-
A priori bootstrappingIn Albert Casullo & Joshua C. Thurow (eds.), The a Priori in Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. 2013.
-
Plato's theory of knowledgeIn David Owen Brink, Susan Sauvé Meyer & Christopher John Shields (eds.), Virtue, happiness, knowledge: themes from the work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, Oxford University Press. 2018.Several contemporary epistemologists have been intrigued by the discussion of the distinction between knowledge and correct opinion in Plato’s Meno (97a–98b); a number of them have suggested that Plato is appealing to the idea that to know a proposition one must be ‘safe from error’ regarding that proposition. In fact, although there is evidence that Plato assumes that knowledge requires something like safety, this passage in the Meno imposes a different requirement on knowledge—namely, what Rob…Read more
-
The meaning of the 'ought'In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2006.
-
The Normativity of the IntentionalIn Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press. 2007.
-
Instrumental RationalityIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 6: Volume 6, Oxford University Press. 2011.
-
18The Predicament of ChoiceIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics 12, Oxford University Press. pp. 294-313. 2017.Normal agents in the actual world are limited: they cannot think about all the options that are available to them—or even about all options that are available to them according to their evidence. Moreover, agents cannot choose an option unless they have thought about that option. Such agents can be irrational in two ways: either by making their choice too quickly, without canvassing enough options, or by wasting time canvassing ever more options when they have already thought of enough options. …Read more
-
93Choosing rationally and choosing correctlyIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 201--229. 2003.According to the "recognitional" view of practical reason, rational practical reasoning consists in trying to figure out which of the available options are good things to do, and then choosing accordingly. According to the rival "constructivist" view, rational practical reasoning consists in complying with certain conditions of purely formal coherence or procedural rationality. Christine Korsgaard objects that recognitional views cannot answer the "normative question". But constructivist views a…Read more
-
Choosing Rationally andIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 201. 2003.
-
14Pricean ignoranceBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 1-22. forthcoming.Richard Price’s moral epistemology provides a distinctive account, not only of the sources of our moral knowledge, but also of its limits – that is, of the moral truths that we do not and even cannot know. According to this moral epistemology, the fundamental moral truths are necessary rather than contingent; if they are knowable at all, they are knowable a priori. In general, fundamental moral truths are akin to mathematical truths. Specifically, these necessary moral truths are grounded in the…Read more
-
15Can our reasons determine what it is rational for us to believe?Philosophical Studies 181 (2): 627-636. 2023.This is a discussion of Mark Schroeder’s book Reasons First. In this book, Schroeder defends the following thesis: for every believer and every time, it is the reasons that the believer has at that time that determine what it is rational for the believer to believe at that time. It is argued here that this thesis is false, since it conflicts with the plausible principle of “normative invariance”: what a believer ought to believe at a time cannot depend on what the believer actually believes at t…Read more
-
45How Can "Evidence" Be Normative?In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, Routledge. pp. 74-90. 2024.It is widely assumed that our “evidence” is at least one source of the “justification” that we have for believing things—where this notion of “justification” seems to be a normative notion. More precisely, it seems to be an agential normative notion, evaluating the different possible attitudes that are available to an agent at a time, on the basis of facts that are just “given”—that is, facts that it is not available to the agent to change through the way in which she exercises her reasoning cap…Read more
-
1Ethical Naturalism, Non-Naturalism, and In-BetweenIn Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism, Oxford University Press. 2023.The contemporary debate on the metaphysical side of metaethics is dominated by two paradigms—reductive naturalism and primitivist non- naturalism. It is argued here that these are both extreme views. In principle, it should be possible for there to be a host of intermediate views between these two extremes. In fact, most of the views that were taken on these metaphysical questions by philosophers of ancient and medieval times differed from both reductive naturalism and primitivist non-naturalism…Read more
-
111Intrinsic values and reasons for actionPhilosophical Issues 19 (1): 342-363. 2009.What reasons for action do we have? What explains why we have these reasons? This paper articulates some of the basic structural features of a theory that would provide answers to these questions. According to this theory, reasons for action are all grounded in intrinsic values, but in a way that makes room for a thoroughly non-consequentialist view of the way in which intrinsic values generate reasons for aaction.
-
46Can our reasons determine what it is rational for us to believe?Philosophical Studies (2-3): 1-10. 2023.This is a discussion of Mark Schroeder’s book Reasons First. In this book, Schroeder defends the following thesis: for every believer and every time, it is the reasons that the believer has at that time that determine what it is rational for the believer to believe at that time. It is argued here that this thesis is false, since it conflicts with the plausible principle of “normative invariance”: what a believer ought to believe at a time cannot depend on what the believer actually believes at t…Read more
-
62Hierocles' Concentric CirclesOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 62 (Summer 2022): 293-332. 2023.Hierocles, a Stoic of the second century CE, famously deployed an image of the ‘concentric circles’ that surround each of us. The image should not be read as advocating absolute impartiality (in the style of classical utilitarianism) or as illustrating the Stoic theory of oikeiōsis. Instead, it is designed to illustrate how it is ‘appropriate to act’ in certain cases. Like other Stoics, Hierocles bases his investigation of appropriate acts on what is ‘in accordance with nature’. According to his…Read more
-
35Rationality and BeliefOxford University Press. 2023.This book gives a general theory of rational belief. Although it can be read by itself, is a sequel to the author's previous book The Value of Rationality (Oxford, 2017). It takes the general conception of rationality that was defended in that earlier book, and combines it with an account of the varieties of belief, and of what it is for these beliefs to count as "correct", to develop an account of what it is for beliefs to count as rational. According to this account, rationality comes in degre…Read more
-
7Defending Double EffectIn Brad Hooker (ed.), Developing Deontology, Wiley. 2011.This essay defends a version of the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) – the doctrine that there is normally a stronger reason against an act that has a bad state of affairs as one of its intended effects than against an otherwise similar act that has that bad state of affairs as an unintended effect. First, a precise account of this version of the DDE is given. Secondly, some suggestions are made about why we should believe the DDE, and about why it is true. Finally, a solution is developed to the…Read more
-
203Doxastic RationalityIn Paul Silva & Luis R. G. Oliveira (eds.), Propositional and Doxastic Justification: New Essays on their Nature and Significance, Routledge. pp. 219-240. 2022.This chapter is concerned with the distinction that most contemporary epistemologists express by distinguishing between “propositional” and “doxastic” justification. The goal is to develop an account of this distinction that applies, not just to full or outright beliefs, but also to partial credences—and indeed, in principle, to attitudes of all kinds. The standard way of explaining this distinction, in terms of the “basing relation”, is criticized, and an alternative account—the “virtue manifes…Read more
-
165The Reasons Aggregation TheoremOxford Studies in Normative Ethics 12 127-148. 2022.Often, when one faces a choice between alternative actions, there are reasons both for and against each alternative. On one way of understanding these words, what one “ought to do all things considered (ATC)” is determined by the totality of these reasons. So, these reasons can somehow be “combined” or “aggregated” to yield an ATC verdict on these alternatives. First, various assumptions about this sort of aggregation of reasons are articulated. Then it is shown that these assumptions allow for …Read more
-
6The Refutation of ExpressivismIn Zsolt Novák & András Simonyi (eds.), Truth, reference, and realism, Central European University Press. pp. 207-234. 2010.Many philosophers think that internalism supports a noncognitivist account of normative judgments, according to which these judgments do not count as genuine beliefs, but rather as non-cognitive states of some kind. Such noncognitivist accounts of normative judgments naturally accompany an expressivist account of the meaning of normative statements. This chapter considers the prospects of such an expressivist theory, taking as its paradigm the most recent theory of Allan Gibbard. It is argued th…Read more
-
14Practical and Theoretical RationalityIn Markus Knauff & Wolfgang Spohn (eds.), The Handbook of Rationality, Mit Press. pp. 137-145. 2021.Philosophers have long distinguished between practical and theoretical rationality. The first section of this chapter begins by discussing the ways in which this distinction was drawn by Aristotle and Kant; then it sketches what seems to be the general consensus today about how, at least roughly, the distinction should be drawn. The rest of this chapter explores what practical and theoretical rationality have in common: in the second section, several parallels between practical and theoretical r…Read more
-
8Christopher Peacocke’s The Realm of Reason (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (3): 776-791. 2007.This is a review of Christopher Peacocke's book The Realm of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2004).
-
12The Predicament of ChoiceOxford Studies in Metaethics 12 294-313. 2017.Normal agents in the actual world are limited: they cannot think about all the options that are available to them—or even about all options that are available to them according to their evidence. Moreover, agents cannot choose an option unless they have thought about that option. Such agents can be irrational in two ways: either by making their choice too quickly, without canvassing enough options, or by wasting time canvassing ever more options when they have already thought of enough options. …Read more
-
11Moral Disagreement and Inexcusable IrrationalityAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1): 97. 2019.This essay explores the following position: Ultimate moral principles are a priori truths; hence, it is irrational to assign a non-zero credence to any proposition that is incompatible with these ultimate moral principles ; and this sort of irrationality, if it could have been avoided, is in a sense inexcusable. So—at least if moral relativism is false—in any disagreement about ultimate moral principles, at least one party to the disagreement is inexcusably irrational. This position may seem ext…Read more
-
9Clare Chambers, Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State (review)Ethics 129 (2): 398-403. 2018.This is a review of Clare Chambers's book, Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State.
-
8The Nature of Normativity: Reply to Holton, Railton, and LenmanPhilosophical Studies 151 (3): 479-491. 2010.In this article, I reply to the comments that Richard Holton, Peter Railton, and James Lenman have made on my 2007 book "The Nature of Normativity".
-
22The Unity of NormativityIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. pp. 23-45. 2018.What is normativity? It is argued here that normativity is best understood as a property of certain concepts: normative thoughts are those involving these normative concepts; normative statements are statements that express normative thoughts; and normative facts are the facts (if such there be) that make such normative thoughts true. Many philosophers propose that there is a single basic normative concept—perhaps the concept of a reason for an action or attitude—in terms of which all other norm…Read more
-
4116Plato's Theory of KnowledgeIn David Brink, Susan Sauvé Meyer & Christopher Shields (eds.), Virtue, Happiness, Knowledge: Themes from the Work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin, Oxford University Press. pp. 33-56. 2018.An account of Plato’s theory of knowledge is offered. Plato is in a sense a contextualist: at least, he recognizes that his own use of the word for “knowledge” varies – in some contexts, it stands for the fullest possible level of understanding of a truth, while in other contexts, it is broader and includes less complete levels of understanding as well. But for Plato, all knowledge, properly speaking, is a priori knowledge of necessary truths – based on recollection of aspects of the Forms – an…Read more
-
145Epistemic Teleology: Synchronic and DiachronicIn Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Jeff Dunn (eds.), Epistemic Consequentialism, Oxford University Press. pp. 85-112. 2018.According to a widely held view of the matter, whenever we assess beliefs as ‘rational’ or ‘justified’, we are making normative judgements about those beliefs. In this discussion, I shall simply assume, for the sake of argument, that this view is correct. My goal here is to explore a particular approach to understanding the basic principles that explain which of these normative judgements are true. Specifically, this approach is based on the assumption that all such normative principles are grou…Read more
APA Western Division
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |