•  825
    What’s Wrong with Manipulation in Education?
    Philosophy of Education 77 (2): 66-80. 2021.
    A teacher controls the release of materials in attempt to get students to appreciate the appeal of a popular yet wrongheaded argument before exposing them to its shortcomings. An instructor uses body language, tone of voice, and images in a Power-Point presentation that appeal to non-deliberative mechanisms in order to influence the students to pay more attention, maintain their focus, or to remember the content better. How do we draw the line between such innocuous educational practices and pro…Read more
  •  221
    Deontology, individualism, and uncertainty, a reply to Jackson and Smith
    with Adi Borer and and David Enoch
    Journal of Philosophy 105 (5): 259-272. 2008.
    How should deontological theories that prohibit actions of type K — such as intentionally killing an innocent person — deal with cases of uncertainty as to whether a particular action is of type K? Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, who raise this problem in their paper "Absolutist Moral Theories and Uncertainty" (2006), focus on a case where a skier is about to cause the death of ten innocent people — we don’t know for sure whether on purpose or not — by causing an avalanche; and we can only save…Read more
  •  141
    The Wrong Time to Aim at What's Right: When is De Dicto Moral Motivation Less Virtuous?
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (3pt3): 307-314. 2015.
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 307-314, December 2015.
  •  115
    One Thought Too Few: Where De Dicto Moral Motivation is Necessary
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (2): 223-237. 2017.
    De dicto moral motivation is typically characterized by the agent’s conceiving of her goal in thin normative terms such as to do what is right. I argue that lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation would put the agent in a bad position for responding in the morally-best manner in a certain type of situations. Two central features of the relevant type of situations are the appropriateness of the agent’s uncertainty concerning her underived moral values, and the practical, moral importance o…Read more
  •  35
    Normative Uncertainty without Unjustified Value Comparisons
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (3). 2022.
    Jennifer Rose Carr’s (2020) article “Normative Uncertainty Without Theories” proposes a method to maximize expected value under normative uncertainty without Intertheoretic Value Comparison (hereafter IVC). Carr argues that this method avoids IVC because it avoids theories: the agent’s credence is distributed among normative hypotheses of a particular type, which don’t constitute theories. However, I argue that Carr’s method doesn’t avoid or help to solve what I consider as the justificatory pro…Read more