•  384
    Liar!
    Analysis 73 (4): 651-659. 2013.
    We have good reason to condemn lying more strongly than misleading and to condemn bullshit assertion less harshly than lying but more harshly than misleading. We each have good reason to mislead rather than make bullshit assertions, but to make bullshit assertions rather than lie. This is because these forms of deception damage credibility in different ways. We can trust the misleader to assert only what they believe to be true. We can trust the bullshitter not to assert what they believe to be …Read more
  •  305
    Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (1): 89-104. 2007.
    Gilbert Harman has argued that the common-sense characterological psychology employed in virtue ethics is rooted not in unbiased observation of close acquaintances, but rather in the ‘fundamental attribution error’. If this is right, then philosophers cannot rely on their intuitions for insight into characterological psychology, and it might even be that there is no such thing as character. This supports the idea, urged by John Doris and Stephen Stich, that we should rely exclusively on experime…Read more
  •  272
    Virtue, Character and Situation
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (2): 193-213. 2006.
    Philosophers have recently argued that traditional discussions of virtue and character presuppose an account of behaviour that experimental psychology has shown to be false. Behaviour does not issue from global traits such as prudence, temperance, courage or fairness, they claim, but from local traits such as sailing-in-rough-weather-with-friends-courage and office-party-temperance. The data employed provides evidence for this view only if we understand it in the light of a behaviourist construa…Read more
  •  260
    Webber argues for a new interpretation of Sartrean existentialism. On this reading, Sartre is arguing that each person’s character consists in the projects they choose to pursue and that we are all already aware of this but prefer not to face it. Careful consideration of his existentialist writings shows this to be the unifying theme of his theories of consciousness, freedom, the self, bad faith, personal relationships, existential psychoanalysis, and the possibility of authenticity. Developing …Read more
  •  237
    Sex
    Philosophy 84 (2): 233-250. 2009.
    The sexual domain is unified only by the phenomenal quality of the occurrence of the desires, activities, and pleasures it includes. There is no conceptual restriction on the range of intentional objects those desires, activities, and pleasures can take. Neither is there good conceptual reason to privilege any class of them as paradigmatic. Since the quality unifying the sexual is not morally significant, the morality of sexuality is no different from morality in general. The view that participa…Read more
  •  231
    Philosophers have recently argued that we should revise our understanding of character. An individual's behaviour is governed not by a set of ‘global’ traits, each elicited by a certain kind of situational feature, they argue, but by a much larger array of ‘local’ traits, each elicited by a certain combination of situational features. But the data cited by these philosophers support their theory only if we conceive of traits purely in terms of stimulus and response, rather than in the more tradi…Read more
  •  225
    Certain recent experiments are often taken to show that people are far more likely to classify a foreseen side-effect of an action as intentional when that side-effect has some negative normative valence. While there is some disagreement over the details, there is broad consensus among experimental philosophers that this is the finding. We challenge this consensus by presenting an alternative interpretation of the experiments, according to which they show that a side-effect is classified as inte…Read more
  •  213
    Character, attitude and disposition
    European Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 1082-1096. 2015.
    Recent debate over the empirical psychological presuppositions of virtue ethics has focused on reactive behavioural dispositions. But there are many character traits that cannot be understood properly in this way. Such traits are well described by attitude psychology. Moreover, the findings of attitude psychology support virtue ethics in three ways. First, they confirm the role of habituation in the development of character. Further, they show virtue ethics to be compatible with the situation ma…Read more
  •  201
    Constancy, Fidelity, and Integrity
    with Clea F. Rees
    In Stan van Hooft (ed.), , Acumen Publishing. pp. 399-408. 2013.
  •  183
    One of the characteristic features of Sartre’s philosophical writing, especially in Being and Nothingness, is his use of extended narrative vignettes that immediately resound with the reader’s own experience yet are intended to illustrate, perhaps also to support, complex and controversial claims about the structures of conscious experience and the shape of the human condition. Among the best known are his description of Parisian café waiters, who somehow contrive to caricature themselves, and h…Read more
  •  175
    Automaticity in Virtuous Action
    with Clea F. Rees
    In Nancy E. Snow & Franco V. Trivigno (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness, Routledge. pp. 75-90. 2014.
    Automaticity is rapid and effortless cognition that operates without conscious awareness or deliberative control. An action is virtuous to the degree that it meets the requirements of the ethical virtues in the circumstances. What contribution does automaticity make to the ethical virtue of an action? How far is the automaticity discussed by virtue ethicists consonant with, or even supported by, the findings of empirical psychology? We argue that the automaticity of virtuous action is automatici…Read more
  •  166
    Doing Without Representation: Coping with Dreyfus
    Philosophical Explorations 5 (1): 82-88. 2002.
    Hubert Dreyfus argues that the traditional and currently dominant conception of an action, as an event initiated or governed by a mental representation of a possible state of affairs that the agent is trying to realise, is inadequate. If Dreyfus is right, then we need a new conception of action. I argue, however, that the considerations that Dreyfus adduces show only that an action need not be initiated or governed by a conceptual representation, but since a representation need not be conceptual…Read more
  •  161
    Bad Faith and the Unconscious
    In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
    Freud's account of repression retains vestiges of the Cartesian model of the mind. Sartre's argument against Freud is essentially an objection to this Cartesian aspect, which Sartre's own theory of bad faith dispenses with.
  •  150
    Rethinking Existentialism
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Jonathan Webber articulates an original interpretation of existentialism as the ethical theory that human freedom is the foundation of all other values. Offering an original analysis of classic literary and philosophical works published by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon up until 1952, Webber's conception of existentialism is developed in critical contrast with central works by Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Presenting his arguments in an accessibl…Read more
  •  147
    Instilling Virtue
    In Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue, Oxford University Press. pp. 134-154. 2016.
    Two debates in contemporary philosophical moral psychology have so far been conducted almost entirely in isolation from one another despite their structural similarity. One is the debate over the importance for virtue ethics of the results of situational manipulation experiments in social psychology. The other is the debate over the ethical implications of experiments that reveal gender and race biases in social cognition. In both cases, the ethical problem posed cannot be identified without fir…Read more
  •  144
    Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The fourteen original essays in this volume focus on the phenomenological and existentialist writings of the first major phase of his published career, arguing with scholarly precision for their continuing importance to philosophical debate. Aspects of Sartre’s philosophy under discussion in this volume include: consciousness and self-consciousness imagination and aesthetic experience emotions and other feeli…Read more
  •  129
    Motivated aversion: Non-thetic awareness in bad faith
    Sartre Studies International 8 (1): 45-57. 2002.
    Sartre's concept of ‘non-thetic awareness’ must be understood as equivalent to the concept of ‘nonconceptual content’ currently discussed in anglophone epistemology and philosophy of mind, since it could not otherwise play the role in the structure of ‘bad faith’, or self-deception, that Sartre ascribes to it. This understanding of the term makes sense of some otherwise puzzling features of Sartre's early philosophy, and has implications for understanding certain areas of his thought.
  •  128
    There Is Something About Inez
    Think (27): 45-56. 2010.
    Hell is other people. This miserable-sounding soundbite, the moment of revelation in Jean- Paul Sartre’s shortest play, must be the most quoted line of twentieth-century philosophy. Not even Jacques Derrida’s claim that ‘there is nothing beyond the text’, fondly cherished in some regions of academia, has anything like the cultural reach of what is often taken to be the quintessential Sartrean slogan. And the analytic tradition hardly abounds in snappy lines: meaning just ain’t in the head, to be…Read more
  •  127
    Sartre’s critique of Husserl
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (1): 155-176. 2020.
    This paper articulates a new understanding of Sartre’s philosophical methodology in his early publications up to and including Being and Nothingness. Through his critique of Husserl across these works, Sartre develops an original and sophisticated variety of transcendental phenomenology. He was attracted to Husserl’s philosophy for its promise to establish the foundations of empirical psychology but ultimately concluded that it could not fulfil this promise. Through the analyses that led him to …Read more
  •  124
    Authenticity
    In Steven Churchill & Jack Reynolds (eds.), Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts, Acumen Publishing. 2013.
    I argue that Sartre's account of the nature and value of authenticity survives Larmore's recent criticism and is preferable to Larmore's alternative account.
  •  120
    Freedom
    In Sebastian Luft & Søren Overgaard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, Routledge. 2011.
    Human freedom was Jean-Paul Sartre’s central philosophical preoccupation throughout his career. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the cornerstone of his moral and political thought, Being and Nothingness, contains an extensive and subtle account of the metaphysical freedom that he considered fundamental to the kind of existence that humans have. Although rooted in phenomenology, Sartre’s account of freedom draws very little on analysis of the experience of freedom itself. It is rather bas…Read more
  •  113
    Habituation and first-person authority
    In Roman Altshuler & Michael Sigrist (eds.), Time and the Philosophy of Action, Routledge. 2016.
    Richard Moran’s theory of first-person authority as the agential authority to make up one’s own mind rests on a form of mind-body dualism that does not allow for habituation as part of normal psychological functioning. We have good intuitive and empirical reason to accept that habituation is central to the normal functioning of desire. There is some empirical support for the idea that habituation plays a parallel role in belief. In particular, at least one form of implicit bias seems better unde…Read more
  •  105
    Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, by SartreJean-Paul, translated by Sarah Richmond. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Pp. xlvii + 848.
  •  105
    Sartre's Theory of Character
    European Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 94-116. 2006.
    Various influential ethical theories propose that we should strive to develop morally sound character traits, either because good actions are those that issue from good character traits, or because good traits are those that generally incline us toward actions that are good for some independent reason such as the intentions with which they are performed or the consequences of performing them. This proposal obviously raises questions about the nature and origins of character traits, and our degre…Read more
  •  98
    Green-blooded passion (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 43 (50): 113-114. 2008.
    ‘Of all the difficulties which impede the progress of thought and the formation of well- grounded opinions on life and social arrangements’, wrote John Stuart Mill around 150 years ago, ‘the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect of the influences which form character’. Aristotle is never far in the background of Mill’s moral and political philosophy, a presence weightier than Jeremy Bentham’s in the foreground. That this is often overlooked is not only b…Read more
  •  93
    Character, consistency, and classification
    Mind 115 (459): 651-658. 2006.
    John Doris has recently argued that since we do not possess character traits as traditionally conceived, virtue ethics is rooted in a false empirical presupposition. Gopal Sreenivasan has claimed, in a paper in Mind, that Doris has not provided suitable evidence for his empirical claim. But the experiment Sreenivasan focuses on is not one that Doris employs, and neither is it relevantly similar in structure. The confusion arises because both authors use the phrase ‘cross-situational consistency’…Read more
  •  85
    Cultivating Virtue
    In Havi Carel & Darian Meacham (eds.), Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship Between Human Experience and Nature, Cambridge University Press. pp. 239-259. 2013.
    Ought you to cultivate your own virtue? Various philosophers have argued that there is something suspect about directing one’s ethical attention towards oneself in this way. These arguments can be divided between those that deem aiming at virtue for its own sake to be narcissistic and those that consider aiming at virtue for the sake of good behaviour to involve a kind of doublethink. Underlying them all is the assumption that epistemic access to one’s own character requires an external point of…Read more
  •  82
    Knowing One's Own Desires
    In Daniel Dahlstrom, Andreas Elpidorou & Walter Hopp (eds.), Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches, Routledge. pp. 165-179. 2016.
    Do you know your own desires in some way that other people cannot know them? Richard Moran claims that his influential theory of first-person authority over beliefs and intentions can also cover desires. However, his deliberative model can apply to desire only if one already has some other way of knowing one’s own desires. Jean-Paul Sartre’s conception of pure reflection, on the other hand, portrays a direct epistemic access to one’s own desires that can ground fundamental first-person authority…Read more
  •  75
    Reconstructing Alfie
    The Philosophers' Magazine (47): 61-66. 2009.
    Good stories tend to get told and retold, over and over again, mutating in the process. They adapt to different times and places, taking on and sloughing off embellishments as they are handed on. They persist through a kind of evolution. This is how it has always been and how it must be. Tales cannot survive otherwise. But this does not mean that all mutations are equally acceptable. For critical discussion is part of the environment in which stories survive. So it is not misplaced to criticise …Read more