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14Weakness of Will and PracticalIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 121. 2003.
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7IrrationalityIn Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 2013.A philosophical treatment of irrationality should at the same time leave space for irrational forms of thought and action and illuminate what is defective about them. While Davidson's analysis of weakness of the will is justly famous, some of Davidson's general philosophical commitments in fact conspire to make it especially difficult for him to account for irrationality. Davidson's conviction that irrationality must involve inconsistency, together with his rather circumscribed understanding of …Read more
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4Ruwen Ogien, dir., Le réalisme moral, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1999, vi + 571 p (review)Philosophiques 28 (1): 219-223. 2001.
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13Moral Relativism and Quasi-AbsolutismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 189. 1998.
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6Between Universalism and Skepticism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (3): 732-734. 1997.
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31Self-control in action and beliefPhilosophical Explorations 24 (2): 225-242. 2021.Self-control is normally, if only tacitly, viewed as an inherently practical capacity or achievement: as exercised only in the domain of action. Questioning this assumption, we wish to motivate the...
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16They Can’t Take That Away from Me: Restricting the Reach of Morality's DemandsIn Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 203-234. 2013.This chapter highlights and assesses an important form of argument that has often been deployed in debates over moral demandingness. 'They can’t take that away from me' arguments claim to identify something which morality cannot ask us to give up — something which morality allegedly cannot take away from us. Does any argument of this kind succeed? This chapter investigates that question by sketching and critiquing three such arguments from the contemporary literature, including a well-known argu…Read more
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7Introduction to the Special Issue: The Nature and Implications of DisagreementAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1): 15-28. 2019.Disagreement and the implications thereof have emerged as a central preoccupation of recent analytic philosophy. In epistemology, articles on so-called peer disagreement and its implications have burgeoned and now constitute an especially rich subject of discussion in the field. In moral and political philosophy, moral disagreement has of course traditionally been a crucial argumentative lever in meta-ethical debates, and disagreement over conceptions of the good has been the spark for central c…Read more
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27Conceptual DisagreementAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1): 15-28. 2019.Can you disagree with someone without thinking that what they say is false? As we shall see, this is not only possible but quite frequent. Starting with the type of disagreement most familiar from the philosophical literature, we will progressively expand the circle of genuine disagreement until it encompasses even conceptual disagreement, which might sound like a contradiction in terms. For conceptual disagreement necessarily involves the parties' using different concepts, which one might think…Read more
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IntroductionIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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La partialité par les projetsLes Ateliers de L’Ethique 3 (1): 41-51. 2008.This paper investigates how we can most effectively argue that partiality toward certain people and not others is morally permissible. Philosophers who strongly insist that morality must leave room for partiality have not made explicit their basis for this conclusion; the present paper comparatively assesses a variety of possible argument strategies which could be deployed in this regard. One promising strategy exploits the acknowledged force of the argument from “the personal point of view,” he…Read more
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11Weakness of will and practical irrationality (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2003.Among the many practical failures that threaten us, weakness of will or akrasia is often considered to be a paradigm of irrationality. The eleven new essays in this collection, written by an excellent international team of philosophers, some well-established, some younger scholars, give a rich overview of the current debate over weakness of will and practical irrationality more generally. Issues covered include classical questions such as the distinction between weakness and compulsion, the conn…Read more
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9The Rational and the Moral Order: The Social Roots of Reason and Morality (review)Philosophical Review 106 (4): 577. 1997.The first four chapters develop his account of reason and reasons in general. Baier calls actions, beliefs, and feelings that can be assessed as rational or irrational “performances”. He argues that the aim of the enterprise of reason is to arrive at performances that are as good as possible ; in order to further this aim, societies promulgate guidelines of rationality. Baier thinks that a being cannot be fully rational unless it has the benefit of such publicly available guidelines. Indeed, “a …Read more
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11Moral Commitment and Moral TheoryJournal of Philosophical Research 26 381-398. 2001.This paper examines the nature of what I call moral commitment: that is, a standing commitment to live up to moral demands. I first consider what kind of psychological state moral commitment might be, arguing that moral commitment is a species of commitment to a counterfactual condition. I explore the general structural features of attitudes of this type in order to shed light on how moral commitment might function in an agent’s motivational economy. I then use this understanding of moral commit…Read more
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3Review of James Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (10). 2006.
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Weakness of willIn Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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20Moral overridingness and moral theoryPacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2). 1998.I begin by proposing and explicating a plausible articulation of the view that morality is overriding. I then argue that it would be desirable for this thesis to be sustained. However, the prospects for its vindication will depend crucially on which moral theory we adopt. I examine some schematic moral theories in order to bring out which are friendly and which unfriendly to moral overridingness. In light of the reasons to hope that the overridingness thesis can be sustained, theories apparently…Read more
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8Is procrastination weakness of will?In Chrisoula Andreou & Mark D. White (eds.), The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination, Oxford University Press. pp. 51-67. 2010.
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16Weakness of Will and Practical JudgementIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 121. 2003.A practical judgement is one which enjoys an internal, necessary relation to subsequent action or intention, and which can serve as a sufficient explanation of such action or intention. Does the phenomenon of weakness of will show that deliberation does not characteristically issue in such practical judgements? The author argues that the possibility of akrasia does not threaten the view that we make practical judgements, when the latter thesis is properly understood. Indeed, the author suggests …Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |