•  140
    Realists about group agency, according to whom corporate agents may have mental states and perform actions over and above those of their individual members, think that individual agents may switch between participating in individual and corporate agency. My aim is, however, to argue that the inescapability of individual agency spells out a difficulty for this kind of switching – and, therefore, for realism about corporate agency. To do so, I develop Korsgaard's notion of plight inescapability. O…Read more
  •  132
    Zombies Incorporated
    Theoria 89 (5): 640-659. 2023.
    How should we understand the relation between corporate agency, corporate moral agency and corporate moral patienthood? For some time, corporations have been treated as increasingly ontologically and morally sophisticated in the literature. To explore the limits of this treatment, I start off by redeveloping and defending a reductio that historically has been aimed at accounts of corporate agency which entail that corporations count as moral patients. More specifically, I argue that standard age…Read more
  •  152
    Desire, Disagreement, and Corporate Mental States
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    I argue against group agent realism, or the view that groups have irreducible mental states. If group agents have irreducible mental states, as realists assume, then the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents features only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. But the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents does not feature only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. So corporate agents lack irreducible menta…Read more
  •  159
    Contingency, Sociality, and Moral Progress
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-20. forthcoming.
    A debate has recently appeared regarding whether non-naturalism is better than other metaethical views at explaining moral progress. I shall take the occasion of this debate to present a novel debunking dilemma for moral non-naturalists, extending Sharon Street's Darwinian one. I will argue that moral progress indicates that our moral attitudes tend to reflect contingent sociocultural and psychological factors. For non-naturalists, there is then either a relation between these factors and the mo…Read more
  •  408
    How Simple is the Humean Theory of Motivation?
    Philosophical Explorations 25 (2): 125-140. 2022.
    In recent discussions of the Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM), several authors – not to mention other philosophers around the proverbial water cooler – have appealed to the simplicity of the theory to defend it. But the argument from simplicity has rarely been explicated or received much critical attention – until now. I begin by reconstructing the argument and then argue that it suffers from a number of problems. Most importantly, first, I argue that HTM is unlikely to be simpler than even clo…Read more
  •  24
    The Constitution of Constitutivism
    Dissertation, University of Leeds. 2019.
    Why be moral? According to constitutivism, there are features constitutive of agency, actual or ideal, the properties of which explain why moral norms are normative for us. I aim to investigate whether this idea is plausible. I start off critically. After defining constitutivism and outlining its attractions and problems (chapter 1), I discuss the theories of various features of agency that are supposed to ground morality according to the leading constitutivists in the literature. I find these t…Read more
  •  258
    A Reason to Know
    Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (3): 557-575. 2023.
    It is often thought that desire-based versions of reasons internalism, according to which our practical reasons depend on what we desire, are committed to denying that we have any categorical reasons. I shall argue, however, that such theories are committed to a universal desire which gives rise to an unexpected categorical reason – a reason to know our surroundings. I will arrive at this conclusion by using Fichte’s argument for thinking that security from unpredictable and powerful forces of n…Read more
  •  368
    Reasons Internalism, Cooperation, and Law
    In Rachael Mellin, Raimo Tuomela & Miguel Garcia-Godinez (eds.), Social Ontology, Normativity and Law, De Gruyter. pp. 115-132. 2020.
    Argues that reasons internalism, suitably understood, explains categorical reasons for us to cooperate with each other. The norms we then cooperate to satisfy can lie at the heart of legal systems, yielding unexpected implications in the philosophy of law.
  •  246
    New Shmagency Worries
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (2): 121-145. 2019.
    Constitutivism explains norms in terms of their being constitutive of agency, actions, or certain propositional attitudes. However, the shmagency objection says that if we can be shmagents – like agents, minus the norm-explaining features of agency – we can avoid the norms, so the explanation fails. This paper extends this objection, arguing that constitutivists about practical norms suffer from it despite their recent attempts to solve it. The standard response to the objection is that it is se…Read more
  •  238
    Om Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance av Ryan Muldoon (review)
    Tidskrift För Politisk Filosofi 22 (1): 56-61. 2018.
    Review of Ryan Muldoon's book Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance (in Swedish).
  •  12
    Om rättfärdigandereflektion
    In Meri Alarcón, Matilda Amundsen Bergström, Tania Kaveh & Vilde Andrea Pettersen (eds.), Meningens motstånd, Göteborgs Universitet. pp. 35-39. 2014.
    Argues that the humanities are valuable (in Swedish).
  •  66
    The Foundations of Agency – and Ethics?
    Philosophia 44 (2): 547-563. 2016.
    In this article, I take off from some central issues in Paul Katsafanas’ recent book Agency and the Foundations of Ethics. I argue that Katsafanas’ alleged aims of action fail to do the work he requires them to do. First, his approach to activity or control is deeply problematic in the light of counterexamples. More importantly, the view of activity or control he needs to get his argument going is most likely false, as it requires our values to do work that they are too fickle to do. Second, I t…Read more
  •  186
    Om From Morality to the End of Reason av Ingmar Persson (review)
    Filosofisk Tidskrift 2016 (1): 60-65. 2016.
    Review of Ingmar Persson's book From Morality to the End of Reason (in Swedish).