University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
DPhil, 1989
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory
  •  7
    Humeanism about Motivation
    In Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: References Further reading.
  • Review of Johnson, Lawrence, A Morally Deep World (review)
    Environmental Values 1 (1). 1992.
  •  6
    External Reasons
    In Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), McDowell and His Critics, Blackwell. 2006.
    This chapter contains section titled: Williams's Analysis of Internal Reasons Williams's Claim that All Reasons are Internal Reasons McDowell's Analysis of External Reasons.
  •  115
    Humeanism, Psychologism, and the Normative Story
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2): 460-467. 2003.
    Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is, I think, best understood as an attempt to undermine our allegiance to these two purported constitutive claims about action. If we must think that psychological states figure in the explanation of action then, according to Dancy, we should suppose that those psychological states are beliefs rather than desire-belief pairs. Dancy thus prefers pure cognitivism to Humeanism. But in fact he thinks that we have no business accepting any form of psychologism in th…Read more
  •  28
    What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. Th…Read more
  •  20
    The natural world’s myriad differences from human beings, and its apparent indifference to human purposes and ends, are often regarded as problems an environmental ethics must overcome. Perhaps, though, ecological ethics might instead be re-envisaged as a form of other-directed concern that responds to just this situation. That is, the recognition of worldly (in)difference might actually be regarded as a precondition for, and opening on, any contemporary ethics, whether human or ecological. What…Read more
  •  34
    Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological Ethics
    Environmental Ethics 29 (1): 23-41. 2007.
    The natural world’s myriad differences from human beings, and its apparent indifference to human purposes and ends, are often regarded as problems an environmental ethics must overcome. Perhaps, though, ecological ethics might instead be re-envisaged as a form of other-directed concern that responds to just this situation. That is, the recognition of worldly (in)difference might actually be regarded as a precondition for, and opening on, any contemporary ethics, whether human or ecological. What…Read more
  •  8
    The Working Landscape (review)
    Environmental Ethics 31 (1): 97-100. 2009.
  •  86
    The Structure of Orthonomy
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55 165-193. 2004.
    According to the standard story of action, a story that can be traced back at least to David Hume , actions are those bodily movements that are caused and rationalized by a pair of mental states: a desire for some end, where ends can be thought of as ways the world could be, and a belief that something the agent can just do, namely, move her body in the way to be explained, has some suitable chance of making the world the relevant way. Bodily movements that occur otherwise aren't actions, they a…Read more
  •  60
  •  119
    The main objection to non‐cognitivism explored in the philosophical literature to date has been semantic in nature. How can normative claims lack truth conditions when they have so many features in common with claims that have truth conditions? The main aim of this paper is to shift attention away from this dominant line of objection onto a range of other problems that non‐cognitivists face. Specifically, I argue that, contrary to the non‐cognitivists, normative claims do express beliefs, even b…Read more
  •  10
    Rethinking the Communicative Turn (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 36 (1): 215-216. 2004.
  • Rethinking the Communicative Turn (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 36 (1): 215-216. 2004.
  •  9
    ‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’
    with Joyce Davidson
    Body and Society 12 (1): 43-67. 2006.
    Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenome…Read more
  •  63
    Humean rationality
    In Piers Rawling & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 75--92. 2004.
    Smith begins by noting the isomorphism between the rational transition to a psychological state from others and the derivation of a concluding proposition from premises in the deductive theoretical realm, and he argues that this isomorphism led Hume to think that the rationality of the psychological transition is to be explained by the deductive validity of the derivation. Generalizing, Smith argues, Hume concluded that the concept of a reason—that is, the concept of a consideration that justifi…Read more
  •  22
    It has become commonplace to interpret 'Easter Island' in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others' edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as 'given' (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, …Read more
  •  61
    Environmental Risks and Ethical Responsibilities
    Environmental Ethics 28 (3): 227-246. 2006.
    The question of environmental responsibility is addressed through comparisons between Hannah Arendt’s and Ulrich Beck’s accounts of the emergent and globally threatening risks associated with acting into nature. Both theorists have been extraordinarily influential in their respective fields but their insights, pointing toward the politicization of nature through human intervention, are rarely brought into conjunction. Important differences stem from Beck’s treatment of risks as systemic and unav…Read more
  •  12
    Epharmosis
    Environmental Ethics 32 (4): 385-404. 2010.
    Concerns for the more-than-human world are consistently marginalized by dominant forms of philosophical and political humanism, characterized here by their unquestioning acceptance of human sovereignty over the world. A genuinely ecological political philosophy needs post-humanist concepts to begin articulating alternative notions of “ecological communities” as ethical and political, and not just biological realities. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of community, epharmosis, a largely defu…Read more
  •  32
    Epharmosis
    Environmental Ethics 32 (4): 385-404. 2010.
    Concerns for the more-than-human world are consistently marginalized by dominant forms of philosophical and political humanism, characterized here by their unquestioning acceptance of human sovereignty over the world. A genuinely ecological political philosophy needs post-humanist concepts to begin articulating alternative notions of “ecological communities” as ethical and political, and not just biological realities. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of community, epharmosis, a largely defu…Read more
  •  285
    In On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that facts about reasons for action are grounded in facts about values and against the view that they are grounded in facts about the desires that subjects would have after fully informed and rational deliberation. I describe and evaluate Parfit's arguments for this value-based conception of reasons for action and find them wanting. I also assess his response to Sidgwick's suggestion that there is a Dualism of Practical Reason. Parfit seems not to notice th…Read more
  •  19
    Environmental ethics should be understood as a radical project that challenges the limits of contemporary ethical and political expression, a limit historically defined by the concept of the citizen. This dominant model of public being, frequently justified in terms of a formal or procedural rationally, facilitates an exclusionary ethos that fails to properly represent our concerns for the non-human world. It tends to regard emotionally mediated concerns for others as a source of irrational and …Read more
  •  20
    Ecology, Community and Food Sovereignty: What's in a Word?
    with Jade Monaghan
    Environmental Values 27 (6): 665-686. 2018.
    'Food sovereignty' plays an increasingly important political role as a focus for grassroots agri-food organisations, such as La Via Campesina, in their attempts to contest the social injustices, health impacts and ecological damage resulting from the increasing global dominance of corporate/industrial agriculture. While not seeking to detract from the successes of such movements, there remain ethical, political and ecological concerns about just how the 'sovereignty' in food sovereignty is to be…Read more
  •  909
    Minimalism and truth aptness
    with Frank Jackson and Graham Oppy
    Mind 103 (411). 1994.
    This paper, while neutral on questions about the minimality of truth, argues for the non-minimality of truth-aptness.
  •  52
    Environmental Anamnesis: Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Extinction
    Environmental Ethics 23 (4): 359-376. 2001.
    Environmentalists often recount tales of recent extinctions in the form of an allegory of human moral failings. But such allegories install an instrumental relation to the past’s inhabitants, using them to carry moralistic messages. Taking the passenger pigeon as a case in point, I argue for a different, ethical relation to the past’s inhabitants that conserves something of the wonder and “strangeness of the Other.” What Walter Benjamin refers to as the “redemptive moment” sparks a recognition o…Read more
  •  4
    Edward Hyams: Ecology and Politics 'Under the Vine'
    Environmental Values 20 (1): 95-119. 2011.
    This paper offers an assessment of the agricultural eco-politics of Edward Hyams, novelist, gardener, historian, broadcaster and anarchist. It focuses in particular on his collaboration with the conservative writer on rural England, and founding member of the Soil Association, H.J. Massingham which resulted in a book, Prophecy of Famine — a fundamental critique of the effects of industrial capitalism on farming and a call for agricultural self-sufficiency and soil conservation. This collaboratio…Read more
  •  129
    Can we draw substantive conclusions about the reasons for action agents have from premisses about the desires of their idealized counterparts? The answer is that we can. The argument for this conclusion is Rawlsian in spirit, focusing on the choices that our idealized counterparts must make simply in virtue of being ideal, and inferring from these choices the contents of the desires that they must have. It turns out that our idealized counterparts must have desires in which we ourselves figure a…Read more
  •  73
    The power and the promise of deep ecology is seen, by its supporters and detractors alike, to lie in its claims to speak on behalf of a natural world threatened by human excesses. Yet, to speak of trees as trees or nature as something worthy of respect in itself has appeared increasingly difficult in the light of social constructivist accounts of “nature.” Deep ecology has been loath to take constructivism’s insightsseriously, retreating into forms of biological objectivism and reductionism. Yet…Read more