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173Can't Kant count? Innumerate Views on Saving the Many over Saving the FewOxford Studies in Normative Ethics 13 215-234. 2023.It seems rather intuitive that if I can save either one stranger or five strangers, I must save the five. However, Kantian (and other non-consequentialist) views have a difficult time explaining why this is the case, as they seem committed to what Parfit calls “innumeracy”: roughly, the view that the values of lives (or the reasons to save them) don’t get greater (or stronger) in proportion to the number of lives saved. This chapter first shows that in various cases, it is permissible to save fe…Read more
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11Raz on responsibility: comments on MayrJurisprudence 15 (1): 116-121. 2024.Mayr’s paper is extremely interesting and compelling and I don’t plan here to address all its insights. Rather, I’ll just try to argue that there might be more unity in understanding of Raz’s accou...
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13Feeling Like It: A Theory of Inclination and WillSchapiro, Tamar, Feeling Like It: A Theory of Inclination and Will, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. viii + 173, £61 (hardback) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4): 1026-1026. 2023.Tamar Schapiro’s terrific book gives a central role to inclination in our understanding of agency. Contemporary philosophers often presuppose a monistic theory of motivation; under the heading of ‘...
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163Rational Powers in Interaction: Replies to Paul, Andreou, Brunero, Mayr, and HaasePhilosophical Inquiries 11 (1): 163-183. 2023.A response to review essays by Chrisoula Andreou, John Brunero, Matthias Haase, Erasmus Mayr, and Sarah Paul on Sergio Tenenbaum's _Rational Powers in Action_
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190Precis of Rational Powers in ActionPhilosophical Inquiries 11 (1): 67-85. 2023.A précis of Sergio Tenenbaum's Rational Powers in Action (Oxford 2021)
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Value disagreement, action, and commitmentIn Justin Vlasits & Katja Maria Vogt (eds.), Epistemology after Sextus Empiricus, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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54Cullity on The Foundations of MoralityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2): 511-518. 2022.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 511-518, March 2022.
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76On self-governance over timeInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (9): 901-912. 2021.ABSTRACT In Planning, Time, and Self-Governanace, Bratman argues that the notion of self-governance plays an important role in grounding the rational principles such as means-ends coherence in the synchronic case, and principles of stability and coherence through time in the case of self-governance over time. In this paper, I grant Bratman’s claim for the synchronic case, however I argue that it is not clear that one can extend the reasoning to the diachronic case. More specifically, I raise a n…Read more
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101Duality of motivation and the guise of the good in Kant’s practical philosophyPhilosophical Explorations 24 (1): 75-92. 2021.Although Kant is clearly committed to some version of the Guise of the Good thesis, he only explicitly endorses a very weak version of it; namely, that under the direction of reason, we only p...
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64Rational Powers in Action: Instrumental Rationality and Extended AgencyOxford University Press. 2021.Rational Powers in Action presents a conception of instrumental rationality as governing actions that are extended in time with indeterminate ends. Tenenbaum argues that previous philosophical theories in this area, in focusing on momentary snapshots of the mind of idealized agents, miss central aspects of human rationality.
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61Value Disagreement, Action, and CommitmentIn Katja Vogt & Justin Vlasits (eds.), Epistemology After Sextus Empiricus, Oxford University Press. pp. 291-311. 2020.
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11Mark Timmons, Significance and System: Essays on Kant's Ethics Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 Pp. 352 ISBN 9780190203368 (hbk) $78.00 (review)Kantian Review 25 (2): 321-327. 2020.
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151Formalism and constitutivism in Kantian practical philosophyPhilosophical Explorations 22 (2): 163-176. 2019.Constitutivists have tried to answer Enoch’s “schmagency” objection by arguing that Enoch fails to appreciate the inescapability of agency. Although these arguments are effective against some versions of the objection, I argue that they leave constitutivism vulnerable to an important worry; namely, that constitutivism leaves us alienated from the moral norms that it claims we must follow. In the first part of the paper, I try to make this vague concern more precise: in a nutshell, it seems that …Read more
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72Reasons and Action ExplanationIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. 2018.The problem of deviant causation has been a serious obstacle for causal theories of action. We suggest that attending to the problem of deviant causation reveals two related problems for causal theories. First, it threatens the reductive ambitions of causal theories of intentional action. Second, it suggests that such a theory fails to account for how the agent herself is guided by her reasons. Focusing on the second of these, we argue that the problem of guidance turns out to be related to a nu…Read more
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959It seems to be a humdrum fact of human agency that we act on intentions or decisions that we have made at an earlier time. At breakfast, you look at the Taco Hut menu online and decide that later today you’ll have one of their avocado burritos for lunch. You’re at your desk and you hear the church bells ring the noon hour. You get up, walk to Taco Hut, and order the burrito as planned. As mundane as this sort of scenario might seem to be, philosophers have raised a problem in understanding it.…Read more
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117The Guise of the Guise of the BadEthical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (1): 5-20. 2018.It is undeniable that human agents sometimes act badly, and it seems that they sometimes pursue bad things simply because they are bad. This latter phenomenon has often been taken to provide counterexamples to views according to which we always act under the guise of the good. This paper identifies several distinct arguments in favour of the possibility that one can act under the guise of the bad. GG seems to face more serious difficulties when trying to answer three different, but related, argu…Read more
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2424Vague Projects and the Puzzle of the Self-TorturerEthics 123 (1): 86-112. 2012.In this paper we advance a new solution to Quinn’s puzzle of the self-torturer. The solution falls directly out of an application of the principle of instrumental reasoning to what we call “vague projects”, i.e., projects whose completion does not occur at any particular or definite point or moment. The resulting treatment of the puzzle extends our understanding of instrumental rationality to projects and ends that cannot be accommodated by orthodox theories of rational choice.
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2119Friendship and the Law of Reason: Baier and Kant on Love and PrinciplesIn C. J. Williams Jenkins (ed.), Persons, Promises, and Practices, University of Notre Dame Press. pp. 250-280. 2005.
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32Speculative Mistakes and Ordinary Temptations: Kant on Instrumentalist Conceptions of Practical ReasonHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2): 203-223. 2003.
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The Object of Reason: An Inquiry Into the Possibility of Practical ReasonDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1996.Subjectivism is the mainstream view of practical reason. According to subjectivism, what has value for an agent must ultimately be grounded in what the agent actually desires. Subjectivism is motivated by a conservative view of the scope and extent of practical reason. Against this view, my dissertation argues that any coherent conception of an end must endow practical reason with a scope that goes beyond anything that subjectivism could accommodate. ;Subjectivism correctly grasps that nothing c…Read more
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1186Akrasia and IrrationalityIn C. T. Sandis O'Connor (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Blackwell. pp. 274-282. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: References.
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