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Book:
Essays on Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, co-edited with John Cottingham, Blackwell, 2009.
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals:
Frank Jackson has argued that, if one is committed to truth-aptness of moral claims and the supervenience of the moral on the descriptive, then one must think that moral properties are descriptive properties (or, rather, natural properties). I argue that his argument works only if we accept a controversial nominalist view about properties in general. This is because other views about properties leave logical room for distinct moral properties even if these properties would be necessarily co-instantiated with some natural properties on the supervenience-base level.
Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit argue that expressivism in metaethics collapses into subjectivism. A sincere utterer of a moral claim must believe that she has the relevant attitudes to be expressed. The truth-conditions of that belief, according to Jackson and Pettit, provide also the truth-conditions of the moral utterance. Thus, the expressivist cannot deny that moral claims have subjectivist truth-conditions. As critics have argued, this argument appears to fail as stated. I try to show that expressivism does have subjectivist repercussions in a way that avoids the problems of the Jackson-Pettit argument. In order to do this, the new argument, based on the norms for the correct use of moral sentences, attempts to tie the expressivist to a more modest form of subjectivism than the previous argument.
This review article looks at the history of the so-called buck-passing accounts of value, the arguments that motivate these views, the details of how these views should be formulated, and what kind of problems they face.
Rule-consequentialists tend to argue for their normative theory by claiming that their view matches our moral convictions just as well as a pluralist set of Rossian duties. As an additional advantage, rule-consequentialism offers a unifying justification for these duties. I challenge the first part of the ruleconsequentialist argument and show that Rossian duties match our moral convictions better than the rule-consequentialist principles. I ask the rule-consequentialists a simple question. In the case that circumstances change, is the wrongness of acts determined by the ideal principles for the earlier circumstances or by the ideal ones for the new circumstances? I argue that whichever answer the rule-consequentialists give the view leads to normative conclusions that conflict with our moral intuitions. Because some set of Rossian duties can avoid similar problems, rule-consequentialism fails in the reflective equilibrium test advocated by the rule-consequentialists.
There is a classic disagreement in moral psychology about the mental states that constitute the sincere acceptance of moral claims. Cognitivists hold that these states are beliefs aiming at a correct description of the world; whereas non-cognitivists argue that they must be some other kind of attitude. Mark Eli Kalderon has recently presented a new argument for non-cognitivism. He argues that all cognitivist inquiries include certain epistemic obligations for the participants in cases of disagreement in the inquiry. I will provide additional support for this claim. Kalderon then claims that our moral inquiry lacks the required epistemic obligation and that therefore it must be non-cognitive. I will show that Kalderon’s case against the required obligation fails and furthermore provide some evidence for the existence of this obligation. Therefore, his argument for non-cognitivism is not sound and provides no pressure against cognitivism.
In this article, I will defend the so-called “buck-passing” theory of value. According to this theory, claims about the value of an object refer to the reason-providing properties of the object. The concept of value can thus be analyzed in terms of reasons and the properties of objects that provide them for us. Reasons in this context are considerations that count in favour of certain attitudes. There are four other possibilities of how the connection between reasons and value might be formulated. For example, we can claim that value is a property that provides us with reasons to choose an option that has this property. I argue that none of these four other options can ultimately be defended, and therefore the buck-passing account is the one we ought to accept as the correct one. The case for the buck-passing account becomes even stronger, when we examine the weak points of the most pressing criticism against this account thus far.
Contractualism has been claimed to be redundant in two ways. First, it has been argued that which principles cannot be reasonably rejected depends on which actions are wrong, and thus the non-rejectable principles cannot be used to account for which actions are wrong. Second, it has been argued that there would not be a need for any justification-based reasons not to do wrong actions as sufficient reasons not to do these actions are already prodivided by more basic, first-order considerations. I try to argued that contractualism can be formulated in a way that can avoid these problems.
It has been argued that Scanlonian contractualism has implausible moral consequences in situations that concern different sized harms to different sized groups. This is because it only allows pair-wise comparisons of burdens to different individuals. I try to argue that a view of this kind can provide all the intuitive results in the aggregation cases when we take into account all the long term consequences to individuals from the adoption of the potential moral principles.
I will begin this paper by identifying the problem within the theory of ethics, which contractualism as a moral theory is attempting to address. It is not that of solving the problem of moral motivation like the 'arch-contratualist', Thomas Scanlon, often claims, but rather that of describing a class of fundamental moral reasons - contractualist reasons for short. In the second section, I will defend the contractualist idea of how the nature of these moral reasons provides us with sufficient, independent tools to construct the content of public moral principles. The rest of my paper is defensive. It addresses the main challenges set to the contracutalist account of moral reasons. In the third section, I will discuss a frequent objection according to which the contratualist reasons are a redundant addition to the space of moral reasons. In the fourth section, I will examine the worry that acting from these reasons would not lead to morally admirable action but rather to vice. In the last section, I will investigate the criticism according to which the normative force of the contratualist reasons is insufficient for rationalising our moral actions in certain difficult circumstances. In this section, we get to the heart of the matter - what the reasons contractualism describes truly are, and how they can explain the generally overriding strength of our moral requirements. I hope to conclude that even after these serious challenges contractualism remains a philosophically viable account of morality's rationalistic appeal.
Critical Notices:
“Consequentialism, Constraints, and the Good-Relative-to: A Reply to Mark Schroeder”.
“Normativity of Reasons – A Critical Notice of Joshua Gert’s Brute Rationality”.
Book Reviews:
"Review of John Kekes's The Human Condition", Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, January 2011 (LINK)
"Review of Alan Goldman's Reasons from Within", Times Literary Supplement, 23 July, 2009, p. 12.
“Review of Anita Superson’s The Moral Sceptic”, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, July 2009 (LINK).
“Review of Roger Crisp’s Reasons and the Good”, The Philosophical Quarterly 57 (July, vol. 228), 2007, pp. 503–505 (LINK).
“Review of Nomy Arpaly’s Unprincipled Virtue”, Ratio 19 (2), 2006, pp. 261–265 (LINK).
“Review of T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other”, Utilitas 19 (4), 2007, 524–526.
Articles in Edited Collections:
“Introduction”. In J. Suikkanen & J. Cottingham (eds.): Essays on Derek Parfit’s On What Matters (Blackwell, 2009), pp. 1–20.
“The Open Question Argument” and “The Naturalistic Fallacy”. Forthcoming in H. LaFollette (ed.): The International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Routledge).
“Contractualism”, co-authored with Matthew S. Liao. Forthcoming in S. Caney (ed.): Encyclopedia of Political Theory (SAGE).
Some older papers published in Finland when I was a student:
“Ongelma toiminnan syiden ymmärtämiselle suosimissuhteiden avulla”
[”A Problem for Understanding Practical Reasons in Terms of Favouring-Relations”]
“The Inadequacy of the Communitarian Account of Practical Agency”.
“Voidaanko arvot sittenkin johtaa tosiasioista?”
[“Can Values Be Derived from the Facts After All?”], co-authored with Antti Kauppinen.
In Salmela, M. & Lemetti, J. (eds.): Perversio, Moraali ja Ironia [Perversion, Irony, and Morality] (Philosophical Studies from the University of Helsinki 7, 2005), pp. 51–64.
“Parfit ja persoonan muuttuva identiteetti”
[“Parfit and Change in Personal Identity”], co-authored with Timo Airaksinen.
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