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14Indifference, Indeterminacy, and the Uncertainty Argument for Saving Identified LivesJournal of Applied Philosophy. forthcoming.In some cases where we are faced with a decision of whether to prioritize identified lives over statistical lives, we have no basis for assigning specific probabilities to possible outcomes. Is there any reason to prioritize either statistical or identified lives in such cases? The ‘uncertainty argument’ purports to show that, provided we embrace ex ante contractualism, we should prioritize saving identified lives in such cases. The argument faces two serious problems. First, it relies on the pr…Read more
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15Risky Transplants and Partial Cures: Against the Objectivist View of Moral ObligationJournal of Value Inquiry 1-23. forthcoming.
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34Against the anti-closure response to the factivity problem for epistemic contextualismPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 27 (2). 2023.It appears that there is an inconsistency in combining epistemic contextualism with a plausible closure principle for knowledge and the view that knowledge is factive. I discuss the proposal that in order to avoid inconsistency the contextualist should reject closure and retain factivity. The proposal offers an alternative to closure and an argument that warrant fails to transmit through inference in the relevant cases. I criticize both accounts. The proposed alternative to closure is not well m…Read more
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17Self-affirmation in sled dogs? Affordances, perceptual agency, and extreme sportSport, Ethics and Philosophy 17 (4): 443-455. 2023.We argue that extreme endurance sport can be valuable for some nonhuman animals. To make the case, we focus specifically on dogsled racing. We argue that, given certain views about the nature of self-affirmation, perceptual agency, and affordances, sled dogs are capable of realizing significant value through extreme endurance running. Because our focus is on the axiological question of the nature of the value of the sport for its participants, we do not claim that extreme dogsledding is ethical;…Read more
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33Skeptical Theism, the Preface Paradox, and Non-Cumulative Inductive Evidence of Pointless EvilPhilosophia 50 (5): 2477-2496. 2022.This paper discusses an analogical argument for the compatibility of the evidential argument from evil and skeptical theism. The argument is based on an alleged parallel between the paradox of the preface and the case of apparently pointless evil. I argue that the analogical argument fails, and that the compatibility claim is undermined by the epistemic possibility of inaccessible reasons for permitting apparently pointless evils. The analogical argument fails, because there are two crucial diff…Read more
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38Understanding by Testimony: A Reply to MalfattiTheoria 86 (4): 528-534. 2020.Federica Malfatti criticizes recent arguments against the possibility of understanding transmission. While she offers no positive argument for the claim that understanding can be transmitted, she does defend a liberal conception of transmission that allows for the possibility of understanding transmission. In this article, I have three aims. First, I will show that there is a stronger version of one of the arguments against understanding transmission that Malfatti considers, which avoids her obj…Read more
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35Vicious competitiveness and the desire to winJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 43 (3): 409-423. 2016.This paper discusses the nature of competitiveness and argues that being competitive does not essentially involve a strong desire to win or to outperform others. The appeal of the ‘desire-to-win’ analysis of competitiveness can be explained away provided we distinguish between virtuous and vicious competitiveness. It is conceivable that a virtuously competitive athlete lack a strong desire to win or to outperform others. Moreover, there is empirical evidence that virtuous competitiveness and vic…Read more
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34Doping, Debunking, and Drawing the LineSport, Ethics and Philosophy 15 (2): 160-184. 2020.The current ban on certain performance enhancing substances in sport such as erythropoietin faces a line-drawing problem: what is the moral difference between taking an EPO injection to incre...
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37Contrastivism and Negative Reason ExistentialsThought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (1): 69-78. 2018.Snedegar offers a contrastivist solution to the puzzle about negative reason existentials, which he argues is preferable to Schroeder's own pragmatic solution. The proposed solution however raises a difficulty for contrastivism, as it suggests an alternative according to which the relevant contrast classes are determined not by the semantics of reason ascriptions but rather by pragmatic effects of contrastive stress. Nevertheless, I suggest there is a contrastivist-friendly solution to the puzzl…Read more
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30Salvaging Serviceability in MetaphysicsSouthwest Philosophy Review 30 (1): 105-115. 2014.We aren’t particularly sympathetic to modal realism (MR). Still, it isn’t clear to us that David Lewis argues for it in the wrong way. “The hypothesis is serviceable,” he says, “and that is a reason to think that it is true” (1986, p. 3). Let’s grant him the first claim: MR is serviceable, which is to say that it allows us “to reduce the diversity of notions we must accept as primitive, and thereby to improve the unity and economy of the theory that is our professional concern – total theory, th…Read more
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13Disagreement and Deep AgnosticismLogos and Episteme 12 (1): 29-52. 2021.One defense of the “steadfast” position in cases of peer disagreement appeals to the idea that it's rational for you to remain deeply agnostic about relevant propositions concerning your peer's judgment, that is, to assign no credence value at all to such propositions. Thus, according to this view, since you need not assign any value to the proposition that your peer's judgment is likely to be correct, you need not conciliate, since you can remain deeply agnostic on the question of how the likel…Read more
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39How Lewis Can Meet the Integration ChallengeJournal of Philosophical Research 44 129-144. 2019.We show that Lewis’s modal realism, and his serviceability-based argument for it, cohere with his epistemological contextualism. Modal realism explains why serviceability-based reasoning in metaphysics might be reliable, while Lewis’s contextualism explains why Lewis can properly ignore the possibility that serviceability isn’t reliable, at least when doing metaphysics. This is because Lewis’s contextualism includes a commitment to a kind of pragmatic encroachment, so that whether a subject know…Read more
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Texas State UniversityRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Sport |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Sport |