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An epistemic free-riding problem?In Philip Catton & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals, . pp. 128-158. 2004.
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264Group agency and supervenienceSouthern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1): 85-105. 2006.Can groups be rational agents over and above their individual members? We argue that group agents are distinguished by their capacity to mimic the way in which individual agents act and that this capacity must 'supervene' on the group members' contributions. But what is the nature of this supervenience relation? Focusing on group judgments, we argue that, for a group to be rational, its judgment on a particular proposition cannot generally be a function of the members' individual judgments on th…Read more
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799Ethical particularism and patternsIn Brad Hooker & Margaret Olivia Little (eds.), Moral particularism, Oxford University Press. pp. 79--99. 2000.
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883The Truth in DeontologyIn R. Jay Wallace (ed.), Reason and value: themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford University Press. 2004.
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Freedom and harmonyIn Chenyang Li & Dascha Düring (eds.), The Virtue of Harmony, Oxford University Press. 2022.
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Republican freedom, social justice, and democracyIn James Dominic Rooney & Patrick Zoll (eds.), Beyond Classical Liberalism: Freedom and the Good, Routledge Chapman & Hall. 2024.
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6An epistemic free-riding problem?In Philip Catton & Cynthia Macdonald (eds.), Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals, Routledge. pp. 128-158. 2004.
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154Social Contract Theory.Political Argument: A Reissue with a New Introduction.Rawls: `A Theory of Justice' and its Critics.Contemporary Political Philosophy: An IntroductionPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (168): 375-378. 1992.
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307Practical unreasonMind 102 (405): 53-79. 1993.Some contemporary theories treat phenomena like weakness of will, compulsion and wantonness as practical failures but not as failures of rationality: say, as failures of autonomy or whatever. Other current theories-the majority see the phenomena as failures of rationality but not as distinctively practical failures. They depict them as always involving a theoretical deficiency: a sort of ignorance, error, inattention or illogic. They represent them as failures which are on a par with breakdowns …Read more
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13Global ConsequentialismIn Brad Hooker, Elinor Mason & Dale E. Miller (eds.), Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 121--133. 2000.
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11External ReasonsIn 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.
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246Backgrounding desirePhilosophical Review 99 (4): 565-592. 1990.Granted that desire is always present in the genesis of human action, is it something on the presence of which the agent always reflects? I may act on a belief without coming to recognize that I have the belief. Can I act on a desire without recognizing that I have the desire? In particular, can the desire have a motivational presence in my decision making, figuring in the background, as it were, without appearing in the content of my deliberation, in the foreground? We argue, perhaps unsurprisi…Read more
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40Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2000.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
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29Reply to Critics of The Birth of EthicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.The critiques of The Birth of Ethics (henceforth BE) that my co-symposiasts have provided are of the very highest quality and I have benefitted enormously from thinking about them and considering h...
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20Precis of The Birth of EthicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.ABSTRACT“The Birth of Ethics”, which is summarized here, argues that creatures like us who lacked prescriptive concepts of a kind with desirability and responsibility would be robustly likely to develop practices of mutual commitment that would prompt the evolution of such concepts, giving them access to corresponding properties. That development and evolution would be explicable without reliance on prescriptive concepts, supporting a form of naturalistic realism about ethics.
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48A Morality Fit for HumansInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 32 (1): 132-145. 2023.There are a number of assumptions made in our accepted psychology of moral decision-making that consequentialism seems to violate:: value connectionism, pluralism and dispositionalism. But consequentialism violates them only on a utilitarian or similar theory of value, not on the rival sort of theory that is sketched here.
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111Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social RealityRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2003.Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers to the basic questions of social metaphysics, from a broad array of voices. It will interest all philosophers and social scientists concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory.
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29The State: A Response to Four InterlocutorsJournal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (2): 225-230. 2023.
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111On the many as one: A reply to Kornhauser and SagerPhilosophy and Public Affairs 33 (4). 2005.In a recent paper on ‘The Many as One’, Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory. How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind? How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity? We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense. But should we expect integration among the many in the legislature, for example, or among the many …Read more
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138Episteme symposium on group agency: replies to Gaus, Cariani, Sylvan, and BriggsEpisteme 9 (3): 293-309. 2012.Discussion Christian List, Philip Pettit, Episteme, FirstView Article
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936Aggregating sets of judgments: Two impossibility results comparedSynthese 140 (1-2). 2004.The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. A…Read more
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782Aggregating sets of judgments: An impossibility resultEconomics and Philosophy 18 (1): 89-110. 2002.Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that difficulty illustrates…Read more
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509Deliberation and DecisionIn Constantine Sandis & Timothy O'Connor (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: The Decision ‐ Theoretic Picture The Decision ‐ plus ‐ Deliberation Picture A Common Mistake References.
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8Analytical PhilosophyIn Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit & Thomas Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell. 2017.Analytical philosophy is philosophy in the mainstream tradition of the Enlightenment. Specifically, it is philosophy pursued in the manner of Hume and Kant, Bentham and Frege, Mill and Russell. What binds analytical figures together is that they endorse, or at least take seriously, the distinctive assumptions of the Enlightenment.
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7Rawls's PeoplesIn Rex Martin & David A. Reidy (eds.), Rawls's Law of Peoples, Blackwell. 2006-01-01.This chapter contains section titled: Rawls's Anti‐Cosmopolitanism Rawls's Ontology of Peoples Reconstructing Rawls's Rejection of Cosmopolitanism Acknowledgments Notes.
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2The Reality of Rule-FollowingIn Alexander Miller & Crispin Wright (eds.), Rule-Following and Meaning, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 188-208. 2002.
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4Participation, Deliberation, and We-thinkingIn Daniel I. O'Neill, Mary Lyndon Shanley & Iris Marion Young (eds.), Illusion of Consent: Engaging with Carole Pateman, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 185-204. 2008.
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49Review Essays: The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and PoliticsThe Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society and Politics (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (3): 689. 1995.The dustjacket of The Common Mind bears a photograph of the traffic at a Sydney intersection on a wet winter’s evening in 1938. It is rush hour, and the homeward traffic conveys a fine sense of common purpose. The scene has a special resonance for me, for I stood at that very spot with my parents and brothers one similar evening in 1966, on the day we first arrived in Australia. There was a marked pedestrian crossing there then, which we set out to negotiate, taking it for granted that the relev…Read more
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |