Bergmann's Dilemma: Exit Strategies for Internalists -- (co-authored with Jason Rogers) forthcoming in Philosophical Studies

Michael Bergmann claims that all versions of epistemic internalism face an irresolvable dilemma.  We show that there are many plausible versions of internalism that falsify this claim.  First, we demonstrate that there are versions of “weak awareness internalism” that, contra Bergmann, do not succumb to the “Subject’s Perspective Objection” horn of the dilemma.  Second, we show that there are versions of “strong awareness internalism” that do not fall prey to the dilemma’s “vicious regress” horn.  We note along the way that these versions of internalism do not, in avoiding one horn of the dilemma, succumb to the dilemma’s other horn.  The upshot is that internalists have many available strategies for avoiding dilemmatic defeat.  (The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com <http://www.springerlink.com> at http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s11098-009-9460-0)

Conciliatory Views of Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence forthcoming in Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology

Conciliatory views of disagreement maintain that discovering a particular type of disagreement requires that one make doxastic conciliation.  In this paper I give a more formal characterization of such a view.  After explaining and motivating this view as the correct view regarding the epistemic significance of disagreement, I proceed to defend it from several objections concerning higher-order evidence (evidence about the character of one’s evidence) made by Thomas Kelly (2005).


The Epistemology of Moral Responsibility

When an agent performs an act (or omission) which is objectively wrong, that agent is morally blameworthy for performing that act unless she had an    excuse.  An agent has an excuse when she fails to meet one or more of the necessary conditions for moral responsibility.  Tracing back to Aristotle, two such requirements for moral responsibility have been identified: a control requirement and an epistemic requirement.  Both of these requirements are    ‘negative’ in the sense that in failing to meet either of these requirements one fails to be morally responsible – one is provided with an excuse.  In this paper I investigate the requirement for moral responsibility which receives rather little attention – the epistemic requirement – through critiquing a proposal by Carl Ginet. 


Examining the Impersonal Standpoint of Act Consequentialism

In this paper I want to focus on three consequences that have been claimed to make a difference in the value of an act’s consequences: that the act was performed, that the act was performed by the agent who performed it, and that the act was performed by an agent who had some relevant property. In particular, I examine whether any of these consequences can aid the invariant act consequentialist in responding to objections stemming from the claim that her thesis is ‘too impersonal’. I find that though counting such consequences may aid the consequentialist in responding to Williams’s Integrity objection, it only makes matter worse regarding the consequentialists inability to account for the moral distinction between doing and allowing.

Reasonable Disagreements and the Naïve Theory of Meaning

In this paper I examine the compatibility between two theses: the naïve theory of meaning, and the thesis that there are no reasonable disagreements. After explaining both of these theses, I show how there is an incompatibility between the two. I then show how a modest revision to the theses that support the claim that there are no reasonable disagreements (the evidential thesis and the uniqueness thesis) can be made, while maintaining the spirit of the claim that there are no such disagreements, so that this revised claims are not incompatible with the naïve theory of meaning.


Skeptical Theism and Having Evidence

In this paper I will defend a response to the evidential argument from evil that has come to be known as the ‘skeptical theist’ response. It has been claimed that the skepticism invoked in the skeptical theist response is too extensive, or that it ‘runs too deep’, creating more problems than it solves. More specifically, it has been charged that this response to the problem of evil leads one to endorse global skepticism on pain of inconsistency. In this paper I will explain the skeptical theistic response to the evidential argument from evil and examine this alleged consequence of adopting it. I will conclude that global skepticism is not a consequence of acceptance of the skeptical theist response to the evidential problem of evil.



Blameworthy, Yet Epistemically Justified

Keith DeRose has sought a better understanding of evidentialism and its interpretation of ‘epistemic ought’ in his paper, “Ought we to follow our Evidence?” In this paper I attempt to provide a better understanding of evidentialism in response to several of DeRose’s proposed counterexamples. In particular, I will examine cases where the epistemic agent is notably blameworthy in some way with regard to a certain belief, yet this belief is nonetheless epistemically justified for that agent. In defending the evidentialist thesis, my claim will be that there is nothing problematic with an agent being blameworthy, yet epistemically justified regarding a belief that a single proposition is the case.



Fragile Events and the Causal Relation

In this paper I defend the claim that maximally-fragile-events are the proper relata of the causal relation. In other words, the things that are causes and effects are maximally-fragile-events alone. Call this thesis the Fragility Thesis. It is standard, though not uncontroversial, to take events as the relata of the causal relation; but it is highly contested that maximally-fragile-events alone play this role. In this paper I show how a counterfactual account of causation coupled with the Fragility Thesis can provide a simple conceptual account that avoids the problems that have faced other counterfactual accounts of causation, as well as suggest that the consequences of adopting such an account are not as outrageous as they may seem.



Supererogation and Act Consequentialism

In this paper I will argue for two claims. First, that there are supererogatory acts. Second, that the existence of such acts shows that act consequentialism is false. I will start by examining the notion of supererogation and then proceed to argue for the first claim. I will then look at the implications that the truth of this first claim has on the truth of act consequentialism and examine and evaluate two possible routes to accommodating supererogatory acts on act consequentialism. In the end I find that both responses inadequate.



Moral Dilemmas and Moral Realism

Several arguments have been advanced charging that the very existence of moral dilemmas would prove that moral realism must be false. In this paper I will examine and evaluate one such argument presented by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong which relies on the notion of a ‘way of life’. I find that there is no objection here to moral realism.