Richard posted about his future research interests a few months ago. His post got me thinking about what my main future research interests are. I will follow him by adding the disclaimers that this list is not exhaustive, that I am sure new projects will strike my fancy in the future, and that I am [...]
Over at the papers page of this site I have posted a new paper and two updates on older papers. The new paper is “The Respect Model of Freedom of Expression”. I wrote about the issues discussed in this paper here and here. The updated papers are “Changing Places: The Personal Reason Requirement and Patient [...]
After some conversations with various people, it has become clear that my two cases involving Lois outlined in this post are not very good in pumping the right intuitions. In fact, now I am unclear whether Lois really is in a position to know that she has a reason to stand still. In fact, I [...]
As it often is, I have started to question some implicit assumptions I made while writing the first draft of my paper on analyses of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational.’ One such assumption concerns what an adequate analysis is meant to capture. The way I see it as follows: there is a fairly broad conceptual space that [...]
In the comment thread to my reductivist moral responsibility post, Cullen said the following about my view (which is partially presented in my Scanlon and Substantive Rationality post), “However, the view you present assumes that reasons for action and rationality do not come apart, which is something you’ll have to argue for. Some people (Parfit, [...]
Scanlon has some interesting things to say about substantive rationality in the “The (most) rational thing to do” section of What We Owe to Each Other. The main thrust of his remarks is that so-called ’substantive rationality’ is not about rationality in the same way that procedural rationality is. He writes, “Requirements of the [...]
The following is about two popular views of reasons for action. On desire-based theories (DB), all of our reasons for action are provided by desires (some DB theories claim only present desires, some claim idealized desires). On value-based theories (VB), all of our reasons for action are provided by facts about value, viz., facts about [...]
Nate Charlow has been discussing reason ascriptions (here, here, and here), and his posts have spurred my thinking on the topic. What follows is not necessarily a criticism of what he is arguing. Although I don’t see a strong point to argue about what he is arguing about, I don’t find anything wrong with his [...]
One of my main arguments in “Well-What? Scepticism about Philosophical Welfare,” is that the rational desire satisfaction analysis (RDS) cannot solve the scope problem (sometimes referred to as the problem from remote desires). RDS states that x is good for S equals by definition it is rational for S to desire x. The first case [...]
