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Irrationality, charity, and ambivalenceIn Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds, Routledge. 2020.
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57What is Group Well-Being?Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (1). 2022.What is group well-being? There is, as of yet, shockingly little philosophical literature explicitly aiming to answer this question. This essay sketches some of the logical space of possible answers, and nudges us to seriously consider certain overlooked options. There are several importantly different ways the well-being of a collective or a group could be related to the well-being of the individuals who constitute it: 1) eliminativism, 2) functionalism, 3) partialism, or 4) the independent vie…Read more
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36McGrath, Sarah. Moral Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $65.00 (cloth)Ethics 131 (2): 398-402. 2021.
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49Guided by Voices: Moral Testimony, Advice, and Forging a 'We'Oxford University Press. 2021.We often rely on others for guidance about what to do. But wouldn't it be better to rely instead on only your own solo judgment? Deferring to others about moral matters, after all, can seem to conflict what Enlightenment demands. In Guided by Voices, however, Eric Wiland argues that there is nothing especially bad about relying on others in forming your moral views. You may rely on others for forming your moral views, just as you can your views about anything else. You can accept moral testimon…Read more
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22Williams on Thick Ethical Concepts and Reasons for ActionIn Simon Kirchin (ed.), Thick Concepts, Oxford University Press. pp. 210-216. 2013.Bernard Williams argued that philosophers should pay more attention to the role thick ethical concepts play in our moral thinking, and, separately, that all reasons for action depend in the first place upon the agent's pre-exisitng motives. Here I argue that these two views are in tension. Much like the standard examples of thick ethical concepts, the concept REASONABLE is likewise thick, and the features of the world that guide its correct use have much less to do with the agent's pre-existing …Read more
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2Rossian Deontology and the Possibility of Moral ExpertiseIn Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies Normative Ethics, Volume 4, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 159-178. 2014.It seems that we can know moral truths. We are also rather reluctant to defer to moral testimony. But it’s not obvious how moral cognitivism is compatible with pessimism about moral testimony. If moral truths are knowable, shouldn’t it be possible for others to know moral truths you don’t know, so that it is wise for you to defer to what they say? Or, alternatively, if it’s always reasonable to refuse to defer to the wisest among us, doesn’t this show that morality is not genuinely cognitive? Th…Read more
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343The Problem of Evil and the Grammar of GoodnessReligions 9. 2018.Here I consider the two most venerated arguments about the existence of God: the Ontological Argument and the Argument from Evil. The Ontological Argument purports to show that God’s nature guarantees that God exists. The Argument from Evil purports to show that God’s nature, combined with some plausible facts about the way the world is, guarantees (or is very compelling grounds for thinking) that God does not exist. Obviously, both arguments cannot be sound. But I argue here that they are b…Read more
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Psychologism and Anti-psychologism about Motivating ReasonsIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. pp. 197-213. 2018.People do things for various reasons. Are these motivating reasons psychological? I argue here that such reasons are typically not purely psychological. Yet there is an important psychological element or aspect of these reasons. I proceed by first reviewing some arguments for and against psychologism about (motivating) reasons. Next, I do the same for the view that reasons are typically non-psychological facts. I then explore some additional alternatives: a) disjunctivist views, b) the appo…Read more
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417Moral Advice and Joint AgencyIn Mark C. Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 8, Oxford University Press. pp. 102-123. 2018.There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to parry this worry about moral worth. The basic id…Read more
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24(En)joining OthersIn David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 64-84. 2013.This paper argues that under some conditions, when one person acts on the direction of another person, the two of them thereby act together, and that this explains why both the director and the directee can be responsible for what is done. In other words, a director and a directee can be a joint agent, one whose members are responsible for what they together do. This is most clearly so when the directive is a command. But it is also sometimes so when the directive is a bit of advice.
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118Should Children Have the Right to Vote?In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 215-224. 2018.No citizen should be denied the right to vote due solely to her age. We can see this by showing that all objections to it fail. It might be objected that it is not unjust to so deprive children because children as a group are unintelligent or irrational, have their interests already represented by the parents, or are justly deprived of many other rights, among other reasons. But all these objections fail because there is no evidence to support it, even if true, this would not justify disenfranch…Read more
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96Moral Testimony: Going on the OffensiveOxford Studies in Metaethics 12. 2017.Is there anything peculiarly bad about accepting moral testimony? According to pessimists, trusting moral testimony is an inadequate substitute for working out your moral views on your own. Enlightenment requires thinking for oneself, at least where morality is concerned. Optimists, by contrast, aim to show that trusting moral testimony isn’t bad largely by arguing that it’s no worse than trusting testimony generally. Essentially, they play defense. However, this chapter goes on the offensive. I…Read more
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33Peer Disagreement: Special CasesLogos and Episteme 9 (2): 221-226. 2018.When you discover that an epistemic peer disagrees with you about some matter, does rationality require you to alter your views? Concessivists answer in the affirmative, but their view faces a problem in special cases. As others have noted, if concessivism itself is what’s under dispute, then concessivism seems to undermine itself. But there are other unexplored special cases too. This article identifies three such special cases, and argues that concessivists in fact face no special problem.
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23Book ReviewJoseph Hamburger,. John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. 239. $35.00 (review)Ethics 111 (3): 637-638. 2001.
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36The Limits of MaximizationPolish Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 99-116. 2010.A nagging problem for the consequentialist is the fact that a person who chooses the action-option that seems to her to maximize good consequences all toooften does not produce consequences as good as she would have produced had she thought about her decision in some other fashion. In response, indirect consequentialists typically recommend that one take advantage of whatever benefits the employment of a nonconsequentialist decision procedure may provide. But I argue here that the consequentiali…Read more
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2Advice, Life-Experience, and Moral ObjectivityDissertation, The University of Chicago. 1997.Deliberation, whether by design or by default, is often portrayed by philosophers as monological; the contemporary philosopher's agent operates in the same milieu as the Cartesian doubter. But here philosophy is out of step with practice: when a person is in a quandary about what to do, he often turns not inward but outward, consulting others for advice. Sometimes he can completely evaluate the soundness of that advice on his own, but often he trusts the advice proffered, this in part because he…Read more
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50A Fallacy in Korsgaard's Argument for Moral ObligationJournal of Value Inquiry 34 (1): 103-104. 2000.
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84Some advice for moral psychologistsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (3). 2003.Recently, philosophers have employed the notion of advice to tackle a variety of philosophical problems. In particular, Michael Smith and Nomy Arpaly have in different ways related the notion of advice to the notion of a reason for action. Here I argue that both accounts are flawed, because each operates with a simplistic picture of the way advice works. I conclude that it would be wise to take more time to analyze what advice is and how it in fact works, before putting it to particular philosop…Read more
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120Intentional action and "in order to"Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 27 (1): 113-118. 2007.I. Thanks largely to Joshua Knobe, philosophers now frequently empirically investigate the folk psychological concept of intentional action. Knobe (2003, 2004a, 2004b) argues that application of this concept is often surprisingly sensitive to one’s moral views. In particular, it seems that people are much more willing to regard a bit of behavior as intentional, if they think that the action in question is bad or wrong. There is much controversy about both the design and the interpretation of the…Read more
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78Psychologism, practical reason and the possibility of errorPhilosophical Quarterly 53 (210). 2003.Psychologism is the view that practical reasons are psychological states. It is widely thought that psychologism is supported by the following principle governing explanation: TF. The difference between false and true beliefs on A's part cannot alter the form of the explanation which will be appropriate to A's actions. (TF) seems to imply that we always need to cite agents' beliefs when explaining their actions, no matter whether those beliefs are true or false. And this seems to vindicate psych…Read more
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122Unconscious violinists and the use of analogies in moral argumentJournal of Medical Ethics 26 (6): 466-468. 2000.Analogies are the stuff out of which normative moral philosophy is made. Certainly one of the most famous analogies constructed by a philosopher in order to argue for a specific controversial moral conclusion is the one involving Judith Thomson's unconscious violinist. Reflection upon this analogy is meant to show us that abortion is generally not immoral even if the prenatal have the same moral status as the postnatal. This was and still is a controversial conclusion, and yet the analogy does s…Read more
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95In the beginning was the doing: the premises of the practical syllogismCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (3): 303-321. 2013.(2013). In the beginning was the doing: the premises of the practical syllogism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 303-321
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14Metaethics and EthicsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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44ReasonsContinuum. 2012.When we say we 'act for a reason', what do we mean? And what do reasons have to do with being good or bad? Introducing readers to a foundational topic in ethics, Eric Wiland considers the reasons for which we act. You do things for reasons, and reasons in some sense justify what you do. Further, your reasons belong to you, and you know the reasons for which you act in a distinctively first-personal way. Wiland lays out and critically reviews some of the most popular contemporary accounts of h…Read more