Title: 'Blame and the Suberogatory' Abstract: In this paper the claim that some actions are blameworthy even if they are not wrong is defended. Suberogatory actions, which generally involve people standing on their rights in ways that display inadequate quality of the will, are examples. I defend this claim against a strategy of assimilating these ... Read more
Title: 'Being-in-the-Room: Epistemic Deference and Elite Capture' Abstract: Standpoint epistemology refers to a set of contentions: that knowledge is socially situated, that marginalized people have some positional advantages in gaining some forms of knowledge, and that research programs ought to reflect these facts. These seem to me to be entirely unobjectionable, and indeed to follow ... Read more
Title: 'Lexical Priority, Decision Theory and De Minimis Risk' Abstract: Say that one moral requirement takes lexical priority over another just in case violations of the former can never be outweighed or counterbalanced by violations of the latter. While lexical priority is arguably a feature of many ethical systems, attempts to model it within the framework of ... Read more
Title: 'What is Morality?' Abstract: In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe argued that the moral vocabulary does not correspond to any concept of Aristotelian ethics, that it derives from a confused response to the ethics of divine of command, and that it is literally meaningless. This essay contends that Anscombe was wrong. Morality corresponds to Aristotle’s general ... Read more
Title: 'Consent and the Question of Dynamics' Abstract: In this paper, I first argue that “rights-waiving” is not an accurate, general description of the operation persons perform when they grant permissive consent. It fails to describe the change to the structure of the normative world that I call authority-retaining permissive consent. This is the kind ... Read more
Title: 'Group Motivation' Abstract: We routinely treat groups, including governments and corporations, as agents with beliefs and aims who are morally responsible for their actions. For instance, we might blame an oil company for an oil spill pointing out that they knew the risk of their profits-first policies. In this paper I discuss a key ... Read more