•  44
    Moral Uncertainty and Distributive Sufficiency
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (4): 949-963. 2021.
    According to the sufficiency principle, distributive justice requires that everyone have some sufficient level of resources or well-being, but inequalities above this threshold have no moral significance. This paper defends a version of the sufficiency principle as the appropriate response to moral uncertainty about distributive justice. Assuming that the appropriate response to moral uncertainty is to maximize expected choiceworthiness, and given a reasonable distribution of credence in some fa…Read more
  •  38
    Expressivism, Moral Fallibility, and the Approved Change Strategy
    The Journal of Ethics 26 (1): 115-129. 2021.
    Blackburn’s “quasi-realism” aims to show that expressivism can accommodate the sorts of claims about moral truth, facts, objectivity, and the like that are found in ordinary moral thought and discourse. Egan argues that expressivists cannot accommodate certain claims about the possibility that one’s own fundamental moral commitments are mistaken. He criticizes what I call the approved change strategy, which explains that judgment in terms of the belief that one might change one’s mind as a resul…Read more
  •  50
    A Critique of Smith’s Constitutivism
    Ethics 127 (1): 116-146. 2016.
    Metaethical constitutivists attempt to explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. Michael Smith has recently defended a novel form of constitutivism that he argues provides a rational foundation for morality. This article develops three main objections centered on (1) the normative significance of Smith’s conception of ideal agency, (2) whether that conception begs the question in favor of the rationality of moral requirements, and (3) whether Smith’s constitutivi…Read more
  •  210
    Korsgaard's Arguments for the Value of Humanity
    Philosophical Review 127 (2): 197-224. 2018.
    In The Sources of Normativity and elsewhere, Korsgaard defends a Kantian ethical theory by arguing that valuing anything commits one to valuing humanity as the source of all value. I reconstruct Korsgaard’s influential argument to show how she can resist many of the objections that critics have raised. I also show how the argument fails because, at a crucial point, it begs the question in favor of the value of humanity. It thus fails for internal reasons that do not depend on rejecting Korsgaard…Read more
  •  84
    Self-validation and internalism in Velleman’s constitutivism
    Philosophical Studies 174 (11): 2667-2686. 2017.
    Metaethical constitutivists explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. In Velleman’s paradigmatic constitutivist theory, that is the aim of self-understanding. The best-known objection to constitutivism is Enoch’s shmagency objection: constitutivism cannot explain normativity because a constitutive aim of agency lacks normative significance unless one has reason to be an agent rather than a “shmagent”. In response, Velleman argues that the constitutive aim is self…Read more