•  1
    Envy in the Philosophical Tradition
    with Alison Duncan Kerr
    In Richard Smith (ed.), Envy: Theory and Research. 2008.
  •  25
    Rational Sentimentalism
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Rational Sentimentalism develops a novel theory of the sentimental values. These values, which include the funny, the disgusting, and the shameful, are profoundly important because they set standards for emotional responses that are part of our shared human nature. Yet moral philosophers have neglected them relative to their prominence in human mental life. The theory is sentimentalist because it holds that these values are emotion-dependent—contrary to some prominent accounts of the funny and t…Read more
  • Sentimentalism and scientism
    In Justin D'Arms & Daniel Jacobson (eds.), Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2014.
  •  374
    Game theoretic explanations and the evolution of justice
    with Robert Batterman and Krzyzstof Górny
    Philosophy of Science 65 (1): 76-102. 1998.
    Game theoretic explanations of the evolution of human behavior have become increasingly widespread. At their best, they allow us to abstract from misleading particulars in order to better recognize and appreciate broad patterns in the phenomena of human social life. We discuss this explanatory strategy, contrasting it with the particularist methodology of contemporary evolutionary psychology. We introduce some guidelines for the assessment of evolutionary game theoretic explanations of human beh…Read more
  •  4
    Could Emotion Development Really Be the Acquisition of Emotion Concepts?
    Developmental Psychology 55 (9): 2015-2019. 2019.
    Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements, then raise a challenge for the approach. It appe…Read more
  •  41
    The literature on the wrong kind of reason problem largely assumes that such reasons pose only a theoretical problem for certain theories of value rather than a practical problem. Since the normative force of the canonical examples is obvious, the only difficulty is to identify what reasons of the right and wrong kind have in common without circularity. This chapter argues that in addition to the obvious WKRs on which the literature focuses, there are also more interesting WKRs that do not overt…Read more
  •  35
    Challenges for the Dynamic Functional Model of Jealousy
    Emotion Review 10 (4): 288-289. 2018.
    This comment on Chung and Harris presses for a clearer account of the motivational role of jealousy within the dynamic functional model of jealousy. It also calls into question the inclusion of “elaborated” jealousy within the emotion itself. It argues that differentiating emotional motivation from motivation toward the same goal that an emotion has requires additional resources.
  •  12
    Velleman on Reacting and Valuing
    Abstracta 8 (S7): 23-29. 2014.
  •  1
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics
    with Daniel Jacobson
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
  •  50
  •  10
    Prinz’s Theory of Emotion 1
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (3): 712-719. 2008.
  •  85
    The Moralistic Fallacy: On the “Appropriateness” of Emotions
    with Daniel Jacobson
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 65-90. 2000.
    Philosophers often call emotions appropriate or inappropriate. What is meant by such talk? In one sense, explicated in this paper, to call an emotion appropriate is to say that the emotion is fitting: it accurately presents its object as having certain evaluative features. For instance, envy might be thought appropriate when one’s rival has something good which one lacks. But someone might grant that a circumstance has these features, yet deny that envy is appropriate, on the grounds that it is …Read more
  •  88
    Relationality, Relativism, and Realism About Moral Value
    Philosophical Studies 126 (3): 433-448. 2005.
    Among the many virtues of Facts, Values and Norms, is the articulation of an especially subtle and detailed form of naturalistic value realism. The theory aspires to vindicate the objective purport of value discourse while granting, indeed insisting, that value is subjective in important respects. Evaluative thought and inquiry are understood to be continuous with empirical inquiry in the human sciences, so that ethical and evaluative conclusions can ultimately be defended on a posteriori ground…Read more
  •  23
    Prinz’s Theory of Emotion 1
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (3): 712-719. 2008.
  •  274
    Sensibility theory and projectivism
    In David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 186--218. 2006.
    This chapter explores the debate between contemporary projectivists or expressivists, and the advocates of sensibility theory. Both positions are best viewed as forms of sentimentalism — the theory that evaluative concepts must be explicated by appeal to the sentiments. It argues that the sophisticated interpretation of such notions as “true” and “objective” that are offered by defenders of these competing views ultimately undermines the significance of their meta-ethical disputes over “cognitiv…Read more
  •  162
    Anthropocentric Constraints on Human Value
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1 99-126. 2006.
    According to Cicero, “all emotions spring from the roots of error: they should not be pruned or clipped here and there, but yanked out” (Cicero 2002: 60). The Stoic enthusiasm for the extirpation of emotion is radical in two respects, both of which can be expressed with the claim that emotional responses are never appropriate. First, the Stoics held that emotions are incompatible with virtue , since the virtuous man will retain his equanimity whatever his fate. Grief is always vicious, both bad …Read more
  •  211
    Two Arguments for Sentimentalism
    Philosophical Issues 15 (1): 1-21. 2005.
    ‘Sentimentalism’ is an old-fashioned name for the philosophical suggestion that moral or evaluative concepts or properties depend somehow upon human sentiments. This general idea has proven attractive to a number of contemporary philosophers with little else in common. Yet most sentimentalists say very little about the nature of the sentiments to which they appeal, and many seem prepared to enlist almost any object-directed pleasant or unpleasant state of mind as a sentiment. Furthermore, becaus…Read more
  •  196
    Prinz’s Theory of Emotion (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (3): 712-719. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  131
    Value and the regulation of the sentiments
    Philosophical Studies 163 (1): 3-13. 2013.
    “Sentiment” is a term of art, intended to refer to object-directed, irruptive states, that occur in relatively transient bouts involving positive or negative affect, and that typically involve a distinctive motivational profile. Not all the states normally called “emotions” are sentiments in the sense just characterized. And all the terms for sentiments are sometimes used in English to refer to longer lasting attitudes. But this discussion is concerned with boutish affective states, not standing…Read more
  •  55
    Sex, fairness, and the theory of games
    Journal of Philosophy 93 (12): 615-627. 1996.
  •  72
    Envy
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  342
    VIII. The significance of recalcitrant emotion
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 127-145. 2003.
    Sentimentalist theories in ethics treat evaluative judgments as somehow dependent on human emotional capacities. While the precise nature of this dependence varies, the general idea is that evaluative concepts are to be understood by way of more basic emotional reactions. Part of the task of distinguishing between the concepts that sentimentalism proposes to explicate, then, is to identify a suitably wide range of associated emotions. In this paper, we attempt to deal with an important obstacle …Read more
  •  15
    Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics (edited book)
    with Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    This volume examines the implications of developments in the science of ethics for philosophical theorizing about moral psychology and human agency. These ten new essays in empirically informed philosophy illuminate such topics as responsibility, the self, and the role in morality of mental states such as desire, emotion, and moral judgement.
  •  15
    Sex, Fairness, and the Theory of Games
    Journal of Philosophy 93 (12): 615-627. 1996.
  •  159
    Empathy, Approval, and Disapproval in Moral Sentimentalism
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1): 134-141. 2011.
    This discussion explores the moral psychology and metaethics of Michael Slote's Moral Sentimentalism. I argue that his account of empathy has an important lacuna, because the sense in which an empathizer feels the same feeling that his target feels requires explanation, and the most promising candidates are unavailable to Slote. I then argue that the (highly original) theory of moral approval and disapproval that Slote develops in his book is implausible, both phenomenologically and for the role…Read more
  •  81
    When evolutionary game theory explains morality, what does it explain?
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (1-2): 296-299. 2000.
    Evolutionary attempts to explain morality tend to say very little about what morality is. If evolutionary game theory aspires not merely to solve the ‘problem of altruism', but to explain human morality or justice in particular, it requires an appropriate conception of that subject matter. This paper argues that one plausible conception of morality (a sanction-based conception) creates some important constraints on the kinds of evolutionary explanations that can shed light on morality. Game theo…Read more
  •  35
    Review: Relationality, Relativism, and Realism about Moral Value (review)
    Philosophical Studies 126 (3). 2005.