•  2654
    Romantic Love and Loving Commitment: Articulating a Modern Ideal
    American Philosophical Quarterly 33 (4): 339-356. 1996.
    This essay presents an ideal for modern Western romantic love.The basic ideas are the following: people want to form a distinctive sort of plural subject with another, what Nozick has called a "We", they want to be loved for properties of certain kinds, and they want this love to establish and sustain a special sort of commitment to them over time.
  •  91
    A Note on Intention and the Doctrine of Double Effect
    Philosophical Studies 134 (2): 103-110. 2007.
    The purpose of this note is to tidy up some matters concerning ascriptions of intention and the employment of the doctrine of double effect (henceforth DDE). I first argue that Jonathan Bennett’s efforts to show that DDE is a foolish doctrine are unsatisfactory. I then consider a puzzle of Mark Johnston’s that seems to pose a problem for the defender of DDE. I turn to possible solutions to the puzzle, criticize one, and then offer the one I find most appealing. I then show how my proposal for em…Read more
  •  611
    Two Cheers for “Closeness”: Terror, Targeting and Double Effect
    Philosophical Studies 137 (3): 335-367. 2008.
    Philosophers from Hart to Lewis, Johnston and Bennett have expressed various degrees of reservation concerning the doctrine of double effect. A common concern is that, with regard to many activities that double effect is traditionally thought to prohibit, what might at first look to be a directly intended bad effect is really, on closer examination, a directly intended neutral effect that is closely connected to a foreseen bad effect. This essay examines the extent to which the commonsense conce…Read more
  •  835
    The Doctrine of Double Effect
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89 (3): 397-406. 2015.
    Abstract: This essay consists of some clarifying remarks on the doctrine of double effect (DDE). After providing a contemporary formulation of the doctrine we put special emphasis on the distinction between those aspects of an action plan that are intended and those that are merely foreseen (the I/F distinction). Making use of this distinction is often made difficult in practice because salient aspects of the action plan exhibit a felt “closeness” to one another that is difficult if not impossib…Read more
  • Essays on Ethics and Action
    Dissertation, Princeton University. 1997.
    This dissertation consists in three essays, one in ethics, one in action theory and one at the intersection of these fields. The first essay concerns romantic love, and makes explicit both the psychological needs people commonly expect it to service and the robust yet conditional commitment it demands. The basic ideas are the following: people regularly want to form an intimate union with another, to be loved for properties of certain sorts, and to have this love generate and sustain a distincti…Read more
  •  517
    What Romance Could Not Be
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84 (3): 589-598. 2010.
    This essay makes a number of distinctions between the motives of love and of duty, and argues that ideally they act in concert so as to generate constancy in loving relations. The essay revolves around a case in which a husband or wife is tempted to infidelity. It is argued that resistance to the temptation is optimally grounded in love for the spouse rather than simply in a duty to resist initiated perhaps through promise or vow. This is not, however, to undermine altogether the significance of…Read more
  •  2
    Kant’s Challenge: The Second Analogy as a Response to Hume
    Dialogue: Journal of Phi Sigma Tau 32. 1990.
    This paper takes off from Allison and argues that our ability to distinguish events from objects shifts the burden (or “challenge”) back to Hume as regards our concept of causation.
  •  44
    To Double Business Bound
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75 (4): 561-583. 2001.
    This paper has two aims. First, I explore the scope and limitations of the doctrine of double effect (DOE) by focusing specifically on the notion of "effect classification." Turning my attention to some hard cases, I argue that the DOE has to be supplemented by additional principles that specify how effects are to be discriminated from one another and how the various aspects of the relevant actions are to be classified as intended or simply foreseen. Secondly, I draw some general lessons from th…Read more