Published Papers
"Slaves of the Passions? On Schroeder's New Humeanism" in Ratio, Vol 22, Issue 2, June 2009, pp.250-7 (PDF of penultimate draft)
A New Direction On Direction of Fit. Forthcoming in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
The Guise of Reasons. Forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly.
Work in Progress
The Aim Of Belief Is to Avoid Falsity.
The Hard Moral Problem and Its Solution. (Revised version soon.)
A Very Good Reason To Reject The Buck Passing Account. (PDF soon.)
Action Guiding Judgements (PDF soon.)
Desire and Certitude. (PDF soon.)
Thesis
My thesis was titled Why Do People Do Things?. Here is the abstract:
Normativity is supposed to be both authoritative and practical. The former is necessary for normativity to have any kind of objective sanction, and the latter is necessary if it is to connect with our actions in any meaningful manner. We might think that there is some kind of tension between these two features of normativity. In deference to Mackie’s argument from queerness, I call this The Queerness Problem. In this thesis, I address two interpretations of the queerness problem.
First, I address The Moral Problem: the apparent inconsistency between cognitivism, judgement internalism, the Humean theory of motivation, and the distinct existences claim. That is, between the claims that judgements about obligations are beliefs, that they motivate, that we are motivated only by desire, and that desires cannot be beliefs. My solution is to deny the last claim and adopt a cognitive theory of desire, according to which to desire something is to believe that one has some normative reason to bring it about. This reductive account of desire promises the best of Humeanism without the worst. But this account is also controversial, and I spend most of the thesis defending it.
Second, more briefly, I address The Categoricity Problem, a problem about how everyone can have the same moral reasons if all normative reasons are dependent on our desires. I argue that the cognitive theory of desire shows that only our subjective reasons are dependent on our desires, which leaves untouched the claim that objective moral reasons are independent of our desires.
In summary, I argue that there is no queerness problem, and that the cognitive theory of desire shows why.