Selected works on Contemporary Topics in Moral Philosophy
Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2018)
This book argues that the moral community—the community of all persons, structured by a web of correlative rights and duties—has the authority to introduce new moral norms. This authority begins to be exercised when individuals linked by such rights and duties attempt conscientiously to work out what they ought to do. In establishes this claim, the book also indirectly defends a novel first-order moral theory.
See the symposium on this book in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (2023): 231-270, with my precis, comments from Rowan Cruft, Linda Radzik, and Cheryl Misak, and my replies.
“Specifying Norms as a Way to Resolve Concrete Ethical Problems”, Philosophy & Public Affairs
19(4): 279–310 (1990).
“Beyond Good and Right: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 24(2): 108–141 (1995).
“Nussbaum: Love and Respect" Metaphilosophy 29: 254–262 (1998).
“Institutionally Divided Moral Responsibility”, Social Philosophy and Policy 16: 218–249 (1999).
“Specifying, Balancing, and Interpreting Bioethical Principles”, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 25(3): 285–307 (2000).
“Autonomy’s Many Normative Presuppositions”, American Philosophical Quarterly 38(3): 287–303 (2001).
“Incommensurability and Basic Goods A Tension in the New Natural Law Theory", in Human Values, ed. David S. Oderberg & Timothy Chappell (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).
“Discerning Subordination and Inviolability: A Comment on Kamm's Intricate Ethics”, Utilitas 20(1): 81–91 (2008).
“Moral Entanglements: Ad Hoc Intimacies”, Journal of Moral Philosophy 9(3): 376–409 (2012).
“Revising Moral Norms: Pragmatism and the Problem of Perspicuous Description", in Constructivism in Ethics, ed. Carla Bagnoli (Cambridge, 2013).
Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism (Oxford, 2018).