Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?

Ethics 118: 4 (October), 2008. Coauthored with Stephen Kearns.

John Broome thinks a person's normative reasons for action are either explanations concerning what she ought to do, or parts of explanations concerning what she ought to do. We think a person's normative reasons for action are evidence concerning what she ought to do . We argue that one apparent advantage that Broome's account has over ours – it aims to capture a common thought that an essential role that normative reasons play is to make it the case that I ought to do whatever it is I ought to do – is really only apparent, and that we are better placed to make sense of the thought that normative reasons make it the case that I ought to do whatever it is I ought to do.

Reasons as Evidence

Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 4, 2009. Coauthored with Stephen Kearns.

In this paper, we argue for a particular informative and unified analysis of normative reasons.  According to this analysis, a fact F is a reason to act in a certain way just in case it is evidence that one ought to act in that way. Similarly, F is a reason to believe a certain proposition just in case it is evidence for the truth of this proposition. Putting the relatively uncontroversial claim about reasons for belief to one side, we present several arguments in favor of our analysis of reasons for action. We then turn to consider a series of objections to the analysis. We conclude that there are good reasons to accept the analysis and that the objections do not succeed.

Moral Knowledge, Epistemic Externalism, and Intuitionism

Ratio, 21:3 (September), 2008.

This paper explores the generally overlooked relevance of an important contemporary debate in mainstream epistemology to philosophers working within ethics on questions concerning moral knowledge. It is argued that this debate, between internalists and externalists about the accessibility of epistemic justification, has the potential to be both significantly influenced by, and have a significant impact upon, the study of moral knowledge. The moral sphere provides a particular type of strong evidence in favour of externalism, and mainstream epistemologists might benefit from paying attention to this fact. At the same time, the terrain of moral epistemology (approached as a subfield of metaethics) needs to be reshaped by the realisation that externalists can steal the thunder of intuitionists when it comes to knowledge constituted by seemingly self-evident beliefs.

Review of Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, Principled Ethics (OUP, 2006)

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2007.