Moral style

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2010

Normative ethics asks, what makes right acts right? W.D. Ross attempted to answer this question in The Right and the Good. Most theorists have agreed that Ross provided no systematic explanatory answers. Ross’s intuitionism lacks any decision procedure, and, McNaughton states, it ‘turns out after all to have nothing general to say about the relative stringency of our basic duties’. Here I’ll show that my own Rossian intuitionism does have a systematic way of explaining what makes right acts right. Deontological theories have struggled to say what internal to acts could make them right. From Price to Ross, the striking but uninformative answer has been the nature of the act. In this paper I’ll provide a Rossian theory of the moral natures of acts. It contains a set of self-evident principles of moral stringency and other considerations that can assist agents in deciding what prima facie duty overrides what.

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2004

Philosophical Psychology

In light of recent empirical data, many psychologists and philosophers have turned away from rationalism about moral judgment and embraced sentimentalism. In the process, they have rejected the classical "moral signature" as a way of distinguishing moral from conventional norms in favor of a sentimentalist approach to carving out the moral domain. In this paper, we argue that this sentimentalist turn has been made prematurely. Although we agree that the experiments reveal that the classical approach is flawed, we propose to replace it with an alternative, according to which a norm is moral precisely if it is justifiable to all. This does not hold for most norms based on disgust or loyalty to a particular community. We accommodate the fact that such norms are not merely conventional by introducing a third domain, the domain of ethics. Our proposal reveals that (psychological) rationalism is still a viable option, as a lot of the experimental evidence that features emotions concerns the domain of ethics rather than morality.

New Blackfriars, 2000

Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2022

I argue that moral principles involve the same sort of generalization as ordinary yet elusive generic generalizations in natural language such as 'Tigers are striped' or 'Peppers are spicy'. A notable advantage of the generic view is that it simultaneously allows for pessimism and optimism about the role and status of moral principles in our lives. It provides a new perspective on the nature of moral principles on which principles are not apt for determining the moral status of particular actions while they may be apt, and even fundamental, to our acquisition of moral knowledge. A natural consequence of the view is variation amongst moral principles, with some regularly warranting exceptions, and some appearing arguably exceptionless. It is also argued that this generic conception of moral principles has significant advantages, as a normative model of moral reasoning, over the view of moral principles as defaults advanced in recent years.

The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 51, 2011, pp. 51–67, 2011

It is often suggested that aesthetic and ethical value judgments are similar in such a way that they should be analyzed in analogous manners. In this paper, I argue that the two types of judgments share four important features concerning disagreement, motivation, categoricity, and argumentation. This, I maintain, helps to explain why many philosophers have thought that aesthetic and ethical value judgments can be analyzed in accordance with the same dispositional scheme which corresponds to the analogy between secondary qualities and values. However, I argue that aesthetic and ethical value judgments differ as regards their fundamental structures. This scheme is mistaken as regards ethical value judgments, but it is able to account for aesthetic value judgments. This implies that aesthetic value judgments are autonomous in relation to ethical value judgments and that aestheticians, not moral philosophers, are the true heirs of this renowned analogy.