Moral realism and some of its constitutive theses, e.g., cognitivism, face the following challenge. If they are true, then it seems that we should predict that deference to moral testimony is appropriate under the same conditions as deference to non-moral testimony. Yet, many philosophers intuit that deference to moral testimony is not appropriate, even in otherwise ordinary conditions. In this paper I show that the challenge is cogent only if the appropriateness in question is disambiguated in a particular way. To count against realism and its constitutive theses, moral deference must fail to be appropriate in specifically the way that the theses predict it is appropriate. I argue that this is not the case. In brief, I argue that realism and allied theses predict only that deference to moral testimony is epistemically appropriate, but that the intuitive data plausibly show only that it is not morally appropriate. If I am right, then there is reason to doubt the metaethical relevance of much of the skepticism regarding moral deference in recent literature. {link}

In a previous volume of Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, Melis Erdur defends the provocative claim that postulating a stance-independent ground for morality constitutes a substantive moral mistake that is isomorphic to the substantive moral mistake that many realists attribute to antirealists. In this discussion paper I reconstruct Erdur’s argument and raise two objections to the general framework in which it arises. I close by explaining why rejecting Erdur’s approach doesn’t preclude normative criticism of metaethical theories. {link}

Drawing on the writings of the Jewish thinker, Abraham Joshua Heschel, I defend a partial response to the problem of divine hiddenness. A Jewish approach to divine love includes the thought that God desires meaningful relationship not only with individual persons, but also with communities of persons. In combination with John Schellenberg’s account of divine love, the admission of God’s desire for such relationships makes possible that a person may fail to believe that God exists not because of any individual failing, but because the individual is a member of a larger community that itself is culpable. {link}

This paper defends pro-realism, the view that it is better if moral realism is true rather than any of its rivals. After offering an account of philosophical angst, I make three general arguments. The first targets nihilism: in securing the possibility of moral justification and vindication in objecting to certain harms, moral realism secures something that is non-morally valuable and even essential to the meaning and intelligibility of our lives. The second argument targets antirealism: moral realism secures a desirable independence for moral justification that is qualitatively different from antirealistic independence that is only explicable in terms of degrees of distance from our subjective responses and attitudes. Finally, I argue that while the pan-expressivist semantic program of quasi-realism has significant effects on what can be appropriately said in meta-ethical discourse, it provides no comfort to the pro-realist who is already angsty about anti-realism.

Religious pluralism presents religious believers, agnostics, and skeptics alike with an epistemological problem: how can confidence in any religious claims (including their negations) be epistemically justified? There seem to be rational, well-informed adherents among a variety of mutually incompatible religious and non-religious perspectives, and so the problem of peer disagreement inevitably arises in the religious domain. We show that the transformative nature of religious experience and identity poses more than just this traditional, epistemic problem of religious belief. In encountering one another, believers, agnostics, and skeptics confront not just different beliefs, but different ways of being a person.

To transition between religious belief and skepticism is not just to adopt a different set of beliefs, but to transform into a different version of oneself. We argue that the transformative nature of religious identity intensifies the problem of pluralism by adding a new dimension to religious disagreement, for there are principled reasons to think we can lack epistemic and affective access to potential religious, agnostic, or skeptical selves. Finally, we reflect on the relationship between the transformative problem of religious pluralism and the more traditional question about which religious beliefs are true.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, there are familiar consequences for disobedience to God—destruction of holy sites, slavery, exile, and death. But there is one consequence that is less familiar and of special interest in this chapter. Disobedience to God sometimes results in stark reversals in God’s very relationship and experiential availability to God’s own people. Such people may even remove God’s very presence. This is a curious form of punishment that threatens the very spiritual identity of the victims of the reversal. This chapter explores divine reversal in the Hebrew Scriptures (and its continuation in the New Testament). Insofar as the self-identified people of God commit positive injustices against others, and even insofar as they are culpable for failing to prevent such injustices from occurring, devotees of the Hebrew Scriptures—so, devout Jews and Christians alike—ought to take seriously the possibility that God will side with those who suffer the injustices and even, in a sense, sanctify their life, practices, and identity. Divine reversals pose problems for Jewish and Christian ethics, which must grapple with the possibility that God might seem to adopt inconsistent moral positions across time—or at least inconsistent moral postures. {link}

Many of us are unmoved when it is objected that some morally or intellectually suspect source agrees with our belief. While we may tend to find this kind of guilt by epistemic association unproblematic, I argue that this tendency is a mistake. We sometimes face what I call the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. This is the problem of encountering agreement about the content your belief from a source whose faults give you reason to worry about the belief’s truth, normative status, etiology, or implications. On the basis of an array of cases, I elaborate four distinct kinds of problems that unwelcome epistemic company poses. Two of these are distinctly epistemic, and two are moral. I canvass possible responses, ranging from stubbornness to an epistemic prudishness that avoids unwelcome company at all costs. Finally, I offer preliminary lessons of the problem and distinguish it from the problem of peer disagreement. {draft}

Winter 2020

This upper-level undergraduate course introduces students to philosophical thinking about religion in a way that is rigorous, historically informed, and sensitive to the lived nature of religious practice. Problems and phenomena addressed in the course include: Can we know whether any gods exist and, if so, how? Is the existence of suffering a problem for rational belief in God? What is the nature of faith, and how does it relate to reason? What is the nature of mystical experience? What bearing, if any, do religious systems have on morality or the meaning of life? What are the philosophical implications of religious diversity? {Syllabus}

Winter 2019

This upper-level undergraduate course introduces students to some of the primary texts and major themes of classical Chinese and Indian thought, both philosophical and religious. The work will be as much historical as it is topical, in that students will not only need to competently read and interpret difficult texts in multiple genres, but will engage in first-order philosophical reflection on perennial topics including the philosophy of human nature, the limits of human knowledge, the foundations of logic, metaphysics, and much else. In the last part of the course, we will discuss current debates surrounding the nature and possibility of comparative philosophy and the special problems and opportunities that attend bridging the (alleged) divides between the Anglophone and Asian traditions. All of our readings and discussions will be in English, although students with competencies in original languages are encouraged to consult with me about utilizing this knowledge in their work and in-class discussions. Required texts will include Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2nd ed., edited by Ivanhoe and van Norden) Classical Indian Philosophy: A Reader (edited by Sarma), and An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (by Perrett). {syllabus}

Fall 2019

Nearly everyone has a set of moral views. Significantly fewer people have developed a full-fledged moral theory: a philosophical account of which things are good and why; which actions are forbidden, obligatory, or merely permissible; which character traits are worth developing or avoiding; whether consequences, intention, character, or something else is primary in moral evaluation; how human emotions should factor into moral decision-making; or whether there is just one or multiple equally morally legitimate ways to live. In this upper-level undergraduate course, students will critically examine how historical and contemporary moral philosophers approach these issues, as well as develop their own thinking about them. {Syllabus}

Fall 2018

In this course students explore some major themes in ethical theory with an eye toward thinking critically about moral problems that inevitably arise within the applied sciences, especially computer science and engineering. We discuss a variety of modern controversies that involve computer scientists or engineers at some level—including but not limited to the Flint water crisis, the design of self-driving cars, the global surveillance disclosures of 2013, the technology of drone warfare, and the Tuskegee experiments. {syllabus}

Fall 2018 (two sections)

Questions of ethics range from the theoretical and general to the practical and particular. In this course, students examine some of the major theoretical and practical themes in ethics. In the first half of the course, we consider virtue theory, natural law theory, consequentialism, deontological theories, the feminist critique of extant moral theory, and contemporary theories of justice. In the second half, we look at a series of problems in applied moral philosophy, including world poverty and hunger, immigration, abortion, the rights of non-human animals, the ethics of terrorism, and racial justice. The course closes with an introduction to the meta-ethical problems of realism and moral skepticism. Students read primary texts and commentary from Living Ethics, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau. {syllabus}

Winter 2020

Through historical and contemporary readings, this course introduces major problems of philosophy that arise within philosophy of religion, epistemology, philosophy of mind, personhood, ontology, philosophy of race & gender, free will, ethical theory, and political philosophy. This course also introduces the skills of philosophy, including but not limited to formal and informal argumentation, conceptual analysis, charitable interpretation, and uncovering unstated assumptions. {Syllabus}

Winter 2019, Fall 2019

Through historical and contemporary readings, this course introduces major problems of philosophy that arise within philosophy of religion, epistemology, philosophy of mind, personhood, ontology, philosophy of race & gender, free will, ethical theory, and political philosophy. This course also introduces the skills of philosophy, including but not limited to formal and informal argumentation, conceptual analysis, charitable interpretation, and uncovering unstated assumptions. Students will read selections from The Norton Introduction to Philosophy (Second Edition), edited by Gideon Rosen, Alex Byrne, Joshua Cohen, Elizabeth Harman, and Seana Shiffrin. {syllabus}

• Bioethics (UNC—Chapel Hill): Fall 2018, Winter 2019

• Introduction to Mathematical Logic, online (UNC—Chapel Hill): Summer 2017, Fall 2019

• Ethics in Practice (UNC—Chapel Hill): Fall 2015

• The Ethics of Peace, War, and Defense (UNC—Chapel Hill): Summer 2015

• Philosophy of Religion (UNC—Chapel Hill): Summer 2013, Fall 2014

Winter 2021

If a branch falls from a tree, we might "blame" the wind in the sense of attributing what philosophers call causal responsibility to the wind - the wind caused the branch to fall. But we don't morally blame it, we don't hold the wind responsible. For one thing, we don't think that the wind had any choice or agency in the matter. In this course, students will read, think, and write about how both philosophers and scientists have thought about questions of moral responsibility and freedom of the will. Questions include: what is free will anyway, and who has it? What are the conditions under which a person is appropriately held morally responsible for what happens? And is free will a necessary condition for moral responsibility? In pursuing these and related questions, students will engage with a variety of historical and contemporary sources.

While some philosophers argue that there is something wrong with moral deference, others think that moral deference is just as acceptable as non-moral deference. Moreover, there are some grounds for thinking that the intuition against moral deference is culturally contingent. I offer a unified explanation for all of the above. Morality helps us to live together, and stable moral belief serves this purpose. However, whether or not practices of moral deference are conducive to the stability of moral belief depends upon various contingent factors within a culture, and this goes a long way toward explaining differing intuitions on the subject. {draft}

Some philosophical debates evoke what I call philosophical angst: the judgment that the truth of some thesis is essential for the meaning or intelligibility of our lives, combined with an anxious concern that it might be false. This paper offers an account of philosophical angst, exploring its phenomenology and normative status in contrast to related phenomena, for example, grief at the death of a loved one. Getting a better grasp of the nature and status of philosophical angst is a research program in its own right, but it also has implications for how we may fruitfully proceed in some otherwise trenchant philosophical debates. I show how my concept can illuminate what is at stake and what drives some of our concerns in contemporary controversies ranging from the metaphysics of reasons to the relationship between God and the meaning of life. {draft}

We generally reject inferences from its being good if p, to its being true that p. I call these value-truth inferences. I show that popular reasons for rejecting these inference are not cogent. I argue to the contrary that value-truth inferences are appropriate (albeit defeasible) in domains of inquiry where theorists are responsible for accommodating evaluative features of their target phenomena. This approach vindicates some value-truth inferences in metaethics, and it has theoretical advantages over competing accounts in recent literature. {draft}

It is widely agreed that one’s degree of blameworthiness for performing a wrong action is lower under conditions of non-culpable ignorance than under conditions of knowledge. One might also ask, however, whether there are conditions under which one’s degree of blameworthiness is higher than it would be under conditions of mere knowledge. One such condition is satisfied when the agent has not just moral knowledge, but moral acquaintance. Intuitively, all else equal, the acquainted wrongdoer is more blameworthy than the unacquainted (but still knowledgeable) wrongdoer. Our goal in this paper is to explain why this is the case. We consider and reject three proposals that attempt to explain the phenomenon by appeal to normatively significant features not unique to acquaintance. We then develop our own proposal: the phenomenological possession account. According to the phenomenological possession account, moral acquaintance heightens blameworthiness for wrongdoing because it uniquely puts the agent in a position to phenomenologically possess reasons against the wrong action. When an agent possesses a reason not just intellectually but phenomenologically, her grasp of that reason is stronger. We contend that given plausible connections between blameworthiness and the possession of reasons against wrong actions, phenomenological possession heightens blameworthiness. After developing the phenomenological possession account, we conclude by considering three applications of our view to debates in normative theory, as well as responding to three objections. {draft}

Questions of ethics range from the theoretical and general to the practical and particular. In the first half of the course, we consider virtue theory, natural law theory, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantianism, and feminist moral theory. In the second half, we look at applied problems, including poverty, hunger, immigration, economic justice and equality, the rights of animals, racial justice, and the ethics of terrorism. We close with an introduction to the metaethical problems of realism and skepticism.

This is a hybrid class. Work is divided between in-person and online content and requirements. In-person meetings will typically feature in-depth lecture and discussion of the readings and themes of the course. The rest of the week you will have recorded or written expository material to study online as well as a comprehension quiz to complete.

In this course we will closely read Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, along with assorted secondary literature.