-Ownership and the Conflation ProblemIn Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, . forthcoming.Libertarian self-ownership views in the tradition of Locke, Nozick, and the left-libertarians have supposed that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against infringing upon our property. Such a conception makes sense when we are focused on property that is very important to its owner, such as a person’s kidney. However, this stringency of our property rights is harder to credit when we consider more trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such havi…Read more
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605Pain for objectivists: The case of matters of mere tasteEthical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (4). 2005.Can we adequately account for our reasons of mere taste without holding that our desires ground such reasons? Recently, Scanlon and Parfit have argued that we can, pointing to pleasure and pain as the grounds of such reasons. In this paper I take issue with each of their accounts. I conclude that we do not yet have a plausible rival to a desire-based understanding of the grounds of such reasons.
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504Morality and virtue: An assessment of some recent work in virtue ethicsEthics 114 (3): 514-554. 2004.This essay focuses on three recent books on morality and virtue, Michael Slote's 'Morals from Motives', Rosalind Hursthouse's 'On Virtue Ethics', and Philippa Foot's 'Natural Goodness'. Slote proposes an "agent-based" ethical theory according to which the ethical status of acts is derivative from assessments of virtue. Following Foot's lead, Hursthouse aims to vindicate an ethical naturalism that explains human goodness on the basis of views about human nature. Both Hursthouse and Slote take vir…Read more
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494Advice for Non-analytical NaturalistsIn Simon Kirchin (ed.), Reading Parfit, Routledge. pp. 153-171. 2017.We argue that Parfit's "Triviality Objection" against some naturalistic views of normativity is not compelling. We think that once one accepts, as one should, that identity statements can be informative in virtue of their pragmatics and not only in virtue of their semantics, Parfit's case against naturalism can be overcome.
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489"Understanding the Demandingness Objection"In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.This paper examines possible interpretations of the Demandingness Objection as it is supposed to work against Consequentialist ethical theories.
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417Against direction of fit accounts of belief and desireAnalysis 61 (1): 44-53. 2001.The authors argue against direction of fit accounts of the distinction between belief and desire.
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305How to be a SubjectivistIn Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, Routledge. forthcoming.Subjectivism, desires, reasons, well-being, ethics
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300The Point of Self-OwnershipIn David Schmidtz & Carmen Pavel (eds.), Oxford Handbook on Freedom, Oxford University Press. pp. 124-40. 2018.I examine what the point of self-ownership might best be thought to be.
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273Backing Away from Libertarian Self-OwnershipEthics 123 (1): 32-60. 2012.Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counter-intuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people's rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this paper I consider t…Read more
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216Instrumental Rationality: Not Dead YetJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (1): 1-13. 2005.No abstract
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215Review of mark Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.I assess Schroeder's book Slaves of the Passions and isolate some grounds for concerns about the overall position.
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213The Limits of the Explanatory Power of DevelopmentalismJournal of Moral Philosophy 7 (4): 517-527. 2010.Richard Kraut's neo-Aristotelian account of well-being, Developmentalism, aspires to explain not only which things are good for us but why those things are good for us. The key move in attempting to make good on this second aspiration involves his claim that our ordinary intuitions about what is good for a person can be successfully explained and systematized by the idea that what benefi ts a living thing develops properly that living thing's potentialities, capacities, and faculties. I argue th…Read more
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169Pleasure as a Mental StateUtilitas 11 (2): 230. 1999.Shelly Kagan and Leonard Katz have offered versions of hedonism that aspire to occupy a middle position between the view that pleasure is a unitary sensation and the view that pleasure is, as Sidgwick put it, desirable consciousness. Thus they hope to offer a hedonistic account of well-being that does not mistakenly suppose that pleasure is a special kind of tingle, yet to offer a sharp alternative to desire-based accounts. I argue that they have not identified a coherent middle position
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167Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for ActionSocial Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 218. 2001.These days, just about every philosophical debate seems to generate a position labeledinternalism. The debate I will be joining in this essay concerns reasons for action and their connection, or lack of connection, to motivation. The internalist position in this debate posits a certain essential connection between reasons and motivation, while the externalist position denies such a connection. This debate about internalism overlaps an older debate between Humeans and Kantians about the exclusive…Read more
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159A robust hybrid theory of well-beingPhilosophical Studies 178 (9): 2829-2851. 2020.This paper articulates and defends a novel hybrid account of well-being. We will call our view a Robust Hybrid. We call it robust because it grants a broad and not subservient role to both objective and subjective values. In this paper we assume, we think plausibly but without argument, that there is a significant objective component to well-being. Here we clarify what it takes for an account of well-being to have a subjective component. Roughly, we argue, it must allow that favoring attitudes t…Read more
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157Desires, Motives, and Reasons: Scanlon’s Rationalistic Moral PsychologySocial Theory and Practice 28 (2): 243-76. 2002.
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112The Case for Stance Dependent ReasonsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (2). 2019.Many philosophers maintain that neither one’s reasons for action nor well-being are ever grounded in facts about what we desire or favor. Yet our reasons to eat a flavor of ice cream we like rather than one we do not seem an obvious counter-example. I argue that there is no getting around such examples and that therefore a fully stance independent account of the grounding of our reasons is implausible. At least in matters of mere taste our “stance” plays a normative role in grounding reasons.
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100Bayes and Blickets: Effects of Knowledge on Causal Induction in Children and AdultsCognitive Science 35 (8): 1407-1455. 2011.People are adept at inferring novel causal relations, even from only a few observations. Prior knowledge about the probability of encountering causal relations of various types and the nature of the mechanisms relating causes and effects plays a crucial role in these inferences. We test a formal account of how this knowledge can be used and acquired, based on analyzing causal induction as Bayesian inference. Five studies explored the predictions of this account with adults and 4-year-olds, using…Read more
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97Parfit's Case Against SubjectivismIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 6: Volume 6, Oxford University Press. 2011.I argue that Parfit's On What Matters does not make a compelling case against subjective accounts of reasons for action.
Syracuse, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |