Papers
| Making Sense of Unpleasantness: Evaluationism and Shooting the Messenger (Philosophical Studies) |
| Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good (JESP) |
There Are No Intrinsic Desires (email for draft)
There are no intrinsic desires. I do not claim that there is nothing we desire for its own sake. What I object to is a view that casts intrinsic desires in the role of ultimate grounds of what an agent objectively ought to do, and which holds that practical reasoning is a matter of determining what one actually wants, deep down. In this paper I show that such a view, Hard Humeanism, requires intrinsic desires to have such abstract content that it becomes wildly implausible that what one ought to do is grounded in what you want. I do this by first offering a sketch of a solution to a well-known critique of Humeanism, known as the specificationist critique. I then show that the emended view that survives this critique prevents the Hard Humean from accounting for the rationality of changes of intrinsic desire during maturation.
Affective Content and the Guise of the Good (email for draft)
There are no intrinsic desires. I do not claim that there is nothing we desire for its own sake. What I object to is a view that casts intrinsic desires in the role of ultimate grounds of what an agent objectively ought to do, and which holds that practical reasoning is a matter of determining what one actually wants, deep down. In this paper I show that such a view, Hard Humeanism, requires intrinsic desires to have such abstract content that it becomes wildly implausible that what one ought to do is grounded in what you want. I do this by first offering a sketch of a solution to a well-known critique of Humeanism, known as the specificationist critique. I then show that the emended view that survives this critique prevents the Hard Humean from accounting for the rationality of changes of intrinsic desire during maturation.
Affective Content and the Guise of the Good (email for draft)
Comments
| Comments on Barry Maguire's "There Are No Reasons for Attitudes" |
Reviews
| Review of Nada Gligorov's "Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense" (Neuroethics) |