Value

"The Value of Consciousness to the One Who Has It.” Forthcoming in G. Lee and A. Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious, OUP.

This paper starts with an intuitive datum - that a zombie's life is never good or bad for the zombie - and considers what sort of account of the good life might accommodate this datum. 

"Mood and Wellbeing.” Forthcoming in Inquiry (special issue on emotion and value).

Subjectivist theories of wellbeing focus on pleasure and desire and as the mental phenomena most central to wellbeing. I argue that mood is actually much more important.

"The Poetic as an Aesthetic Category." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
2023.

We call many things poetic that aren't poems: movies, music passages, and even things from everyday life. What exactly are we doing when we call these things poetic? What is this aesthetic property we're attributing to them? I start on an answer. 

"A Fitting-Attitude Approach to Aesthetic Value?" British Journal of Aesthetics 2023.

Fitting-attitude approaches to moral value have been quite popular recently. I look into what an analogous approach to aesthetic value might look like.

"Moral Judgment and the Content-Attitude Distinction." Philosophical Studies 2022.

Some people say moral judgments are cognitive states, some say they are noncognitive states. I say some moral judgments are cognitive and some are noncognitive. The cognitive ones (e.g., belief that the German genocide of the Herero and Namaque is wrong) morally evaluate though their content, the noncognitive ones (e.g., indignation about the German genocide of the Herero and Namaqua) morally evaluate throuth their attitude. I argue that this view, which I call moral-judmgment pluralism, overcomes all the main issues that have structured the debate between cognitivism and noncognitivism.

"Indignation, Appreciation, and the Unity of Moral Experience." Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2022.

Some people say there is nothing in common across all our moral experiences. I argue that when we pay attention to the attitudes employed by certain emotions we discover that there is in fact an experiential commonality among all moral experiences. 

(With Mark Timmons.) "The Phenomenology of Kantian Respect for Persons." Dean and Sensen (eds.), Respect 2021.

Discussions of Kant's account of respect for persons tend to focus on the distinctive functional role of respect in Kant's writings; we try to bring out of his writings, espectially the Groundwork and the Doctrine of Virtue, a portrait of respect's distinctive phenomenal character.

"Moral Experience: Its Existence, Describability, and Significance." Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency 2020.

I argue for the existence, describability, and significance of moral experience.

"The Value of Consciousness." Analysis 2019. [Longer version: “The Value of Consciousness: A Propaedeutic”]

What is the value of consciousness? I discuss what one might mean by this question and what one might say by way answering it, reviewing recent work in diverse areas of philosophy (with special emphasis on theories of well-being) that bear on the question.

"Dignity and the Phenomenology of Recognition-Respect." Emotional Experiences: Ethical and Political Significance 2017.

I argue that the dignity of persons is partially grounded in the privacy of their subjective experience - this privacy creates a kind of inviolability central to dignity.

"Justifying Desires." Metaphilosophy 2013.

I present an argument for the view that an agent's having a desire to act a certain way is not only a necessary condition for the agent having a justificatory reason for action, as ethical internalists often argue, but also a sufficient condition for having such a reason.

"Moral Motivation, Moral Phenomenology, and the Alief/Belief Distinction." Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2012.

I address the tension between cognitivist and internalist accounts of moral judgment by distinguishing two types of moral judgment - moral belief and moral alief. Cognitivism is true of the former, internalism of the latter. 

“Moral Phenomenology: Foundational Issues.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2008.

What is moral phenomenology? How should we pursue it? Why? I answer.