Cristian Constantinescu

Birkbeck College, University of London, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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I'm a Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. My main research is in ethics and metaethics. I also have longstanding interests in philosophical debates around naturalism, expressivism, evolutionary accounts of morality, Humeanism about motivation, and generally all things Hume. More widely, I am also interested in the philosophy of language, and in particular in theories of vagueness. Lately I've been thinking a lot about moral vagueness, i.e. the vagueness of moral concepts.

Before joining Birkbeck, I did a BPhil at Oxford, where my supervisors were Adrian W. Moore, Tim Williamson and Bede Rundle, and a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where I was supervised by Simon Blackburn and Hallvard Lillehammer.

Before even that, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Bucharest, where my thesis advisor was Mircea Dumitru.

I also taught philosophy for one year at the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, primarily to students of computing science and engineering who had no desire whatsoever to learn about Descartes, Hume, or Kant. Since then, I have been deeply aware of the need for philosophers to be able to justify their discipline to non-philosophers. Sadly, I have been quite complacent about this so far, but I plan to address the issue more carefully in the future. A first step towards this goal would be to provide a description of my research interests in plain English, thus hopefully allaying any worries that as a naturalistic expressivist with concerns about vagueness, my main activity might actually consist in painting indefinite landscapes whilst in the nude.

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Princeton University

University of Oxford

Lund University

Western Washington University

John Halstead

University of Oxford

John Broome

University of Oxford

Heather Burnett

University of California, Los Angeles

Tom Dougherty

University of Cambridge

Galit Weidman Sassoon

Bar-Ilan University

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Papers by Cristian Constantinescu

Vague Comparisons (in Ratio)

Some comparisons are hard. How should we think about such comparisons? According to John Broome, ... more Some comparisons are hard. How should we think about such comparisons? According to John Broome, we should think about them in terms of vagueness. But the vagueness account has remained unpopular thus far. Here I try to bolster it by clarifying the notion of comparative vagueness that lies at its heart.

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Moral Vagueness: A Dilemma for Non-Naturalism (in Oxford Studies in Metaethics)

Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol 9 (ed. by Russ Shafer-Landau), Oxford University Press, pp. 152-185., Jul 2014

In this paper I explore the implications of moral vagueness (viz., the vagueness of moral predica... more In this paper I explore the implications of moral vagueness (viz., the vagueness of moral predicates) for non-naturalist metaethical theories like those recently championed by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others. I characterise non-naturalism in terms of its commitment to 7 theses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience, Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. I start by offering a number of reasons for thinking that moral predicates are vague in the same way in which ‘red’, ‘tall’, and ‘heap’ are said to be. I then argue that the moral non-naturalist seeking to countenance moral vagueness faces a dilemma: are her putatively irreducible moral properties vague, or perfectly sharp? On either horn of the dilemma, serious problems arise for some of the central tenets of non-naturalism: vague properties seem to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons.

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Value Incomparability and Indeterminacy (in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 57-70, Mar 2012

Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. A... more Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. According to the standard account, developed most famously by Joseph Raz, 'incomparability' means determinate failure of the three classic value relations (better than, worse than, and equally good): two value-bearers are incomparable with respect to a value V if and only if (i) it is false that x is better than y with respect to V, (ii) it is false that x is worse than y with respect to V and (iii) it is false that x and y are equally good with respect to V. Most philosophers have followed Raz in adopting this account of incomparability. Recently, however, John Broome has advocated an alternative view, on which value incomparability is explained in terms of vagueness or indeterminacy. In this paper I aim to further Broome's view in two ways. Firstly, I want to supply independent reasons for thinking that the phenomenon of value incomparability is indeed a matter of the indeterminacy inherent in our comparative predicates. Secondly, I attempt to defend Broome's account by warding off several objections that worry him, due mainly to Erik Carlson and Ruth Chang.

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Vague Comparisons (in Ratio)

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Moral Vagueness: A Dilemma for Non-Naturalism (in Oxford Studies in Metaethics)

Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol 9 (ed. by Russ Shafer-Landau), Oxford University Press, pp. 152-185., Jul 2014

Download

Value Incomparability and Indeterminacy (in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice)

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 57-70, Mar 2012

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Cristian Constantinescu

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