•  4
    Teaching and Learning Guide for: Moral Perception
    Philosophy Compass 15 (1). 2020.
  •  25
    How Naive Is Contentful Moral Perception?
    Philosophies 8 (3): 49. 2023.
    According to contentful moral perception (CMP), moral properties can be perceived in the same sense as tables, tigers, and tomatoes. Recently, Heather Logue (2012) has distinguished between two potential ways of perceiving a property. A Kantian Property (KP) in perception is one in which a perceiver’s access involves a detection of the property via a representational vehicle. A Berkeleyan Property (BP) in perception is one in which a perceiver’s access to the property involves that property as p…Read more
  •  138
    Toward a Perceptual Solution to Epistemological Objections to Nonnaturalism
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 24 (3). 2023.
    Stance-independent nonnaturalist moral realism is subject to two related epistemological objections. First, there is the metaethical descendant of the Benacerraf problem. Second, there are evolutionary debunking arguments. Standard attempts to solve these epistemological problems have not appealed to any particular moral epistemology. The focus on these epistemologically neutral responses leaves many interesting theoretical stones unturned. Exploring the ability of particular theories in moral e…Read more
  •  790
    Attentional Moral Perception
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5): 501-525. 2022.
    Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up on mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate moral perception are those of virtue theorists and sensibility theorists. On these views, one central ability of the virtuous agent is her sensitivity to morally relevant features of situations, where this sens…Read more
  •  92
    Normative concepts and the return to Eden
    Philosophical Studies 179 (7): 2259-2283. 2022.
    Imagine coming across an alternative community such that, while they have normative terms like 'ought' with the same action-guiding roles and relationships to each other, their normative terms come to pick out different properties. When we come across such a community, or even just imagine it, those of us who strive to be moral and rational want to ask something like the following: Further Question: Which set of concepts ought we use—theirs or ours? The problem, first raised by Eklund, is that o…Read more
  •  599
    Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (successful) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation which is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a spatio-temporal chunk of the world is presenting itself to you. Recently, Elijah Chudnoff and John Bengson have independently developed an extension of this view to intellectual experiences, or intuitions…Read more
  •  283
    Getting a Moral Thing Into a Thought: Metasemantics for Non-Naturalists
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 140-169. 2020.
    Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imoge…Read more
  •  41
    A Defense of Spoiler Voting
    Public Affairs Quarterly 34 (3): 205-228. 2020.
    A familiar debate in first-past-the-post democracies is whether ideologically disenfranchised voters should cast their vote for minor party candidates. We argue that voting for minor party candidates will sometimes be the best strategic option for voters with non-mainstream ideologies. Major parties, as rational agents, will be ideologically responsive to genuine threats of defection. By voting for a minor party, voters can simultaneously punish major parties for unfairly “bargaining” with their…Read more
  •  677
    Moral perception
    Philosophy Compass 15 (1). 2020.
    Moral perceptualism is the theory that perception and perceptual experience is attuned to moral features in our environment. This idea has received renewed attention in the last 15–20 years, for its potential to do theoretical work in moral epistemology and moral psychology. In this paper, I review the main motivations and arguments for moral perceptualism, the variety of theories that go under the heading of “moral perception,” and the three biggest challenges to moral perception. https://youtu…Read more
  •  64
    A Posteriori Ethical Intuitionism and the Problem of Cognitive Penetrability
    European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1791-1809. 2017.
    According to a posteriori ethical intuitionism, perceptual experiences can provide non-inferential justification for at least some moral beliefs. Moral epistemology, for the defender of AEI, is less like the epistemology of math and more like the epistemology of tables and chairs. One serious threat to AEI comes from the phenomenon of cognitive penetration. The worry is that even if evaluative properties could figure in the contents of experience, they would only be able to do so if prior cognit…Read more
  •  755
    Which Moral Properties Are Eligible for Perceptual Awareness?
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (3): 290-319. 2020.
    Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an answer to this question by assessing the relationship between the metaphysical structure of different normative properties and a plausible constraint on which properties are eligible for perceptual awa…Read more
  •  504
    You Oughta Know: A Defence of Obligations to Learn
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4): 690-700. 2019.
    Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives learning, practising, and performing a wide range of skills. Many of us also have a great amount of control over which skills we learn and develop. From choices as significant as career pursuits to those as minor as how we spend our weeknight leisure time, we exercise a great amount of agency over what we know and what we can do. In this paper we argue, using a framework first developed by Carbonell (2013) that in many real-world circumstances …Read more
  •  57
    An epistemic argument for liberalism about perceptual content
    Philosophical Psychology 32 (1): 143-159. 2018.
    This paper concerns the question of which properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. According to conservatives, only low-level properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Liberals, on the other hand, claim that high-level properties, such as natural kind properties, artifacts, and even moral properties, can figure in the contents of perceptual experience. I defend a novel argument in favor of liberalism, the Epistemic Argument, which hinges on two crucial claims…Read more
  •  100
    Why conceptual competence won’t help the non-naturalist epistemologist
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4): 616-637. 2018.
    Non-naturalist normative realists face an epistemological objection: They must explain how their preferred route of justification ensures a non-accidental connection between justified moral beliefs and the normative truths. One strategy for meeting this challenge begins by pointing out that we are semantically or conceptually competent in our use of the normative terms, and then argues that this competence guarantees the non-accidental truth of some of our first-order normative beliefs. In this …Read more
  •  317
    Moral Perception and the Contents of Experience
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 13 (3): 294-317. 2016.
    I defend the thesis that at least some moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. I argue for this claim using a _contrast argument_, a type of argument commonly found in the literature on the philosophy of perception. I first appeal to psychological research on what I call emotionally empathetic dysfunctional individuals to establish a phenomenal contrast between EEDI s and normal individuals in some moral situations. I then argue that the best explanation for this contrast, as…Read more
  •  212
    Moral Perception without (Prior) Moral Knowledge
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (2): 164-181. 2018.
    Proponents of impure moral perception claim that, while there are perceptual moral experiences, these experiences epistemically depend on a priori moral knowledge. Proponents of pure moral perception claim that moral experiences can justify independently of substantive a priori moral knowledge. Some philosophers, most notably David Faraci, have argued that the pure view is mistaken, since moral perception requires previous moral background knowledge, and such knowledge could not itself be percep…Read more
  •  152
    Self-ownership and non-culpable proviso violations
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 14 (1): 67-83. 2015.
    Left and right libertarians alike are attracted to the thesis of self-ownership because, as Eric Mack says, they ‘believe that it best captures our common perception of the moral inviolability of persons’. Further, most libertarians, left and right, accept that some version of the Lockean Proviso restricts agents’ ability to acquire worldly resources. The inviolability of SO purports to make libertarianism more appealing than its egalitarian counterparts, since traditional egalitarian theories c…Read more
  •  560
    Character (Alone) Doesn't Count: Phenomenal Character and Narrow Intentional Content
    American Philosophical Quarterly 52 (3): 261-272. 2015.
    Proponents of phenomenal intentionality share a commitment that, for at least some paradigmatically intentional states, phenomenal character constitutively determines narrow intentional content. If this is correct, then any two states with the same phenomenal character will have the same narrow intentional content. Using a twin-earth style case, I argue that two different people can be in intrinsically identical phenomenological states without sharing narrow intentional contents. After describin…Read more
  •  132
    Seemings: still dispositions to believe
    Synthese 191 (8): 1-14. 2014.
    According to phenomenal conservatism, seemings can provide prima facie justification for beliefs. In order to fully assess phenomenal conservatism, it is important to understand the nature of seemings. Two views are that (SG) seemings are a sui generis propositional attitude, and that (D2B) seemings are nothing over and above dispositions to believe. Proponents of (SG) reject (D2B) in large part by providing four distinct objections against (D2B). First, seemings have a distinctive phenomenology…Read more