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1Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical ApproachesPhilosophical Quarterly 48 (192): 426-426. 1998.
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9Normative GuidanceIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 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 a…Read more
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4Mill's Utilitarianism: Critical Essays (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1997.John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life
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105Experientialism and the Quality of a LifeAnalysis 83 (1): 146-158. 2023.The value of a life for the person living it has been conceptualized in various ways. One might begin by asking what intrinsically matters to a person, and then.
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7Lewis on Value and ValuingIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.David Lewis was ideally equipped for the venture. In his life he was a great celebrator of value, in ideas, arguments, music, history, trains, and, above all, sociability and humour. Indeed, the author suspects that, in his own life, desiring and valuing, and valuing and desiring, were intimately connected. Lewis rejects accounts of the valuing attitude in terms of judging to be valuable, taking to be valuable, believing to be valuable, or even experiencing as valuable. Conditional relationalism…Read more
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93Moral Explanation and Moral ObjectivityMoral Relativism and Moral ObjectivityPhilosophy 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
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56Commitment and Reasons – A Comment on Ruth Chang, ‘Three Dogmas of Normativity’Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (2): 220-230. 2023.Ruth Chang has argued convincingly that we must recognize that some choices will not involve strict, univocal comparison of options. How, then, can such choices be made well? Chang suggests that commitment is a fundamental way of ‘putting one's very self’ behind a normative consideration, thereby ‘endow[ing] that consideration with the normativity of a reason’. This view challenges what Chang deems to be three dogmas of normativity, and the current comment critically assesses the relation of her…Read more
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40Moral Relativism and Moral ObjectivityPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 175-182. 1998.
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Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of moralityIn Samuel Scheffler (ed.), Consequentialism and its critics, Oxford University Press. 1988.
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10Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 1996.What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, …Read more
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Internalism for externalistsIn Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Metaethics, Wiley Periodicals. 2009.
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1Nietzsche's normative theory? : The art and skill of living wellIn Simon Robertson & Christopher Janaway (eds.), Nietzsche, Naturalism & Normativity, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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72Normative Guidance, Evaluative Guidance, and SkillAnalyse & Kritik 43 (1): 235-252. 2021.At least since Aristotle, practical skill has been thought to be a possible model for individual ethical development and action. Jonathan Birch’s ambitious proposal is that practical skill and tool-use might also have played a central role in the historical emergence and evolution of our very capacity for normative guidance. Birch argues that human acquisition of motor skill, for example in making and using tools, involves formation of an internal standard of correct performance, which serves as…Read more
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39Comment on Susanna Siegel, The Rationality of PerceptionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3): 735-754. 2020.In Susanna Siegel’s compelling presentation of the case for the rationality of perception, a “significant part of the constructive defense” is played by the idea that there are “inferential routes to perceptual experience” (Siegel 2017, p. 94). Inferences, after all, are epistemically evaluable and bear on the rational standing of their conclusions. She argues that an obstacle to accepting this idea is a “Reckoning Model” of inference, and shows by example that we recognize as inferences various…Read more
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64Rationalization of emotion is also rationalBehavioral and Brain Sciences 43. 2020.Cushman seeks to explain rationalization in terms of fundamental mental processes, and he hypotheses a selected-for function: information exchange between “rational” and “non-rational” processes in the brain. While this is plausible, his account overlooks the importance – and information value – of rationalizing the emotions of ourselves and others. Incorporating such rationalization would help explain the effectiveness of rationalization and its connection with valuation, as well as raise a cha…Read more
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Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of MoralityIn James Rachels (ed.), Ethical Theory 2: Theories About How We Should Live, Oxford University Press Uk. 1998.
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23Le réalisme moralLes ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 11 (2-3): 171-212. 2016.Peter Railton,Denis Courville
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173Moral Learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevanceCognition 167 (C): 172-190. 2017.
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127Moral learning: Psychological and philosophical perspectivesCognition 167 (C): 1-10. 2017.The past 15 years occasioned an extraordinary blossoming of research into the cognitive and affective mechanisms that support moral judgment and behavior. This growth in our understanding of moral mechanisms overshadowed a crucial and complementary question, however: How are they learned? As this special issue of the journal Cognition attests, a new crop of research into moral learning has now firmly taken root. This new literature draws on recent advances in formal methods developed in other do…Read more
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147At the Core of Our Capacity to Act for a Reason: The Affective System and Evaluative Model-Based Learning and ControlEmotion Review 9 (4): 335-342. 2017.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
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62Author Reply: Affect, Value, Uncertainty, and ActionEmotion Review 9 (4): 354-355. 2017.Value and uncertainty are the critical components of decision and action. To think of the affective system as at the core of action is to draw attention to the role of affect in representing and combining these two dimensions, and orchestrating a wide range of mental capacities—attention, perception, memory, inference, motivation, and monitoring—in light of these evaluative representations. The commentators have helpfully enriched our appreciation of the various ways in which affect can contribu…Read more
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3Explaining Explanation: A Realist Account of Scientific Explanation and UnderstandingDissertation, Princeton University. 1980.The orthodox, empiricist covering-law account of scientific explanation, as developed by C. G. Hempel and others, has long dominated philosophical discussions of scientific explanation. In recent years it has met overwhelming critical resistance. We should give up this account of scientific ex
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101Preliminary draft of November 2010—please do not circulate without permission.
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212If 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
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12Red, bitter, goodIn Peter A. Railton (ed.), European Review of Philosophy, Volume 3: Response-Dependence, Stanford: Csli Publications. 1998.
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7Naturalistic Realism in MetaethicsIn Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 43-57. 2017.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |