• Bastiat on Economic Harmony
    Social Philosophy and Policy. forthcoming.
    Frederick Bastiat’s last work was the Economic Harmonies, published in 1851. He died while completing it, and — though it had some uptake in the 19th century — in recent times scholarly interest has focused on his other work. In the Harmonies, he makes a remarkable claim: when properly understood, in a free market society all people’s economic interests are in harmony. If we consider that Karl Marx was arguing at the same time that those same societies are afflicted by an endemic class struggle …Read more
  • Response-Dependent Realism
    In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism, Oxford University Press. pp. 465-83. 2023.
    Writers on metaethics divide over two conceptions of what moral realism comes to. The first of these —the “Modest” conception — commits to the truth-aptness of moral judgments. The second —the “Robust” conception — commits to the mind- or stance- or response-dependence of such judgments. In this paper I take up the relationship of response-dependent (RD) moral theories to these conceptions of realism. Some proponents of RD views see themselves as opponents of realism. On the Modest conception th…Read more
  • Doing Justice to Oneself
    In Glen Pettigrove & Christine Swanton (eds.), Neglected Virtues, Routledge. pp. 179-99. 2021.
    Rosalind Hursthouse wrote in 1999 (On Virtue Ethics, pp. 5-7) of a gap in virtue ethics in the shape of the virtue of justice. Many years on, that gap persists. Our aim is to make a beginning on that virtue, but here we find an obstacle in its treatment by Aristotle, whose thinking about the virtues we otherwise find so rich. Whereas Aristotle took the virtue of justice to be concerned exclusively with one’s treatment of others, we begin instead with the idea that justice also concerns how one t…Read more
  • After Aristotle's Justice
    In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 10, . pp. 32-55. 2020.
    To the extent we are curious about the virtue of justice as a virtue of character, we may start with Aristotle’s conception, but a fresh look at justice can, potentially, open avenues of thought in more than one direction. The fruits of interaction between Aristotelian and Kantian thought have been manifest in a wide variety of ways in recent years, and this essay aspires to rethink the virtue of justice in this light. It aims to offer a first cut at a conception of a virtue of justice that draw…Read more
  •  141
    Aristotelian constructivism
    Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (1): 182-213. 2008.
    The Kantian strain of practical constructivism (through Rawls, Korsgaard, and others) has been so influential that it is tempting to identify the constructivist approach in practical domains with the Kantian development of the outlook. In this essay, I explore a different variety of practical constructivism, what I call “Aristotelian constructivism”. My aim is to establish conceptual space for this form of constructivism by indicating in what ways Aristotelian constructivism agrees with its Kant…Read more
  •  63
    Eudaimonia as Fundamentally Good
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 97 (3): 386-400. 2020.
    In the ethical theories of the ancient Greeks, eudaimonia provided a grounding for the value of all other goods. But a puzzle for such views is that some things are good for us irrespective of the intervention of eudaimonia and its requirement of virtuous activity. In this article, the author considers challenges to the eudaimonist account of value on those grounds pressed by Nicholas Wolterstorff and Sophie Grace Chappell. The aim is ethical-theoretical, rather than historical. The author defen…Read more
  •  52
    Equality of Authority as the Aristotelian Common Good
    Journal of Value Inquiry 55 (3): 399-416. 2020.
    This paper reconsiders the relationship between the personal and the common good within an Aristotelian conception of the virtuous and happy life. Thinking about that relationship requires that we face up to a central tension in the Aristotelian ethical outlook. That approach is rooted in the value of eudaimonia — of living well, of happiness. That is something like the personal good. At the same time, on the Aristotelian picture no form of human life can be good if it is not one we can live wit…Read more
  •  33
    Justice (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Justice is a virtue that speaks to our time and has been sought and celebrated since it was conceptualized in ancient Greece. Foregrounding new and fascinating research in philosophy and psychology, as well as other empirical fields of study, the essays in this volume explore the breadth and significance of current understandings of justice, with an emphasis on justice as a virtue that individuals can cultivate in themselves and others.
  •  397
    Psychological Eudaimonism and Interpretation in Greek Ethics
    Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 287-319. 2012.
    Plato extends a bold, confident, and surprising empirical challenge. It is implicitly a claim about the psychological — more specifically motivational — economies of human beings, asserting that within each such economy there is a desire to live well. Call this claim ‘psychological eudaimonism’ (‘PE’). Further, the context makes clear that Plato thinks that this desire dominates in those who have it. In other words, the desire to live well can reliably be counted on (when accompanied with correc…Read more
  •  31
    Talbot Brewer seeks to follow Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Alasdair MacIntyre in "retrieving" philosophical ethics from the grip of bad questions and worse answers. This is an ambitious aim, and Brewer may not entirely succeed. But if he falls short it is in an intelligent, rich, and fecund way. It is what moral philosophy can be like at its best.
  •  12
    In this book Genevieve Lloyd undertakes an expansive and ambitious survey of the notion of providence and related concepts, effectively throughout the recorded history of Western civilization. In any work of a scope this ambitious, there are bound to be both omissions and problematic elements of interpretation; the only question is whether or not these are sufficient to undermine the positive philosophical work that the survey accomplishes. The answer in this case is a resounding ‘no.’ Lloyd’s b…Read more
  •  96
    Shaping the Normative Landscape. By David Owens (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253): 851-853. 2013.
    David Owens argues that we have interests in purely normative phenomena—in particular, in being obligated. That is, obligation is valuable not merely because our more obvious and non-normative interests are served via being obligated and doing what we are obligated to do, but because the various ways in which we obligate ourselves to others, and they to us, are valuable in and of themselves. This is our ‘normative landscape’, and we shape that landscape through our various normative undertakings…Read more
  •  277
    Teichmann’s book is a contemplative study of issues in ethics and language, in two senses. First, it is characteristic of the style of the book, which is as much ruminative as argumentative. Second, a consistent theme in the book is the significance of what Teichmann takes Aristotle to be after in advocating a life of contemplation as our highest end. Early on Teichmann reminds us of Wittgenstein’s references to ‘pictures’ or ‘ways of seeing’ things that frame the questions we ask and determine …Read more
  •  454
    The virtue of justice revisited
    In Stan van Hooft & Nafsika Athanassoulis (eds.), The Handbook of Virtue Ethics, Acumen Publishing. 2014.
    Some of the earliest Western ideas about the virtues of character gave justice a prominent position, but if moral philosophy has made any progress at all in the past two centuries, we might think it worthwhile to reconsider what that virtue involves. Kant seems (even to most non-Kantians) to have crystallized something important to our relations with others in formulating a proscription against treating others merely as means. And twentieth-century moral and political theory put the justice of s…Read more
  •  65
    Prichard vs. Plato: Intuition vs. reflection
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (5). 2007.
    This paper addresses a complaint, by Prichard, against Plato and other ancients. The charge is that they commit a mistake is in thinking that we are capable of giving reasons for the requirements of duty, rather than directly and immediately apprehending those requirements. I respond in two ways. First, Plato does not make the egregious mistake of substituting interest for duty, and thus giving the wrong kind of reason for duty’s requirements, as Prichard alleges. Second, we should see that the …Read more
  •  57
    Ends
    Social Theory and Practice 30 (4): 507-533. 2004.
    Rationalist opponents of Instrumentalism believe that reason can and should play some further role in determining our ends. Instrumentalists deny this: reason can generate only reasons for taking the necessary means to ends established antecedently by conative states. I argue that Instrumentalism cannot make adequate sense of the notion of ends. Instrumentalism requires a non-rational way of identifying ends and ascribing rational force to them, and there appears to be none consistent with Instr…Read more
  •  929
    Virtue Ethics and the Interests of Others
    Dissertation, The University of Arizona. 1999.
    In recent decades "virtue ethics" has become an accepted theoretical structure for thinking about normative ethical principles. However, few contemporary virtue ethicists endorse the commitments of the first virtue theorists---the ancient Greeks, who developed their virtue theories within a commitment to eudaimonism. Why? I believe the objections of modern theorists boil down to concerns that eudaimonist theories cannot properly account for two prominent moral requirements on our treatment of ot…Read more
  •  91
    Three Dogmas of Response-Dependence
    Philosophical Studies 123 (3): 175-211. 2005.
    Response-dependent accounts of value claim that to understand what we are saying about the objects of our value judgments, we must take into account the responses those objects provoke. Recent discussions of the proposal that value is response-dependent are obscured by dogmas about response-dependence, that (1) response-dependency must be known a priori, (2) must hold necessarily, and (3) the terms involved must designate rigidly. These “dogmas” stand in the way of formulating and assessing a cl…Read more
  •  81
    Good for You
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (2). 2004.
    Theories of human well-being struggle with a tension between opposing intuitions: on the one hand, that our welfare is subjectively determined by us as individuals, and on the other that there are objective constraints on what can count as our good. I argue that accounts driven primarily by subjectivist intuitions fail to come to grips with the signific-ance of objectivist intuitions, by failing to explain where our objectivist intuitions come from and why they are important, and defend an alter…Read more
  •  236
    Aristotelian constructivism
    Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (1): 182-213. 2008.
    Constructivism about practical judgments, as I understand it, is the notion that our true normative judgments represent a normative reality, while denying that that reality is independent of our exer-cise of moral and practical judgment. The Kantian strain of practical constructivism (through Kant himself, John Rawls, Christine Korsgaard, and others) has been so influential that it is tempting to identify the constructivist approach in practical domains with the Kantian development of the out-lo…Read more
  •  51
    Virtue and politics
    In Daniel C. Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 265. 2013.
    Various theorists have offered accounts of how a virtue ethical theory might inform a political theory — here meaning a theory of political legitimacy and authority. These theories claim to support a liberal regimen of authority, and they do, but only to a limited extent. -/- What they cannot support is a justificatory liberal authority structure. Each of the accounts given would authorize coercive force to impose on holders of other theories decisions counter to the values endorsed by those oth…Read more
  •  14
    Prichard vs. Plato: Intuition vs. Reflection
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 33 (sup1): 1-32. 2007.
    The project of this paper is to address a complaint, by Prichard, against Plato and other ancients, as committing a basic “mistake” in moral philosophy. The basic mistake is in thinking that we are capable of giving reasons for the requirements of duty, rather than directly and immediately apprehending those requirements. Prichard’s argument that this is a mistake consists in an argument that attempts to give reasons for such requirements always fail. He classes those attempts into two kinds, an…Read more
  •  41
    Eudaimonist Autonomy
    American Philosophical Quarterly 42 (3). 2005.
    Kant claims that autonomy is possible only if the law that determines the will disregards any incentive grounded in the natural world. Here I develop and defend an alternative notion of autonomy, drawn from the ancient eudaimonists, on which practical reason is grounded in our interest in living well. This allows eudaimonism a conception of the autonomy of the will in which (like Kant’s) the will is the source of its own laws, but in which (unlike Kant’s) it has an object that is thoroughly sit…Read more
  •  75
    Well-Being and Eudaimonia
    with Daniel Russell
    In Julia Peters (ed.), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective, Routledge. pp. 52. 2013.
    Daniel Haybron’s recent book, The Pursuit of Unhappiness, includes a defense of a normative notion of well-being. Haybron’s main contribution is to argue that a central component of well-being is the fulfillment of one’s “emotional nature,” that is, fulfillment as a unique individual who is such as to find happiness in some things rather than others. We argue that the contrast he draws between his view and “Aristotelian” views of well-being is problematic in two ways. First, Haybron says that un…Read more
  •  32
    Tara Smith, viable values (review)
    Journal of Value Inquiry 35 (4): 575-579. 2001.
  •  62
    Kant on Welfare
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (2). 1999.
    Kant’s moral theory is sometimes thought to mandate public welfare provision on grounds of beneficence or Kant’s commitment to freedom. However, at no point does Kant argue for welfare in these ways. Instead, the rationale he offers is that public welfare provision is instrumentally necessary for the security and the stability of the state. I argue that this is no oversight on Kant’s part. I consider plausible alternative arguments for public welfare provision, and show why Kant does not espouse…Read more
  •  44
    Virtue and Second-Personal Reasons: A Reply to Cokelet
    Ethics 126 (1): 162-174. 2015.
    In “Two-Level Eudaimonism and Second-Personal Reasons,” Bradford Cokelet argues that we should reject one strategy—one I advanced earlier in this journal—for reconciling a virtue-ethical theoretical framework with that part of our moral experience that has been described as second-personal reasons. Cokelet frames a number of related objections to that strategy, and his concerns are worth taking up. Addressing them provides an opportunity both to revisit and develop the model bruited in my earlie…Read more
  •  193
    Review: Development and Reasons (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 58 (233). 2008.
    No Abs Richard Kraut’s What is Good and Why is a development and defense of devel-opmentalism. But Kraut’s approach renders problematic the relationship between good-for and reasons for action. One consequence is uncertainty as to how exactly anybody’s good becomes reason-giving for us, given that there is no immediate connection between anyone’s good and reasons for action. A further problem can be seen in trying to identify a basis for thinking we are beings entitled to respect. Finally, Kraut…Read more
  •  19
    Equality and Public Policy: Volume 31, Part 2 (edited book)
    with Antony Davies, David Schmidtz, and Miller Jr
    Cambridge University Press. 2015.
    If ever there were a time in which concerns about equality as a primary issue for social policy disappeared from public view, now is not that time. Recent work in economics on inequality has climbed to the top of best-sellers lists, and the issue was a major talking point in American midterm elections in 2014. The sheer bewildering volume of scholarship and discussion of equality makes it difficult to distinguish signal from noise. What, of all that we know about ways in which we are equal and w…Read more