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249The Fine-Tuning Argument Against the MultiversePhilosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.It is commonly argued that the fact that our universe is fine-tuned for life favors both a design hypothesis as well as a non-teleological multiverse hypothesis. The claim that the fine-tuning of this universe supports a non-teleological multiverse hypothesis has been forcefully challenged however by Ian Hacking and Roger White. In this paper we take this challenge even further by arguing that if it succeeds, then not only does the fine-tuning of this universe fail to support a multiverse hypo…Read more
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178Compatibilism and Control over the Past: A New Argument Against CompatibilismCriminal Law and Philosophy 18 (1): 201-215. 2024.Michael Moore’s recent book Mechanical Choices: The Responsibility of the Human Machine is full of rich, insightful discussion of many important issues related to free will and moral responsibility. I will focus on one particular issue raised by Moore: the question of whether we can have control over the past. Moore defends a compatibilist account of moral responsibility on which there are some possible cases in which agents do have such control. But Moore seeks to avoid positing too much contro…Read more
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209Moral Luck, Free Will Theodicies, and Theological DeterminismIn Leigh Vicens & Peter Furlong (eds.), Theological Determinism: New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. pp. 184-194. 2022.I raise two challenges for theological determinism. The first challenge concerns the accounts of human moral responsibility available to them. The second challenge concerns the responses to the problem of evil available to them. We will also see that the two challenges converge in an interesting way.
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120Risky ThoughtsThe Journal of Ethics 27 (2): 123-130. 2023.I respond to George Sher's A Wild West of the Mind. Sher argues that the mind is a “morality-free zone.” I respond that some thoughts are too risky to think. As a result, there are some moral limits on our mental lives. But these moral limits need not be overly burdensome. Many somewhat risky thoughts are nonetheless permissible.
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1000Equal Moral Opportunity: A Solution to the Problem of Moral LuckAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 386-404. 2022.ABSTRACT Many of our common-sense moral judgments seemingly imply the existence of moral luck. I attempt to avoid moral luck while retaining most of these judgments. I defend a view on which agents have moral equality of opportunity. This allows us to account for our anti-moral-luck intuitions at less cost than has been previously recognized.
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1922God and Moral KnowledgeIn Kevin Vallier & Joshua Rasmussen (eds.), A New Theist Response to the New Atheists, Routledge. pp. 33-46. 2020.In this chapter, we will investigate the ramifications of moral knowledge for naturalism (roughly, the view that all that exists is the natural world). Specifically, we will draw attention to a certain problem we face if the world is purely naturalistic. We will then show how theism provides resources for solving this problem. We’ll argue that the fact that we have lots of moral knowledge fi ts better with theism than with naturalism. Specifically, we’ll present reasons to think that (1) natural…Read more
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1080Gun Control, the Right to Self-Defense, and Reasonable Beneficence to AllErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6. 2019.
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Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume 9 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2019.Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is an annual volume offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this longstanding area of philosophy that has seen an explosive growth of interest over the past half century.
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617Luckily, We Are Only Responsible for What We Could Have AvoidedMidwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1): 106-118. 2019.This paper has two goals: (1) to defend a particular response to the problem of resultant moral luck and (2) to defend the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. Cases of overdetermination threaten to undermine the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. To deal with this issue, I will motivate a particular way of responding to the problem of resultant moral luck. I defend the view that one's degree of responsibility is immune to moral luck …Read more
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756Bundle Theory and the Identity of IndiscerniblesRes Philosophica 96 (4): 495-508. 2019.A and B continue their conversation concerning the Identity of Indiscernibles. Both are aware of recent critiques of the principle that haven’t received replies; B summarizes those critiques, and A offers the replies that are due. B then raises a new worry.
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897How to be an Actualist and Blame PeopleOxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility 6. 2019.The actualism/possibilism debate in ethics concerns the relationship between an agent’s free actions and her moral obligations. The actualist affirms, while the possibilist denies, that facts about what agents would freely do in certain circumstances partly determines that agent’s moral obligations. This paper assesses the plausibility of actualism and possibilism in light of desiderata about accounts of blameworthiness. This paper first argues that actualism cannot straightforwardly accommodate…Read more
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764Moral Responsibility Without General AbilityPhilosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 22-40. 2019.It is widely thought that, to be morally responsible for some action or omission, an agent must have had, at the very least, the general ability to do otherwise. As we argue, however, there are counterexamples to the claim that moral responsibility requires the general ability to do otherwise. We present several cases in which agents lack the general ability to do otherwise and yet are intuitively morally responsible for what they do, and we argue that such cases raise problems for various kinds…Read more
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855Reasons-responsiveness and degrees of responsibilityPhilosophical Studies 165 (2): 629-645. 2013.Ordinarily, we take moral responsibility to come in degrees. Despite this commonplace, theories of moral responsibility have focused on the minimum threshold conditions under which agents are morally responsible. But this cannot account for our practices of holding agents to be more or less responsible. In this paper we remedy this omission. More specifically, we extend an account of reasons-responsiveness due to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza according to which an agent is morally respons…Read more
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399Fischer on Foreknowledge and Explanatory DependenceEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (4): 51-61. 2017.I explore several issues raised in John Martin Fischer’s Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. First I discuss whether an approach to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge that appeals directly to the claim that God’s beliefs depend on the future is importantly different from Ockhamism. I suggest that this dependence approach has advantages over Ockhamism. I also argue that this approach gives us good reason to reject the claim that the past is fixed. Finally, I discuss Fischer’s proposal re…Read more
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370Subjective Deontology and the Duty to Gather InformationEthics 127 (1): 257-271. 2016.Holly Smith has recently argued that Subjective Deontological Moral Theories (SDM theories) cannot adequately account for agents’ duties to gather information. I defend SDM theories against this charge and argue that they can account for agents’ duties to inform themselves. Along the way, I develop some principles governing how SDM theories, and deontological moral theories in general, should assign ‘deontic value’ or ‘deontic weight’ to particular actions.
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650Ability, Foreknowledge, and Explanatory DependenceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 658-671. 2016.Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory depend…Read more
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745Frankfurt cases: the fine-grained response revisitedPhilosophical Studies 174 (4): 967-981. 2017.Frankfurt cases are supposed to provide us with counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities. Among the most well known responses to these cases is what John Fischer has dubbed the flicker of freedom strategy. Here we revisit a version of this strategy, which we refer to as the fine-grained response. Although a number of philosophers, including some who are otherwise unsympathetic to Frankfurt’s argument, have dismissed the fine grained response, we believe there is a good deal …Read more
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383The Frankfurt Cases and Responsibility for OmissionsPhilosophical Quarterly 66 (264): 579-595. 2016.
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515Ability-based objections to no-best-world argumentsPhilosophical Studies 164 (3): 669-683. 2013.In the space of possible worlds, there might be a best possible world (a uniquely best world or a world tied for best with some other worlds). Or, instead, for every possible world, there might be a better possible world. Suppose that the latter is true, i.e., that there is no best world. Many have thought that there is then an argument against the existence of God, i.e., the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect being; we will call such arguments no-best-world arguments. In…Read more
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428A challenge for Frankfurt-style compatibilistsPhilosophical Studies 172 (5): 1279-1285. 2015.The principle of alternative possibilities tells us that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt-style cases provide an extremely influential challenge to the PAP . And Frankfurt-style compatibilists are motivated to accept compatibilism about responsibility and determinism in part due to FSCs. But there is a significant tension between our judgments about responsibility in FSCs and our judgments about responsibility in certain omissions case…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Religion |
Normative Ethics |