Acts and Morals

Analysis, 2004

Cognition, 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.

Theoria, 2008

We could consign all other moral theories, all those according to which the deontic concepts cannot be so reduced purely to considerations of value, to the deontologist.

Topoi

Any account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: (i) for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. (ii) Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of faculty psychology is (iii) the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main in...

2004

Joshua Knobe (2003a, b) presented data that suggest people's judgments of a behavior's intentionality may be significantly influenced by moral considerations. In particular, Knobe (2003b) argues that when people judge the intentionality of an action with moral consequences, they fail to consider an important component of intentionality-the agent's skill (Malle & Knobe, 1997)-that they do consider when judging an almost identical action with neutral consequences. This finding raises a number of issues about the consistency of intentionality judgments and perhaps even the unity of the folk concept of intentionality. Moreover, it raises the specter of a bias in people's thinking, namely to ignore important information when judging morally significant actions, which, if true, would have considerable impact on legal proceedings.

: This article sets out a notion of moral responsibility that incorporates the central features of the answerability conception advocated by T. M Scanlon, Hilary Bok, and Angela Smith, and of Michael McKenna’s more specific conversational account, but which excludes any notion of desert, whether basic or non-basic. The point of blaming and praising on this notion largely forward-looking: its main objectives are protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. Agents are blameworthy and praiseworthy by virtue of being appropriate recipients of blame and praise given these aims. Blaming on this conception can involve causing harm, but the justifiability of such harming does not reintroduce the legitimacy of desert. The resulting notion of moral responsibility is immune to any threat from the causal determination of action.

Ethical theory and moral practice, 2002

I argue against the standard view that it is possible to describe extensionally different consequentialist theories by describing different evaluative focal points. I argue that for consequentialist purposes, the important sense of the word 'act' must include all motives and side effects, and thus these things cannot be separated.

2017

A common objection to the view that one’s intentions are non-derivatively relevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions is that it confuses permissibility with other categories of moral evaluation, in particular, with blameworthiness or character assessment. The objection states that a failure to distinguish what one is permitted to do from what kind of a person one is, or from what one can be held blameworthy for, leads one to believe that intentions are relevant to permissibility when in fact they are only relevant to blameworthiness or to character assessment. In this paper, I argue that this objection is mistaken. I defend two claims: first, that a confusion of moral categories is not the source of the view that intentions are relevant to permissibility and, second, that in conjunction with some other premises a confusion does not undermine that view.

Philosophical Books, 1996