Overview
Much of my current research focuses on what we should want, think, and feel -- in short, the question of what attitudes we should have, what our mental lives should look like. In a series of papers, I develop a pluralistic ethics of attitudes that says that facts about which attitudes we ought to hold are a function of both considerations of fittingness (aptness, worthiness) and considerations of goodness, or benefit. Some papers from this project can be found below.
Much of my current research focuses on what we should want, think, and feel -- in short, the question of what attitudes we should have, what our mental lives should look like. In a series of papers, I develop a pluralistic ethics of attitudes that says that facts about which attitudes we ought to hold are a function of both considerations of fittingness (aptness, worthiness) and considerations of goodness, or benefit. Some papers from this project can be found below.
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Publications
Fittingness (co-edited with Richard Rowland). Under contract with Oxford University Press. Fitting Attitude Theories of Value. Commissioned for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Consequentialists Must Kill. Forthcoming in Ethics. In which I argue that consequentialists (even agent-relative ones) can't accommodate certain deontic constraints. Link soon. Weighing Epistemic and Practical Reasons for Belief. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. In which I provide an account of how to weigh epistemic and practical reasons for belief against one another when the two types of reasons conflict. Link. Fitting Love and Reasons for Loving. Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. In which I provide an account of what kinds of considerations can make love fitting. Link. The Fundamentality of Fit. Oxford Studies in Metaethics 14 (2019): 216-236. Winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics. In which I defend a 'fittingness-first' ontology of normativity. Link. Fittingness. Philosophy Compass 13 (2018): e12542. In which I provide an opinionated guide to fittingness. Link. In Defense of the Wrong Kind of Reason. Thought 5 (2016): 53-62. In which I argue that 'wrong-kind' reasons for attitudes are genuine reasons for attitudes. Link. Transparency and the Ethics of Belief. Philosophical Studies 173 (2016): 1191-1201. In which I defend the existence of practical reasons for belief. Link. Reviews Review of Expressing Our Attitudes: Explanation and Expression in Ethics, by Mark Schroeder. Ethics 127 (2017): 806-812. In which I review Mark Schroeder's collection of essays about expressivism. Link. Work in Progress Paper about the possibility of forever fitting feelings In which I argue that some feelings are fitting forever. Draft soon. Paper about the ethics of anxiety In which I develop an account of how to answer the question of whether to be worried. Draft soon. Paper about envy in politics In which I consider and counter the charge that egalitarian views of justice are motivated by envy. Draft soon. Paper about the normativity of fittingness In which I argue that fittingness is intrinsically and authoritatively normative. Draft soon. |
South Coyote Buttes, Arizona
Knik Glacier, Alaska
South Coyote Buttes, Arizona
Matanuska Glacier, Alaska
South Coyote Buttes, Arizona
Photo Credit: My dad and professional photographer Andrew K. Howard
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