•  4085
    Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of morality
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 13 (2): 134-171. 1984.
    The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
  •  728
    Naturalism and Prescriptivity
    Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1): 151. 1989.
    Statements about a person's good slip into and out of our ordinary discourse about the world with nary a ripple. Such statements are objects of belief and assertion, they obey the rules of logic, and they are often defended by evidence and argument. They even participate in common-sense explanations, as when we say of some person that he has been less subject to wild swings of enthusiasm and disappointment now that, with experience, he has gained a clearer idea of what is good for him. Statement…Read more
  •  726
    Facts and Values
    Philosophical Topics 14 (2): 5-31. 1986.
  •  666
    Normative Guidance
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 1, Oxford University Press. pp. 3-34. 2006.
    I’ve been told that there are two principal approaches to drawing figures from life. One begins by tracing an outline of the figure to be drawn, locating its edges and key features on an imagined grid, and then using perspective to fill in depth. The other approach proceeds from the ‘center of mass’ of the subject, seeking to build up the image by supplying contour lines, the intersections of which convey depth—as if the representation were being created in relief. The second approach need not adop…Read more
  •  411
    Intuition—spontaneous, nondeliberative assessment—has long been indispensable in theoretical and practical philosophy alike. Recent research by psychologists and experimental philosophers has challenged our understanding of the nature and authority of moral intuitions by tracing them to “fast,” “automatic,” “button-pushing” responses of the affective system. This view of the affective system contrasts with a growing body of research in affective neuroscience which suggests that it is instead a f…Read more
  •  385
    Staying in touch with normative reality
    Philosophical Studies 151 (3). 2010.
  •  371
    Internalism for externalists
    Philosophical Issues 19 (1): 166-181. 2009.
    No Abstract
  •  350
    Reply to Justin D’Arms
    Philosophical Studies 126 (3): 481-490. 2005.
    Peer Reviewed.
  •  325
    A deductive-nomological model of probabilistic explanation
    Philosophy of Science 45 (2): 206-226. 1978.
    It has been the dominant view that probabilistic explanations of particular facts must be inductive in character. I argue here that this view is mistaken, and that the aim of probabilistic explanation is not to demonstrate that the explanandum fact was nomically expectable, but to give an account of the chance mechanism(s) responsible for it. To this end, a deductive-nomological model of probabilistic explanation is developed and defended. Such a model has application only when the probabilities…Read more
  •  290
    Coping with moral uncertainty (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3): 794-801. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  283
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  •  246
    In our everyday lives we struggle with the notions of why we do what we do and the need to assign values to our actions. Somehow, it seems possible through experience and life to gain knowledge and understanding of such matters. Yet once we start delving deeper into the concepts that underwrite these domains of thought and actions, we face a philosophical disappointment. In contrast to the world of facts, values and morality seem insecure, uncomfortably situated, easily influenced by illusion or…Read more
  •  240
    Reliance, Trust, and Belief
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (1): 122-150. 2014.
    An adequate theory of the nature of belief should help us explain the most obvious features of belief as we find it. Among these features are: guiding action and reasoning non-inferentially; varying in strength in ways that are spontaneously experience-sensitive; ‘aiming at truth’ in some sense and being evaluable in terms of correctness and warrant; possessing inertia across time and constancy across contexts; sustaining expectations in a manner mediated by propositional content; shaping the fo…Read more
  •  217
    Our notion of normativity appears to combine, in a way difficult to understand but seemingly familiar from experience, elements of force and freedom. On the one hand, a normative claim is thought to have a kind of compelling authority; on the other hand, if our respecting it is to be an appropriate species of respect, it must not be coerced, automatic, or trivially guaranteed by definition. Both Hume and Kant, I argue, looked to aesthetic experience as a convincing example exhibiting this marria…Read more
  •  212
    If practical reason is concerned with thoughtful normative regulation of action, then theoretical reason might be seen as a matter of thoughtful normative regulation of belief. The conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, we are told, is an act or intention to act; the conclusion of a piece of theoretical reasoning, by parallel, would be a belief or a belief-tendency. Because theoretical reason is understood to be responsive specifically to epistemic – not merely pragmatic – reasons for bel…Read more
  •  204
    Précis of Facts, Values, and Norms
    Philosophical Studies 126 (3): 429-432. 2005.
    Peer Reviewed.
  •  197
    Moral Explanation and Moral ObjectivityMoral Relativism and Moral Objectivity
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 175. 1998.
    What is the real issue at stake in discussions of "moral explanation"? There isn't one; there are many. The standing of purported moral properties and problems about our epistemic or semantic access to them are of concern both from within and without moral practice. An account of their potential contribution to explaining our values, beliefs, conduct, practices, etc. can help in these respects. By examining some claims made about moral explanation in Judith Thompson's and Gilbert Harman's Moral …Read more
  •  192
    Two cheers for virtue: or, might virtue be habit forming?
    Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 1 295-330. 2011.
    Traditional virtue-oriented approaches to ethics suppose that acquiring relatively stable character traits, such as courage and compassion, is crucial in addressing the question of how to be. However, recent psychological studies cast doubt on the idea that people develop such traits. In light of this pessimism, the paper raises the question: what is left of virtue theory? It argues that much remains once one shifts from a traditional understanding of virtues to one of cognitive/affective “if…th…Read more
  •  190
    That Obscure Object, Desire
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 86 (2): 22-46. 2012.
  •  180
  •  170
    Marx and the Objectivity of Science
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.
    Marx claims that his social theory is objective in the same sense as contemporary natural science. Yet his social theory appears to imply that the prevailing notion of scientific objectivity is ideological in character. Must Marx, then, either give up his claim of scientific objectivity or admit that he is engaged in a bit of ideology on behalf of his own theory? By suggesting an alternative way of understanding objectivity, an attempt is made to show that one can accept the implications of Marx…Read more
  •  145
    Reply to John Skorupski
    Utilitas 20 (2): 230-242. 2008.
  •  137
    Recent decades have witnessed a sea change in thinking about emotion, which has gone from being seen as a disruptive force in human thought and action to being seen as an important source of situation- and goal-relevant information and evaluation, continuous with perception and cognition. Here I argue on philosophical and empirical grounds that the role of emotion in contributing to our ability to respond to reasons for action runs deeper still: The affective system is at the core of the process…Read more