•  28
    What Is Non-Naturalism?
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (n/a). 2021.
    Metaethicists often specify non-naturalism in different ways: some take it to be about identity, while others take it to be about grounding. But few directly address the taxonomical question of what the best way to understand non-naturalism is. That’s the task of this paper. This isn’t a merely terminological question about how to use the term “non-naturalism”, but a substantive philosophical one about what metaphysical ideology we need to capture the pre-theoretical concerns of non-naturalists.…Read more
  •  113
    Banks, Bosses, and Bears: A Pragmatist Argument Against Encroachment
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 657-676. 2021.
    The pragmatism—anti-pragmatism debate concerns whether practical considerations can constitute genuinely normative wrong-kind reasons (WKRs) for and against doxastic attitudes, whereas the encroachment—anti-encroachment debate concerns whether practical considerations can affect what right-kind reasons (RKRs) one has or needs to have in order to enjoy some epistemic status. While these are two separate issues, my main aim is to show that pragmatists have a plausible debunking explanation to offe…Read more
  •  61
    Pluralist pragmatists claim that there are both practical and epistemic reasons for belief, but should they also claim that there are both kinds of reasons for action? I argue that the pluralist pragmatist faces a puzzle here. If she accepts that there are epistemic reasons for action, she must explain a striking asymmetry between action and belief: while epistemic reasons play a large role in determining which beliefs one all-things-considered ought to have, they don’t play much of a role in de…Read more
  •  99
    Non-naturalism and Normative Necessities
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 12. 2017.
    This chapter argues that the best way for a non-naturalist to explain why the normative supervenes on the natural is to claim that, while there are some sui generis normative properties whose essences cannot be fully specified in non-normative terms and do not specify any non-normative sufficient conditions for their instantiation, there are certain hybrid normative properties whose essences specify both naturalistic sufficient conditions for their own instantiation and sufficient conditions for…Read more
  •  66
    Choosing normative properties: a reply to Eklund’s Choosing Normative Concepts
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (5): 455-474. 2020.
    ABSTRACT The literature surrounding Horgan and Timmons’s Moral Twin Earth scenarios has focused on whether such scenarios present a metasemantic problem for naturalist realists. But in Choosing Normative Concepts, Eklund uses a similar scenario to illuminate a novel, distinctly metaphysical problem for normative realists of both naturalist and non-naturalist stripes. The problem is that it is not clear what would suffice for the sort of ardent realist view that normative realists have in mind – …Read more
  •  149
    Grounding the Domains of Reasons
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 137-152. 2020.
    A good account of normative reasons should explain not only what makes practical and epistemic reasons a unified kind of thing, but also why practical and epistemic reasons are substantively differ...
  •  266
    In Defense of Practical Reasons for Belief
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (3): 529-542. 2017.
    Many meta-ethicists are alethists: they claim that practical considerations can constitute normative reasons for action, but not for belief. But the alethist owes us an account of the relevant difference between action and belief, which thereby explains this normative difference. Here, I argue that two salient strategies for discharging this burden fail. According to the first strategy, the relevant difference between action and belief is that truth is the constitutive standard of correctness fo…Read more
  •  40
    Defending internalists from acquired sociopaths
    Philosophical Psychology 30 (7): 878-895. 2017.
    People who suffer brain damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex have a puzzling psychological profile: they seem to retain high intellect and practical reasoning skills after their brain injuries, but continually make poor decisions in many aspects of their lives. Adina Roskies argues that their behavior is explained by the fact that, although VM patients make correct judgments about what they ought to do, they are entirely unmotivated by those judgments. Roskies thus takes VM patients to…Read more