It Ain't Necessarily So

While Neo-Aristotelians argue quite plausibly that it is hard to get to eudaemonia if one is wicked, I argue that they fail to show that the seeker of flourishing has a reason to become virtuous (as opposed to morally mediocre)

What is it Like to Have a Crappy Imagination?

I argue that when it comes to understanding other people, humans have a problem that involves a combination of poor imagination and excessive trust in this imagination. Often, the problem has to do with what I call "runaway simulation" - clinging to the assumption that another person resembles you despite glaring counter-evidence. I then argue that the same type of problem appears intra-personally, as we fail miserably to imagine potential and future selves. Finally, I argue that this fact goes a long way to explain the phenomenology of many transformative experiences, an explanation that does not require a special kind of knowledge to exist along the lines of "knowing what it's like"

Responsibility, applied ethics, and complex autonomy theories

I argue that despite it being said often that the concept of personal autonomy is important for grounding moral responsibility and in applied ethics, a certain type of theories of autonomy and identification, descended from the work of Harry Frankfurt starting 1971, are not relevant in an obvious way to either moral responsibility or applied ethics

Quality of Will and (Some) Unusual Behavior

This chapter explores how far one can go accounting for the moral responsibility implications of several unusual mental conditions using a parsimonious quality-of-will account that relies on the way we talk about moral responsibility in more mundane situations. By contrasting situations involving epistemic irrationality versus cognitive impairment, it becomes clear that the presence of those often (but not always) excuses actions performed by unusual agents. The discussion turns to cases of clinical depression and sketches a way for quality-of-will accounts to approach them. It is also argued that of some of these mental conditions, there is no particular reason to think that they excuse. There is also an argument against regarding the concept "mental disorder" and current DSM categories as critical to agency theory

Moral Worth: You Can't Have it Both Ways

Some say that concern for morality de dicto grants right actions moral worth. That is, they say that if you do the right thing because of your concern to do the right thing, your action has moral worth (and you are worthy of esteem for that action). Some say that concern for morality de re grants moral worth - that is, they say that if you do the right action for the reasons that make it right (for example, because it protects wellbeing and respects autonomy) then your action has moral worth. Increasingly, some argue, and many seem to think, that both concern for morality de dicto and concern for morality de re grant right actions moral worth In this paper, I will argue that the last position is false. If de dicto concern grants moral worth, de re concern does not, and vice versa. The question turns out to be surprisingly tied to the question of whether moral ignorance excuses from blame

Affective Experience, Desire, and Reasons for Action

What is the role of affective experience in explaining how our desires provide us with reasons for action? When we desire that p, we are thereby disposed to feel attracted to the prospect that p, or to feel averse to the prospect that not-p. In this paper, we argue that affective experiences – including feelings of attraction and aversion – provide us with reasons for action in virtue of their phenomenal character. Moreover, we argue that desires provide us with reasons for action only insofar as they are dispositions to have affective experiences. On this account, affective experience has a central role to play in explaining how desires provide reasons for action

Willpower Satisficing

Satisficing Consequentialism is often rejected as hopeless. Perhaps its greatest problem is that it risks condoning the gratuitous prevention of goodness above the baseline of what qualifies as “good enough”. I propose a radical new willpower-based version of the view that avoids this problem, and that better fits with the motivation of avoiding an excessively demanding conception of morality. I further demonstrate how, by drawing on the resources of an independent theory of blameworthiness, we may obtain a principled specification of what counts as “good enough”