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Practical reasons to believe, epistemic reasons to act, and the baffled action theoristPhilosophical Issues 33 (1): 22-32. 2023.
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What We Epistemically Owe To Each OtherPhilosophical Studies 176 (4). 2019.This paper is about an overlooked aspect—the cognitive or epistemic aspect—of the moral demand we place on one another to be treated well. We care not only how people act towards us and what they say of us, but also what they believe of us. That we can feel hurt by what others believe of us suggests both that beliefs can wrong and that there is something we epistemically owe to each other. This proposal, however, surprises many theorists who claim it lacks both intuitive and theoretical support.…Read more
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An Epistemic Non-ConsequentialismThe Philosophical Review 129 (1): 1-51. 2020.Despite the recent backlash against epistemic consequentialism, an explicit systematic alternative has yet to emerge. This paper articulates and defends a novel alternative, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for the truth. §1 tackles some preliminaries concerning the proper formulation of the epistemic consequentialism / non-consequentialism divide, explains where Epistemic Kantianism falls in the dialectical landscape, and shows how it can capture what seems attrac…Read more
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Silence & Salience: On Being JudgmentalIn Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity, Routledge. pp. 256-269. 2020.This chapter explores the concept of judgmentalism: what it is and why it’s morally problematic. After criticizing an account offered by Gary Watson, the paper argues for a broader understanding of what it is to be judgmental, encompassing not just the overall beliefs that we form about someone else, but also the very pattern of our thoughts about those with whom we are involved in interpersonal relationships. The thesis is that to care about someone is to be oriented toward them, or to see them…Read more
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Two Kinds of RationalityIn Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity, Routledge. pp. 177-190. 2020.Gerhard Ernst tries to clarify the nature of rationality. He does this by distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of rationality: rationality in the “adjustment-sense” and rationality in the “evaluation-sense.” A person is rational in the adjustment-sense if her mental states are well adjusted to each other, i.e. if her beliefs, emotions and intentions fit together (in a sense Ernst explains); a person is rational in the evaluation-sense if she has evaluative beliefs which are ade…Read more
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Instrumental reasons for belief: elliptical talk and elusive propertiesIn Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity, Routledge. pp. 109-125. 2020.Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on one’s aims. Thi…Read more
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Rationality as Reasons-ResponsivenessAustralasian Philosophical Review 4 (4): 332-342. 2020.John Broome argues that rationality cannot consist in reasons-responsiveness since rationality supervenes on the mind, while reasons-responsiveness does not supervene on the mind. I here defend this conception of rationality by way of defending the assumption that reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind. Given the many advantages of an analysis of rationality in terms of reasons-responsiveness, and in light of independent considerations in favour of the view that reasons-responsiveness sup…Read more
Zürich, Canton of Zürich, Switzerland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |