•  52
    Positive Psychology and Virtue: Values in Action
    Journal of Positive Psychology 14 (1): 1-5. 2019.
    This paper provides an overview of the issues and themes that were discussed on an interdisciplinary panel which occurred at the American Philosophical Association’s pacific division meeting in April of 2017. The panel focused on the connections between the VIA classification of virtues and character strengths in psychology and virtues and the Aristotelian approach to virtue in philosophy. Three key themes emerged from the papers presented at this panel: 1) the nature of the relationship between…Read more
  •  36
    Virtues as reasons structures
    Philosophical Studies 178 (9): 2785-2804. 2020.
    There is a certain kind of tension in recent accounts of the role of reasons in virtue ethics between two plausible claims that pull in different directions. First, that virtues are the central normative notion in virtue ethics; and second, that virtue is a kind of responsiveness to reasons: that reasons explain both what it is to act from virtue, and what the virtues are. I argue that this is a serious tension and necessitates a different account of the relationship between virtues and reasons;…Read more
  •  51
    The Necessity of Moral Reasoning
    Journal of Value Inquiry 52 (1): 37-57. 2018.
    A new variety of empirical skeptical moral arguments have been put forward in recent years, drawing on data from neuroscience, social and behavioral psychology, and economics, which strongly suggest that emotions play a central causal role in moral judgment, and that reasoning has at most a limited supplementary causal role in small portion of moral judgments. It follows from these empirical finding, it is argued, that moral judgments and morality more generally cannot be grounded in reason in t…Read more
  •  13
    Disclosure: Is It Enough?
    Hastings Center Report 33 (3): 4. 2003.
    This is a letter to the editor in response to “Bioethics Consultation in the Private Sector” by Baruch Brody et al. (HCR May-June, 2002). The letter argues that increased steps need to be taken to minimize potential conflicts of interest when bioethicists are paid to consult for pharmaceutical companies.
  •  121
    Reason and Emotion, Not Reason or Emotion in Moral Judgment
    Philosophical Explorations (3): 1-16. 2016.
    One of the central questions in both metaethics and empirical moral psychology is whether moral judgments are the products of reason or emotions. This way of putting the question relies on an overly simplified view of reason and emotion as two fully independent cognitive faculties whose causal contributions to moral judgment can be cleanly separated. However, there is a significant body of evidence in the cognitive sciences that seriously undercuts this conception of reason and emotion, and supp…Read more
  •  24
    Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization, written by Charles C. Camosy (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (3): 347-350. 2015.
    A review of Charles Camosy's book, Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization
  •  91
    Reason and Intuition in the Moral Life: A Dual-Process Account of Moral Justification
    In Jonathan Evans & Keith Frankish (eds.), In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 335--354. 2009.
    This chapter explores how morality can be rational if moral intuitions are resistant to rational reflection. There are two parts to this question. The normative problem is whether there is a model of moral justification which can show that morality is a rational enterprise given the facts of moral dumbfounding. Appealing to the model of reflective equilibrium for the rational justification of moral intuitions solves this problem. Reflective equilibrium views the rational justification of moralit…Read more
  •  144
    What is Moral Reasoning?
    Philosophical Psychology (1): 1-20. 2013.
    What role does moral reasoning play in moral judgment? More specifically, what causal role does moral reasoning have in the production of moral judgments? Recently, many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to answer this question by drawing on empirical data. However, these attempts fall short because there has been no sustained attention to the question of what moral reasoning is. This paper addresses this problem, by providing a general account of moral reasoning in terms of a capaci…Read more