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15Defining Moral RealismIn Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism, Oxford University Press. pp. 3-17. 2023.Wherever philosophers disagree, one of the things at issue is likely to be what they disagree about, itself. In addition to asking whether moral realism is true, and which forms of moral realism are more likely to be true than others, we can also ask what it would mean for some form of moral realism to be true. The usual aspiration of such inquiry is to find definitions that all can agree on, so that we can use terms in a uniform way. But we doubt that this aspiration is always possible, or even…Read more
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35The Fundamentals of ReasonsOxford University Press. 2024.The concept of a reason is now central to many areas of contemporary philosophy. Key theses in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of action, and the philosophy of the emotions, among others, have come to be framed in terms of reasons. And yet, despite their centrality, theorists seem to take inconsistent things for granted about how reasons work, what kinds of things can be reasons, what reasons favor, and more. Somehow reasons have come to be both indispensable and impenetra…Read more
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72Trials and Triumphs of University-Funded Open-Access PublishingJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (2). 2023.Mark Schroeder reflects on nine years of leading JESP, the continuing value of and challenges for the model of university-funded full-open access publishing in philosophy, and announces new leadership of and support for the journal.
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31Reply to Reasons LatestersPhilosophical Studies 181 (2): 637-648. 2024.It is an honor to receive such careful and attentive criticism. In this response, I attempt to put the criticisms of the reasons latesters into the context of my argumentative aims in the book and to point toward how they might be answered.
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30Précis of Reasons FirstPhilosophical Studies 181 (2): 603-606. 2024.This is an overview of the main themes and theses of _Reasons First_ for a book symposium, and intended to be read alongside the other contributions to that symposium.
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245Noncognitivism in EthicsRoutledge. 2010.According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest co…Read more
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213Narrative and Personal IdentityAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 96 (1): 209-226. 2022.In this paper I explore how and why personal identity might be essentially narrative in nature. My topic is the question of personal identity in the strict sense of identity—the question of which person you are, and how that person is extended in space, time, and quality. In this my question appears to contrast with the question of personal identity in the sense sought by teenagers and sufferers of mid-life crises who are trying to ‘find themselves’. But in fact it will be key to my argument tha…Read more
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188How Does the Good Appear To Us?Social Theory and Practice 34 (1): 119-130. 2008.This is a rough draft of a critical notice of Sergio Tenenbaum’s book, Appearances of the Good, for Social Theory and Practice.
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225Being Realistic About Reasons, by T.M. Scanlon: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. x + 132, US$35 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 195-198. 2015.
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101Why You'll Regret Not Reading This PaperRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 85 135-156. 2019.In this paper, I explore the role for anticipated regret in major life decision-making, focusing on how it is employed by realistic decision-makers in a variety of realistic cases. I argue that the most obvious answers to how regret might matter in decision do not make these cases intelligible, but that we can make them intelligible through consideration of the significance of narrative in our own self-understanding.
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330The fundamental reason for reasons fundamentalismPhilosophical Studies 178 (10): 3107-3127. 2021.Reasons, it is often said, are king in contemporary normative theory. Some philosophers say not only that the vocabulary of reasons is useful, but that reasons play a fundamental explanatory role in normative theory—that many, most, or even all, other normative facts are grounded in facts about reasons. Even if reasons fundamentalism, the strongest version of this view, has only been wholeheartedly endorsed by a few philosophers, it has a kind of prominence in contemporary normative theory that …Read more
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58Knowledge Is Belief For Sufficient (Objective and Subjective) ReasonOxford Studies in Epistemology 5. 2015.This chapter lays out a case that with the proper perspective on the place of epistemology within normative inquiry more generally, it is possible to appreciate what was on the right track about some of the early approaches to the analysis of knowledge, and to improve on the obvious failures which led them to be rejected. Drawing on more general principles about reasons, their weight, and their relationship to justification, it offers answers to problems about defeat and the conditional fallacy …Read more
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85Common Subject for EthicsMind 130 (517): 85-110. 2021.The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and explore what I shall call the Common Subject Problem for ethics. The problem is that there seems to be no good answer to what property everyone who makes moral claims could be talking and thinking about. The Common Subject Problem is not a new problem; on the contrary, I will argue that it is one of the central animating concerns in the history of both metaethics and normative theory. But despite its importance, the Common Subject Problem is esse…Read more
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249Sensory Modality and Perceptual ReasonsEpisteme 1-7. forthcoming.Perception can provide us with a privileged source of evidence about the external world – evidence that makes it rational to believe things about the world. In Reasons First, Mark Schroeder offers a new view on how perception does so. The central motivation behind Schroeder’s account is to offer an answer to what evidence perception equips us with according to which it is what he calls world-implicating but non-factive, and thereby to glean some of the key advantages of both externalism and inte…Read more
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66Reasons FirstOxford University Press. 2021.Reasons First explores the hypothesis that reasons have a basic explanatory role in ethics and epistemology. While widely accepted concerning moral worth, Schroeder argues that this idea also illuminates some long-standing puzzles to do with knowledge.
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12Expressing Our Attitudes: Explanation and Expression in Ethics, Volume 2Oxford University Press. 2015.When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightforwardly applied to the subject of metaethics. The philosophical research program of expressivism, emotivism's contemporary heir, has called this assumption into question. In this volume Mark Schroeder argues that the only plausible ways of developing expressivism or similar views require us to re-think what we may have thought that we knew about p…Read more
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323Treating like a childAnalytic Philosophy 63 (2): 73-89. 2020.Analytic Philosophy, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 73-89, June 2022.
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The Humean Theory of ReasonsIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume Ii, Clarendon Press. 2007.
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130Sins of ThoughtFaith and Philosophy 37 (3): 273-293. 2020.According to the Book of Common Prayer, we have sinned against God “in thought, word, and deed.” In this paper I’ll explore one way of understanding what it might mean to sin against God in thought—the idea that we can at least potentially wrong God by what we believe. I will be interested in the philosophical tenability of this idea, and particularly in its potential consequences for the epistemology of religious belief and the problem of evil.
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843Desiring under the Proper GuiseOxford Studies in Metaethics 14 121-143. 2019.According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of content determinat…Read more
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181The Importance of Being in a Position to KnowPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2): 457-462. 2020.
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1Value and the Right Kind of ReasonIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 5, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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480Attributing error without taking a standPhilosophical Studies 176 (6): 1453-1471. 2019.Moral error theory is the doctrine that our first-order moral commitments are pervaded by systematic error. It has been objected that this makes the error theory itself a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards of competing first-order moral theories :87–139, 1996) and Kramer. Kramer: “the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. It is not something that can adequately be contested or confirmed through n…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
History of Western Philosophy, Misc |