My CV.

“A Defense of the Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harm,” American Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming.

Although the counterfactual comparative account of harm, according to which someone is harmed when things go worse for her than they otherwise would have, is intuitively plausible, it has recently come under attack. There are five serious objections in the literature: some philosophers argue that the counterfactual account makes it hard to see how we could harm someone in the course of benefitting that person; others argue that Parfit’s non-identity problem is particularly problematic; another objection claims that the account forces us to see many harms where there is just one; a fourth objection is based on the claim that the counterfactual account makes mysterious the distinction between harms and mere failures-to-benefit; and a final problem arises from cases of pre-emption, in which the nearest possible world in which the harmful event does not occur is a world in which some other harmful event occurs. This paper argues that, properly understood, harm essentially involves a counterfactual comparison, and that these comparisons are sensitive to context in the manner typical of counterfactual conditionals, and that, augmented with two plausible distinctions, this account has the resources to provide satisfying responses to each of the objections that have been raised against it.

“Perspective-Neutral Intrinsic Value,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol 92. no. 3 (September 2011) pp. 323 – 37.

Is it possible to do a good thing, or to make the world a better place? Some philosophers argue that it these things are not possible, because this perspective-neutral value does not exist. Some have argued that `good' does not play the right sort of grammatical or semantic role and does not describe the objects it applies to; or that all good things are good in some particular way, and that there is no such thing as ``just plain'' good; or that goodness is inherently perspective-dependent. I argue that the logical and semantic properties of `good' are what we should expect of an evaluative predicate; that the fact that there are many ways of being good is not a threat to the thesis that some of these ways are independent of perspective; and that there are examples that convincingly demonstrate that some ways of being good are perspective-independent.

“Moorean Pluralism as a Solution to The Incommensurability Problem,” Philosophical Studies vol. 153 no. 3 (April 2011) pp 335 – 49.

Several prominent ethical philosophers have attempted to demonstrate that there exist instances or types of value that are of crucial moral significance but which cannot legitimately be compared with one another. Bernard Williams and Michael Stocker, for example, argue that it can sometimes be rational to regret having chosen the all-things- considered better of two alternatives, and that this sense of regret entails that the goodness of the worse option is not made up for by and is therefore incommensurable with that of the better. Joseph Raz and others have made similar points. In this paper, I propose a theory of value that is monistic in that it countenances just one sort of morally crucial value, but pluralistic in that several distinct properties bearer this value. I then explain how this view avoids incommensurable values without doing violence to the core intuitions that seemed to necessitate them, and how it fits into a larger conception of morality, right conduct, and moral psychology.

“In Defense of the Trichotomy Thesis,” Acta Analytica vol. 25 no. 3. (2010) pp. 317 - 327

According to a standard picture, for any two comparable objects and a basis for comparison, either one is greater than the other or they are equal with respect to the basis. This picture has been called the Trichotomy Thesis, and although it is intuitive and plausible, it has been called into question by such philosophers as Derek Parfit, James Griffin, Joseph Raz, and Ruth Chang. Chang’s discussion is particularly rich, for she proposes and provides a detailed account of a possible fourth relation that, she argues, provides a satisfying explanation of hard cases of comparison. In this paper, I will examine a version of the main argument against the Trichotomy Thesis, and attempt to show that it is unsound.

“The Amenability of Pleasure and Pain to Aggregation,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 13 no. 3 (June 2010) pp. 293 - 303.

Many philosophers, such as Bentham, Mill, Moore, and possibly Plato, among others, have found it obvious that pleasure and pain come in measurable quantities, and that these quantities are of central importance to morality. This thesis is controversial, however, and several philosophers have presented or felt compelled to respond to arguments for the conclusion that it is false. One important class of these arguments concerns the use of numbers to represent aggregates of pleasure and pain. If pleasure and pain were measurable quantities, then, by definition, it would be possible to perform various mathematical and statistical operations on numbers representing amounts of them. For example, it would be possible to add them together and to subtract them from one another, and the results of such an operation would be coherent, and could themselves be thought of as amounts of pleasure or pain. It would also be possible to meaningfully and coherently express relationships between amounts of pleasure and pain in terms of ratios: it would be possible to say, meaningfully, that one episode of pleasure contained twice as much pleasure as another episode; or that one episode contained a third as much pain as another. It is sometimes argued that such expressions must be false or meaningless; that these kinds of claim about amounts of pleasure and pain do not make sense, and that pleasure and pain therefore do not come in amounts suitable for numerical representation. In this paper, I present, explain, and rebut several of the most interesting and significant instances of this type of argument in an effort to show that, in general, it is specious.

“Pleasure, Desire, and Oppositeness,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (May, 2010).

Why is pain the opposite of pleasure? Several theories of pleasure and pain have substantial difficulty explaining this basic feature. Theories according to which pleasure and pain are individual sensations or features of sensations have particular difficulty, since it is difficult to understand how pairs of sensations could be opposites. Some philosophers argue that the pain is the opposite of pleasure because pain and pleasure are fundamentally a matter of desire and aversion, and desire and aversion are clear opposites. I argue that the structure of desire and aversion does not correspond to that of pleasure and pain. I propose that pleasure and pain are opposites because pleasure is good and pain is bad, and good and bad are clear opposites. I show that this view explains the structure of opposition of pleasure and pain, and I answer several objections.

“The Problem of Interpersonal Comparisons of Pleasure and Pain,” (penultimate draft) Journal of Value Inquiry vol. 42 no. 1 (March 2008). The published version is available at www.springerlink.com. (Subscription required.)

Several philosophers have argued that interpersonal comparisons of utility are problematic or even impossible, and that this poses a problem for the thesis that pleasure is a legitimate, measurable quantity. This, in turn, is thought to pose a problem of some kind for a variety of normative ethical and axiological theories. Perhaps it is supposed to show that utilitarianism or hedonism is false, or is supposed to show that there is no genuine hedonic calculus, or that any view that presupposes that pleasure and pain are morally relevant is false or untenable. Its proponents begin by noticing that interpersonal comparisons of pleasure and pain are impossible in some relevant sense. This impossibility has been exploited by different philosophers for different purposes. It is clear, however, that a great many ethical theories rely in some way on the thesis that pleasure is measurable, and that its incoherence therefore threatens a great many theories in ethics. The purpose of this paper is to survey several of the most interesting versions of this argument; then to explain several attempts to respond to the problem, and to explain why each attempt fails; then to present, explain, and defend the correct solution to the problem.