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Conversation & ResponsibilityOup Usa. 2012.
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Simply Responsible: Basic Blame, Scant Praise, and Minimal AgencyOxford University Press. 2023.We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal…Read more
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Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of KnowledgeCambridge University Press. 1996.Almost all theories of knowledge and justified belief employ moral concepts and forms of argument borrowed from moral theories, but none of them pay attention to the current renaissance in virtue ethics. This remarkable book is the first attempt to establish a theory of knowledge based on the model of virtue theory in ethics. The book develops the concept of an intellectual virtue, and then shows how the concept can be used to give an account of the major concepts in epistemology, including the …Read more
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Modern moral philosophy (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2004.Although this collection of articles is not formally a commentary on Elizabeth Anscombe's famous article of the same title, in which she criticized the moral philosophy prevalent in 1958, a number of the contributors consider Anscombe's work as a starting point. The collection can be interpreted as a demonstration of the extent to which moral philosophers have since attempted to respond to Anscombe's challenge, and to develop an approach to their subject which is neither based on divine law nor …Read more
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Wide or narrow scope?Mind 116 (462): 359-370. 2007.
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Criticism as ConversationPhilosophical Perspectives 33 (1): 26-61. 2019.
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Two kinds of curiosityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.Leading philosophical models of curiosity represent it as a desiderative attitude whose content is a question, and which is satisfied by knowledge of the answer to that question. I argue that these models do not capture the distinctive character of a form of curiosity that I call 'erotic curiosity'. Erotic curiosity addresses itself not to a question but to an object whose significance for the inquirer is affective as well as epistemic. This form of curiosity is best understood by analogy to ero…Read more
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Intellectual virtue and its role in epistemologyAsian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 1-20. 2022.An overview is presented of what I take to be the role of the intellectual virtues within the epistemological enterprise. Traditionally, the theory of knowledge has been thought to be central to the epistemological project, but since, as I explain, the intellectual virtues aren’t required for knowledge, this might suggest that they have only a marginal role to play in epistemological debates. I argue against this suggestion by showing how the intellectual virtues are in fact crucial to several c…Read more
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LibertarianismPolity. 2018.
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Standing Conditions and BlameSouthwest Philosophy Review 32 (1): 145-151. 2016.In “The Standing to Blame: A Critique” (2013), Macalester Bell challenges theories that claim that ‘standing’ plays a central role in blaming practices. These standard accounts posit that it is not enough for the target of blame to be blameworthy; the blamer also must have the proper standing to blame the wrongdoer. Bell identifies and criticizes four different standing conditions, (1) the Business Condition, (2) the Contemporary Condition, (3) the Nonhypocricy Condition, and (4) the Noncomplici…Read more
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Being More BlameworthyAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 56 (3): 233-246. 2019.In this paper I explore graded attributions of blameworthiness—that is, judgments of the general sort, "A is more blameworthy for x-ing than B is," or "A is less blameworthy for her character than B is." In so doing, I aim to provide a philosophical basis for the widespread, if not completely articulate, practice of altering the degree to which we hold others responsible on the basis of facts about them or facts about their environments. To vindicate this practice, I disambiguate several related…Read more
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Blame: Its Nature and Norms (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2012.
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The Standing To Blame, or Why Moral Disapproval Is What It IsDialectica 73 (1-2): 183-210. 2019.Intuitively, we lack the standing to blame others in light of moral norms that we ourselves don't take seriously: if Adam is unrepentantly aggressive, say, he lacks the standing to blame Celia for her aggressiveness. But why does blame have this feature? Existing proposals try to explain this by reference to specific principles of normative ethics – e.g. to rule‐consequentialist considerations, to the wrongness of hypocritical blame, or principles of rights‐forfeiture based on this wrongness. In…Read more
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Hypocritical Blame, Fairness, and StandingMetaphilosophy 49 (1-2): 137-152. 2018.This paper argues that hypocritical blame renders blame inappropriate. Someone should not express her blame if she is guilty of the same thing for which she is blaming others, in the absence of an admission of fault. In failing to blame herself for the same violations of norms she condemns in another, the hypocrite evinces important moral faults, which undermine her right to blame. The hypocrite refuses or culpably fails to admit her own mistakes, while at the same time demands that others admit…Read more
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In defense of doxastic blameSynthese 195 (5): 2205-2226. 2018.In this paper I articulate a view of doxastic control that helps defend the legitimacy of our practice of blaming people for their beliefs. I distinguish between three types of doxastic control: intention-based, reason-based, and influence-based. First I argue that, although we lack direct intention-based control over our beliefs, such control is not necessary for legitimate doxastic blame. Second, I suggest that we distinguish two types of reason-responsiveness: sensitivity to reasons and appre…Read more
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The paradox of self-blameAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2). 2022.It is widely accepted that there is what has been called a non-hypocrisy norm on the appropriateness of moral blame; roughly, one has standing to blame only if one is not guilty of the very offence one seeks to criticize. Our acceptance of this norm is embodied in the common retort to criticism, “Who are you to blame me?”. But there is a paradox lurking behind this commonplace norm. If it is always inappropriate for x to blame y for a wrong that x has committed, then all cases in which x blames …Read more
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Moral torch fishing: A signaling theory of blameNoûs (3). 2019.It is notable that all of the leading theories of blame have to employ ungainly fixes to deflect one or more apparent counterexamples. What these theories share is a content‐based theory of blame's nature. Such approaches overlook or ignore blame's core unifying feature, namely, its function, which is to signal the blamer's commitment to a set of norms. In this paper, we present the problems with the extant theories and then explain what signaling is, how it functions in blame, why appealing to …Read more
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The Conversational SelfMind 131 (521): 193-230. 2022.This paper explores a distinctive form of social interaction—interpersonal inquiry—in which two or more people attempt to understand one another by engaging in conversation. Like many modes of inquiry into human beings, interpersonal inquiry partly shapes its own objects. How we conduct it thus affects who we become. I present an ethical ideal of conversation to which, I argue, at least some of our interpersonal inquiry ought to aspire. I then consider how this ideal might influence philosophica…Read more
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Three Faces of DesireOxford University Press. 2004.To desire something is a condition familiar to everyone. It is uncontroversial that desiring has something to do with motivation, something to do with pleasure, and something to do with reward. Call these "the three faces of desire." The standard philosophical theory at present holds that the motivational face of desire presents its unique essence--to desire a state of affairs is to be disposed to act so as to bring it about. A familiar but less standard account holds the hedonic face of desire …Read more
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Unprincipled virtue: an inquiry into moral agencyOxford University Press. 2003.
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A Casual Theory of Acting for ReasonsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2): 103-114. 2015.Amanda works in a library, and a patron asks for her help in learning about duty-to- rescue laws in China. She throws herself into the task, spending hours on retrieving documents from governmental and non-governmental sources, getting electronic translations, looking for literature on Scandinavian duty-to-rescue laws that mention Chinese laws for comparison, and so on. Why? She likes to gain this sort of general knowledge of the world; perhaps the reason she works so hard is that she is learnin…Read more
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What does it take to "have" a reason?In Andrew Evan Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief, Cambridge University Press. pp. 201--22. 2011.forthcoming in reisner and steglich-peterson, eds., Reasons for Belief If I believe, for no good reason, that P and I infer (correctly) from this that Q, I don’t think we want to say that I ‘have’ P as evidence for Q. Only things that I believe (or could believe) rationally, or perhaps, with justification, count as part of the evidence that I have. It seems to me that this is a good reason to include an epistemic acceptability constraint on evidence possessed…1 It is a truism that adopting an un…Read more
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Acting for the right reasonsPhilosophical Review 119 (2): 201-242. 2010.This essay examines the thought that our right actions have moral worth only if we perform them for the right reasons. It argues against the view, often ascribed to Kant, that morally worthy actions must be performed because they are right and argues that Kantians and others ought instead to accept the view that morally worthy actions are those performed for the reasons why they are right. In other words, morally worthy actions are those for which the reasons why they were performed (the reasons…Read more
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Moral ReasonOxford University Press. 2014.
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Why Moral Reasoning Is Insufficient for Moral ProgressJournal of Political Philosophy 28 (1): 73-96. 2020.A lively debate in the literature on moral progress concerns the role of practical reasoning: Does it enable or subvert moral progress? Rationalists believe that moral reasoning enables moral progress, because it helps enhance objectivity in thinking, overcome unruly sentiments, and open our minds to new possibilities. By contrast, skeptics argue that moral reasoning subverts moral progress. Citing growing empirical research on bias, they show that objectivity is an illusion and that moral reaso…Read more
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Intellectual Trust in Oneself and OthersCambridge University Press. 2001.To what degree should we rely on our own resources and methods to form opinions about important matters? To what degree should we depend on various authorities, such as a recognized expert or a social tradition? In this provocative account of intellectual trust and authority, Richard Foley argues that it can be reasonable to have intellectual trust in oneself even though it is not possible to provide a defence of the reliability of one's faculties, methods and opinions that does not beg the ques…Read more
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Self‐Knowledge and Moral StupidityRatio 25 (3): 291-306. 2012.Most commonplace moral failure is not conditioned by evil intentions or the conscious desire to harm or humiliate others. It is more banal and ubiquitous – a form of moral stupidity that gives rise to rationalization, self‐deception, failures of due moral consideration, and the evasion of responsibility. A kind of crude, perception‐distorting self‐absorption, moral stupidity is the cause of many moral missteps; moral development demands the development of self‐knowledge as a way out of moral stu…Read more
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Friendship and the Structure of TrustIn Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 186-206. 2016.In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral virtues are exactly like friendship…Read more
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Love of Whole PersonsThe Journal of Ethics 23 (4): 347-367. 2019.According to quality theories of love, love is fitting by virtue of properties of the loved person. Despite their immediate plausibility, quality theories have met with many objections. Here I focus on two that strike at the heart of what makes the quality theory an appealing account of love, specifically, the theory’s ability to accommodate the fact that loving someone is a way of valuing them for who they are. The fungibility objection and the problem of love’s object maintain that if a person…Read more
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Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and MoralityWiley-Blackwell. 1995.
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