•  24
    Virtue Ethics in Social Theory
    American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4): 329-340. 2023.
    Tommie Shelby has offered an influential, carefully stated, and well-argued set of objections to any volitional analysis of racism (VAR) as consisting centrally in certain forms of race-based disregard. Here I hope to defend aspects of VAR by analyzing, evaluating, and sometimes countering several of his major contentions, which have stood unchallenged in the literature over more than two decades. First, I sketch and respond to his Methodological objection to VAR, which criticizes VAR's reliance…Read more
  •  14
    White Nights of the Soul
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 9 (4): 82-117. 2006.
  •  24
    Some Mortal Questions
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6 (2): 125-133. 2003.
  •  15
    A Note on Religious Assent and Dissent
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4 (2): 160-177. 2001.
  •  15
    Death of the (Hand)maiden: Contemporary Philosophy in Faith and Reason
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 2 (3): 11-19. 1999.
  •  5
    Are Some People Better Off Dead?
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 2 (1): 68-81. 1999.
  •  8
    Risk and Protective Factors Associated to Peer School Victimization
    with Inmaculada Méndez and Cecilia Ruiz-Esteban
    Frontiers in Psychology 8. 2017.
  •  111
    The racial contract hypothesis
    Philosophia Africana 4 (1): 27-42. 2001.
  •  22
    The Idea of Human Rights (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 19 (2): 256-260. 2002.
  •  131
    Racism, Psychology, and Morality: Dialogue with Faucher and Machery
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 41 (2): 250-268. 2011.
    I here respond to several points in Faucher and Machery’s vigorous and informative critique of my volitional account of racism (VAR). First, although the authors deem it a form of "implicit racial bias," a mere tendency to associate black people with "negative" concepts falls short of racial "bias" or prejudice in the relevant sense. Second, such an associative disposition need not even be morally objectionable. Third, even for more substantial forms of implicit racial bias such as race-based fe…Read more
  •  19
    Methods and Findings in the Study of Virtues: Humility
    Philosophia 43 (2): 325-335. 2015.
    I sketch and respond to Ryan Byerly’s distinction between a Value-Based Approach to assessing proposed accounts of a virtue-here, humility-and what he calls a Counterexample Based Approach. My first section, on method, argues that, though distinct, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and answer different questions. Engaging his claim that the former approach is superior to the latter, I suggest that we apply Byerly’s own idea that there are different kinds of value to show, contra Byer…Read more
  •  55
    Lies and the Vices of Self-Deception
    Faith and Philosophy 15 (4): 514-537. 1998.
    This essay applies to the morality of lying and other deception a sketch of a kind of virtues-based, input-driven, role-centered, patient-focused, ethical theory. Among the questions treated are: What is wrong with lying? Is it always and intrinsically immoral? Can it be correct, as some have vigorously maintained, that lying is morally wrong in some circumstances where other forms of deliberate dissimulation are not? If so, how can that be? And how can it be that lying to someone is immoral whe…Read more
  •  22
    From Neighbor-Love to Utilitarianism, and Back
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 89 1-32. 2015.
    Contrasting loving our neighbors with utilitarians’ demand to maximize good reveals important metatheoretic structures and dynamics that I call virtues- basing, input drive, role centering, and patient focus. First, love (good will) is a virtue; such virtues are foundational to both moral obligations and the impersonally valuable. Second, part of loving is acting lovingly. Whether and how I act lovingly, and how loving it is, is a matter of motivation; this input-driven account contrasts with hi…Read more
  •  164
    Being unimpressed with ourselves: Reconceiving humility
    Philosophia 34 (4): 417-435. 2006.
    I first sketch an account of humility as a character trait in which we are unimpressed with our good, envied, or admired features, achievements, etc., where these lack significant salience for our image of ourselves, because of the greater prominence of our limitations and flaws. I situate this view among several other recent conceptions of humility (also called modesty), dividing them between the inward-directed and outward-directed, distinguish mine from them, pose problems for each alternativ…Read more
  •  71
    At the start of her vigorously argued and classic article, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” G. E. M. Anscombe stated three focal theses. First, that philosophers of the time needed to dispense with investigation into talk of what is morally right, wrong; permissible, forbidden, required; and of moral obligation or duty, what we morally ought to do. Second, there was no adequate philosophical psychology then available of the sort needed for doing good moral philosophy. Third, the differences among the …Read more
  •  34
    Identity confusions
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (7): 839-862. 2006.
    This article responds to logical and social theses proposed by Professor José Medina in discussing the relativity of identity. In exploring the metaphor of family resemblance, the author argues that its causal mechanism is biological, not social; particular features of being a woman, or of belonging to a racial or ethnic group, cannot be reduced to social constructions. The article skeptically discusses the supposed importance of sex, race, and ethnicity to a person’s individual identity, and su…Read more
  •  59
    Sin and Suffering in a Catholic Understanding of Medical Ethics
    Christian Bioethics 12 (2): 165-186. 2006.
    Drawing chiefly on recent sources, in Part One I sketch an untraditional way of articulating what I claim to be central elements of traditional Catholic morality, treating it as based in virtues, focused on the recipients (“patients”) of our attention and concern, and centered in certain person-to-person role-relationships. I show the limited and derivative places of “natural law,” and therefore of sin, within that framework. I also sketch out some possible implications for medical ethics of thi…Read more
  •  46
    A Volitional Account of Racist Beliefs, Contamination, and Objects
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 92 59-85. 2018.
    Prof. Alberto Urquidez, in an important recent article that appears in different form in his book, Redefining Racism, offers an informed, sustained, careful, multi-pronged, and sometimes original critique of the volitional analysis of racism, which I have proposed in a series of articles over the past two dozen years. Here I expand and improve VAR’s analysis of paternalistic racists and their beliefs, clarify its ‘infection’-model’s explanation of racism’s spread and variety, and lay out what it…Read more
  •  103
    Race as a Social Construction
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 26 115-133. 2019.
    This paper raises serious problems for the commonly held claim that races are socially constructed. The first section sketches out an approach to our construction of institutional phenomena that, taking Searle’s general approach, restricts social construction proper to cases where we adopt rules that bind relevant parties to treat things of a type in certain ways, thus constituting important roles in, and parts of, our social lives. I argue this conception, construction-by-rules, helps distingui…Read more
  •  2
    2. Death of the (Hand)maiden: Contemporary Philosophy in Faith and Reason
    Logos. Anales Del Seminario de Metafísica [Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España] 2 (3). 1999.
  •  6
    8. A Note on Religious Assent and Dissent
    Logos. Anales Del Seminario de Metafísica [Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España] 4 (2). 2001.
  •  16
    5. White Nights of the Soul: Chritopher Nolan's Insomnia and the Renewal of Moral Reflection in Film
    Logos. Anales Del Seminario de Metafísica [Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España] 9 (4). 2006.
  •  34
    The Game Between a Biased Reviewer and His Editor
    with Rosa Rodriguez-Sánchez and J. Fdez-Valdivia
    Science and Engineering Ethics 25 (1): 265-283. 2019.
    This paper shows that, for a large range of parameters, the journal editor prefers to delegate the choice to review the manuscript to the biased referee. If the peer review process is informative and the review reports are costly for the reviewers, even biased referees with extreme scientific preferences may choose to become informed about the manuscript’s quality. On the contrary, if the review process is potentially informative but the reviewer reports are not costly for the referees, the bias…Read more
  • La cuestion de Dios en Borges
    Aquinas 42 (n/a): 399-412. 1999.