Publications

It has become increasingly popular to distinguish two types of weight that reasons can have: one connected in some way to the overall status of being required, the other to the overall status of being justified or permitted. The purpose of this essay is...

In Bias: A Philosophical Study, Thomas Kelly posits a distinction between two senses of the word ‘bias’, one pejorative, the other non-pejorative, and he puts this distinction to work in two crucial portions of the book: first, when he defends his central...

This commentary on Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson’s Rational Sentimentalism explores two key issues: what exactly is the position D’Arms and Jacobson call ‘rational sentimentalism’, and why exactly do they restrict their theorizing to the normative...

The permissible and the forbidden are privative opposites: each is a lack of the other. The good and the bad are, by contrast, polar opposites: badness is anti-goodness, not non-goodness. What about the fitting and the unfitting, the appropriate and the...

The evaluative categories—goodness, badness, betterness, and the like—and the deontic categories—requiredness, permittedness, forbiddenness, and the like—are separate families of normative categories, each with its own distinctive logic, structure, and...

Quasi-realists aim to account for many of the trappings of metanormative realism within an expressivist framework. Chief among these is the realist way of responding to the Euthyphro dilemma: quasi-realists want to join realists in being able to say, “It...

Moral properties are explained by other properties. And moral principles tell us about moral properties. How are these two ideas related? In particular, is the truth of a given moral principle part of what explains why a given action has a given moral...

See title.

I argue that there is one and only one grounding/in-virtue-of relation, and that it is indispensable for normative theorizing.

Are there practical reasons for and against belief? For example, do the practical benefits to oneself or others of holding a certain belief count in favor of that belief? I argue "No." My argument involves considering how practical reasons for belief, if...

I argue that Alvin Goldman has failed to save process reliabilism from my critique in earlier work of consequentialist or teleological epistemic theories. First, Goldman misconstrues the nature of my challenge: two of the cases he discusses I never...

Once upon a time, coherentism was the dominant response to the regress problem in epistemology, but in recent decades the view has fallen into disrepute: now almost everyone is a foundationalist (with a few infinitists sprinkled here and there). In this...