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10‘Empathy and the boundaries of interpersonal understanding’ – introductionPhilosophical Explorations 27 (2): 123-127. 2024.One of the reasons why empathy is a topic of enduring interest is the role it can play in understanding others. Empathy can help us to predict each other’s future actions and explain past ones; to...
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3Empathising in online spacesPhilosophical Explorations 27 (2): 225-236. 2024.This paper aims to better understand and account for potential difficulties in empathising with each other in online spaces. I argue that two important differences between online and in-person communication are both to do with what information comes across in equivalent interactions. Firstly, there are ways in which less information comes across in online interactions (both consciously and unconsciously). Secondly, agents have greater control over what information comes across in online interact…Read more
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200Empathy, Motivating Reasons, and Morally Worthy ActionJournal of Value Inquiry 1-13. forthcoming.Contemporary literature criticises a necessary link between empathy and actions that demonstrate genuine moral worth. If there is such a necessary link, many argue, it must come in the developmental stages of our moral capacities, rather than being found in the mental states that make up our motivating reasons. This paper goes against that trend, arguing that critics have not considered how wide-ranging the mental states are that make up a person’s reasons. In particular, it argues that empathy …Read more
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71Morality without CategoricityEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 19 (2): 4-1. 2023.This paper argues that an agent’s moral obligations are necessarily connected to her desires. In doing so I will demonstrate that such a view is less revisionary—and more in line with our common-sense views on morality—than philosophers have previously taken it to be. You can hold a desire-based view of moral normativity, I argue, without being (e.g.) a moral relativist or error theorist about morality. I’ll make this argument by showing how two important features of an objective morality are co…Read more
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465The Division of Normativity and a Defence of Demanding Moral TheoriesEthical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (1): 3-17. 2022.Morality, according to some theories, demands a lot of us. One way to defend such demanding moral theories is through an appeal to the division of normativity; on this picture, morality is only one of the normative domains that guides us, so it should be expected that we often fail to follow that guidance. This paper defends the division of normativity as a response to demandingness objections against an alternative: moral rationalism. It does this by addressing and refuting three arguments: the…Read more
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20Christopher Woodard, Taking Utilitarianism Seriously (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. xii + 217 (review)Utilitas 34 (3): 363-366. 2022.
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117Attitudinal Theories of Pleasure and De Re DesiresUtilitas 33 (3): 361-369. 2021.This article has two main aims. First, it will defend an ‘attitudinal’ account of pleasure, that is, an account of what it is that makes an experience pleasurable for a subject that explains it in terms of a certain kind of de re desire that the subject has towards that experience. Second, in doing so, the article aims to further our understanding of unconscious desires, and of what the subjects of such desires can be. The article begins by introducing two existing accounts of what makes an expe…Read more
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250Reflective blindness, depression and unpleasant experiencesAnalysis 79 (4): 684-693. 2019.This paper defends a desire-based understanding of pleasurable and unpleasant experiences. More specifically, the thesis is that what makes an experience pleasant/unpleasant is the subject having a certain kind of desire about that experience. I begin by introducing the ‘Desire Account’ in more detail, and then go on to explain and refute a prominent set of contemporary counter-examples, based on subjects who might have ‘Reflective Blindness’, looking particularly at the example of subjects with…Read more
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175Supererogation and the Case Against an 'Overall Ought'American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2): 181-192. 2020.This paper argues against a kind of 'overall ought'. The main argument is a version of the paradox of supererogation. The problem is this: obligating an agent to do what’s overall best will, when that differs from what’s morally best, obligate the agent not to do what’s morally best. This, the paper will argue, is implausible. For each of four possible interpretations of this overall ought concept, it will either come across a form of this paradox or no longer look like the targeted ‘overall oug…Read more
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University of SalzburgPost-doctoral Fellow
Salzburg, Salzburg State, Austria
Areas of Specialization
Moral Normativity |
Pleasure and Pain |
Moral Psychology |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |