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33Guise of the GoodIn Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, Routledge. 2020.
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213Can'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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14Raz 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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19Feeling 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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211Rational 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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215Precis 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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64Cullity 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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43On 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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111Duality 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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73Rational 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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72Value Disagreement, Action, and CommitmentIn Justin Vlasits & Katja Maria Vogt (eds.), Epistemology after Sextus Empiricus, Oxford University Press. pp. 291-311. 2020.
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12Mark 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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160Formalism 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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74Reasons 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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990Extended Agency and the Problem of Diachronic AutonomyIn Carla Bagnoli (ed.), Time in Action: The Temporal Structure of Rational Agency and Practical Thought, Routledge. 2022.It 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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131The 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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607Direction of Fit and Motivational CognitivismIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 235-64. 2010.The idea of direction of fit has been found appealing by many philosophers. Anscombe’s famous examples have persuaded many of us that there must be some deep difference between belief and desire that is captured by the metaphor of direction of fit. Most of the aim of the paper is to try to get clear on which intuitions Anscombe’s example taps into. My view is that there is more than one intuition in play here, and I will try to show that various distinctions and points are confused in the litera…Read more
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319The Conclusion of Practical ReasonPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 94 323-343. 2007.
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910Minimalism about Intention: A Modest DefenseInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (3): 384-411. 2014.Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 3, Page 384-411, June 2014
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118Quasi-realism's problem of autonomous effectsPhilosophical Quarterly 53 (212). 2003.Simon Blackburn defends a 'quasi-realist' view intended to preserve much of what realists want to say about moral discourse. According to error theory, moral discourse is committed to indefensible metaphysical assumptions. Quasi-realism seems to preserve ontological frugality, attributing no mistaken commitments to our moral practices. In order to make good this claim, quasi-realism must show that (a) the seemingly realist features of the 'surface grammar' of moral discourse can be made compatib…Read more
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9IntroductionPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 94 (1): 9-13. 2007.
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