Dissertation

My dissertation develops and applies a distinction between fit-related and value-related reasons for action. Drawing this distinction permits progress on fundamental issues in normative ethics.

Committee: Geoff Sayre-McCord (advisor), Daniel Muñoz, Sarah Stroud, Chris Howard (McGill University), and Margaret Shea

Publications

• “The Aptic View of Moral Worth”
  Provisionally forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (draft available upon request)
  Suppose someone is in need and the right thing to do is to help them. You can help because you care about them. Or you can help because you want to impress an acquaintance. But there’s something objectionable about helping merely for the spectacle. And there’s something praiseworthy about helping out of compassion. Only the compassionate agent acts with moral worth. Why? A popular explanation is that only the compassionate agent acts from reasons of the right kind. But that an agent acts for a particular kind of reason doesn’t tell us much of anything about their motives. We are also moved to act by our attitudes. What ultimately explains whether a given set of motives confers moral worth, I contend, is whether the agent’s motives are fitting. Compassion is a fitting attitude when someone needs help. A concern to promote one’s self-image is not. I defend The Aptic View of moral worth. I say a right act has moral worth when the agent’s motives correctly appraise the moral significance of their right action. Here’s the thought. An agent is moved to action by their occurrent attitudes—these are their motives. Together their attitudes reveal the agent’s evaluation of or orientation toward their action. Their motives on the whole appraise certain features of their action as morally significant. If this appraisal is correct, then their motives are fitting and their right action thereby enjoys moral worth.
• “Consequentializing Ends”
  Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies
  To consequentialize a moral theory is to give it a consequentialist representation. Even if you can consequentialize, why should you? Notational consequentializers say consequentializing reveals the true substantive differences between moral theories. Whether a theory counts as consequentialist or not is unimportant, for any non-consequentialist theory has a consequentialist counterpart that agrees both about deontic verdicts and the grounds of those verdicts. The two theories are thus notational variants of the same view. Earnest consequentializers say consequentializing yields a moral theory that is more intuitively attractive than standard versions of non-consequentialism. They say your normative theory can have it all: consequentialism’s Compelling Idea, but without any counterintuitive deontic verdicts. I argue that Notational and Earnest consequentializers share a false assumption about the nature of reasons for action. They say because we always act in order to bring about an outcome, any and all reasons to act must be features of outcomes. I argue this assumption should be rejected, as some moral theories say there are reasons that are not features of outcomes. This false assumption undergirds key premises in the arguments for notational and earnest consequentializing. The arguments for consequentializing therefore fail.

In Progress

Drafts available upon request

• “Killing Weights to Save Constraints” ms.
  The Mafia threatens to kill five people, unless you kill a sixth. What to do? Most agree that it’s wrong to kill the sixth. Morality plausibly includes a constraint on killing. But constraints seem to give rise to a paradox. Famously, the friend of constraints says it is wrong to kill, even to prevent more killings. But if killing is so bad, then how could it be wrong to minimize the overall number of killings? This is the so-called Paradox of Deontology. In this chapter I argue that extant accounts of constraints share a fatal flaw: they say killing is wrong because your reasons not to kill outweigh your reasons to kill. The air of paradox that has tirelessly followed constraints is a direct result of such weighing explanations. Weighing explanations tempt us toward maximizing principles. Maximizing principles generate the paradox. I argue that the friend of constraints need only say that your reason not to kill defeats your reason to kill. There are many non-weighing ways to say this. For instance, Joseph Raz and others argue that a certain class of reasons defeat one another by exclusion. I develop a version of this Razian view, and argue that it avoids problems encountered by other versions of the view.
• “Permission: Impossible” ms.
  Suppose we’re having coffee. If I finish my coffee first, I can’t just grab your mug and have some of yours. We owe things to one another, and I owe it to you not to just grab your coffee and drink it. Do we owe anything to ourselves? Some philosophers say so. But if you have duties to yourself, why don’t you violate your own rights when you grab your own coffee and drink it? Plausibly, your decision to act waives the duty you have against yourself. But any putative duties to ourselves seem to lack the characteristic bindingness of duties. How can we have duties to ourselves if they do not bind us to act? This is the so-called Paradox of Self-Release. In this paper I argue the paradox is merely apparent. Dissolving the paradox reveals the surprising relationship between moral modality and metaphysical modality. For example, if you do not waive your right against me to not drink your coffee, I would wrong you in sneaking a sip. But if I were to act against my own right without waiving it, I would wrong myself. However, it’s metaphysically impossible that I decide to act without waiving my right. But that it is impossible to perform a certain action does not prohibit morality from assigning a deontic verdict to that action. That there is a legitimate case of self-wronging in impossible modal space implies that normative or moral necessity extends beyond metaphysical necessity. This is why the paradox of self-release is merely apparent. Just because you cannot, metaphysically, violate your own right does not mean that it would not be morally wrong for you to do so.