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The practical role essential to value judgmentsIn Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Metaethics, Wiley Periodicals. 2009.
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21The Rationality of EndsOxford Studies in Metaethics 13. 2018.This chapter defends the thesis that an agent can display more or less rationality in selecting ends, even final ends, against the background of a conception of practical rationality as an excellence in the exercise of cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors. It moreover argues that Humeans and anti-Humeans alike should accept this conclusion, while refocusing their disagreement on the question of whether excellence in the exercise of cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors i…Read more
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49Moral Cognitivism and MotivationPhilosophical Review 108 (2): 161-219. 1999.The impact moral judgments have on our deliberations and actions seems to vary a great deal. Moral judgments play a large part in the lives of some people, who are apt not only to make them, but also to be guided by them in the sense that they tend to pursue what they judge to be of moral value, and shun what they judge to be of moral disvalue. But it seems unrealistic to claim that moral judgments play a pervasive role in the lives of all or even most people. There are considerable variations i…Read more
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579Moral cognitivism and motivationPhilosophical Review 108 (2): 161-219. 1999.The impact moral judgments have on our deliberations and actions seems to vary a great deal. Moral judgments play a large part in the lives of some people, who are apt not only to make them, but also to be guided by them in the sense that they tend to pursue what they judge to be of moral value, and shun what they judge to be of moral disvalue. But it seems unrealistic to claim that moral judgments play a pervasive role in the lives of all or even most people. There are considerable variations i…Read more
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61Value ascriptions: rethinking cognitivismPhilosophical Studies 176 (6): 1417-1438. 2019.This paper focuses on value as ascribed to what can be desired, enjoyed, cherished, admired, loved, and so on: value that putatively serves as ground for evaluating such attitudes and for justifying conduct. The main question of the paper is whether such value ascriptions are property ascriptions as traditional cognitivism claims. The paper makes the case that although the linguistic evidence favors traditional cognitivism over non-cognitivism about evaluative language, the main tenet of cogniti…Read more
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4Objective values: does metaethics rest on a mistake?In Brian Leiter (ed.), Objectivity in Law and Morals, Cambridge University Press. pp. 144--193. 2001.
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206How Do Moral Judgments Motivate?In James Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 6--163. 2006.
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134The practical role essential to value judgmentsPhilosophical Issues 19 (1): 299-320. 2009.No Abstract
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288Having Value and Being Worth ValuingJournal of Philosophy 111 (2): 84-109. 2014.This paper explores the relationship between the ascription of value to an object and an assessment of conative attitudes taken towards that object. It argues that this relationship is captured by an a priori necessary truth that falls out of the mastery conditions for the concept of value: what has value is worth valuing, when valuing is understood to be a relatively stable conative attitude distinct from judging valuable. What kind of assessment of attitude is at stake? How are we to understan…Read more
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182The Virtue of Practical RationalityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 1-33. 2008.Practical rationality is best regarded as a virtue: an excellence in the exercise of one’s cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors. The author develops this idea so as to yield a Humean conception of practical rationality. Nevertheless, one of the crucial features of the approach is not distinctively Humean and sets it apart from the most familiar neo‐Humean approaches: an agent’s practical rationality has to do with the presence and form of his cognitive activity, as well as with how …Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |