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5Elizabeth Anscombe on MurderJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 27 (3). 2024.The topic of murder was among Elizabeth Anscombe’s central preoccupations. Drawing on both her published writings and newly available archival resources, this paper reconstructs Anscombe’s theory of murder. I show that Anscombe was concerned to deny the semantic thesis that “murder” means “killing that is unjustified or impermissible” and I show how her theory surmounts three challenges that seem to support the semantic thesis. In doing so, I discuss her views on responsibility, the significance…Read more
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29Intention and Wrongdoing: In Defense of Double EffectCambridge University Press. 2021.According to the principle of double effect, there is a strict moral constraint against bringing about serious harm to the innocent intentionally, but it is permissible in a wider range of circumstances to act in a way that brings about harm as a foreseen but non-intended side effect. This idea plays an important role in just war theory and international law, and in the twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot invoked it as a way of resisting consequentialism. However, many moral p…Read more
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47Epistemological disjunctivism: Neo-Wittgensteinian and moderate neo-MooreanEpisteme 17 (4): 438-457. 2020.ABSTRACTDuncan Pritchard proposes a biscopic solution to the problem of radical skepticism, which consists in epistemological disjunctivism and a theory about the limits of rational evaluation inspired by Wittgenstein's On Certainty. According to the latter theory, we cannot have rationally grounded knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, a consequence that Pritchard finds attractive insofar as he thinks that claims to know the falsity of radical skeptical hypotheses are episte…Read more
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141Not all worlds are stagesPhilosophical Studies 116 (3): 309-321. 2003.The stage theory is a four-dimensional account of persistence motivatedby the worm theory's inability to account for our intuitions in thecases involving coinciding objects. Like the worm theory, it claimsthat there are objects spread out in time, but unlike the worm theory,it argues that these spacetime worms are not familiar particulars liketables and chairs. Rather, familiar particulars are the instantaneoustemporal slices of worms. In order to explain our intuitions that particulars persist …Read more
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26Circling to Scientia: Reading Descartes in Light of the Debate Between Stoic Dogmatists and Academic SkepticsJournal of the History of Philosophy 55 (1): 55-81. 2017.At the end of the Fifth Meditation, Descartes has the Meditator proclaim: “the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends uniquely on my awareness of the true God, to such an extent that I was incapable of perfect knowledge [perfecte scire] of anything else until I became aware of him”. Not so, complained the Second Objectors, for it seems an atheist can know, in the sense of being “clearly and distinctly aware,” that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. In response, Descart…Read more
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86Epistemological disjunctivism and easy knowledgeSynthese 192 (8): 2647-2665. 2015.Stewart Cohen argues that basic knowledge is problematic, as it implies that subjects can acquire knowledge or justified beliefs about certain matters in ways that are supposedly too easy. Cohen raises two versions of the problem of easy knowledge, one involving the principle of closure and the other track-record style bootstrapping reasoning. In this paper I confront the problem of easy knowledge from the perspective of epistemological disjunctivism about perception. I argue that disjunctivism …Read more
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49Felicitology: Neurath’s Naturalization of EthicsHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (2): 183-208. 2011.In this article, I aim to reconstruct Otto Neurath’s naturalistic program for practical philosophy. This program, which he calls “felicitology,” was intended as a version of ethics suitable for the “scientific worldview” of the logical empiricists. I begin by situating Neurath’s ethical concerns in the context of the debate between his fellow Austro-Marxists and the Marburg neo-Kantians. I then show why, contrary to many logical empiricists, Neurath thought that ethical considerations had an imp…Read more
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188From Volitionalism to the Dual Aspect Theory of ActionPhilosophia 41 (3): 867-886. 2013.Volitionalism is a theory of action motivated by certain shortcomings in the standard causal theory of action. However, volitionalism is vulnerable to the objection that it distorts the phenomenology of embodied agency. Arguments for volitionalism typically proceed by attempting to establish three claims: (1) that whenever an agent acts, she tries or wills to act, (2) that it is possible for volitions to occur even in the absence of bodily movement, and (3) that in cases of successful bodily act…Read more
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76A Critique of Scanlon on Double EffectJournal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2): 178-199. 2012.According to the Principle of Double Effect (PDE), there are conditions under which it would be morally justifiable to cause some harm as a foreseen side-effect of one's action even though it would not be justifiable to form and execute the intention of causing the same harm. If we take the kind of justification in question to be that of moral permissibility, this principle correctly maps common intuitions about when it would be permissible to act in certain ways. T.M. Scanlon argues that the PD…Read more
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70The Closeness Problem for Double Effect: A Reply to Nelkin and RicklessJournal of Value Inquiry 51 (1): 69-83. 2017.
University of Pittsburgh
PhD, 2011
Saint Paul, MN, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Epistemology |