Areas of Interests

Ethics, social and political philosophy.

As my publications reveal, my main research interests lie in moral philosophy, in particular normative ethics. Indeed, my second book is a systematic survey of the field of normative ethics, considered analytically (rather than historically, as is more typical of textbooks in ethics). More particularly still, much of my work centers on the debate between consequentialist and deontological moral theories. My first book dealt with two common objections to consequentialism, that it is too demanding, and that it fails to recognize that certain types of acts are morally forbidden—even when performing those acts would bring about the best possible results. I argue that neither objection can be sustained. The book thus constitutes a kind of back door defense of consequentialism. Since then, much of my work has been devoted to trying to arrive at an adequate theory of the good (to incorporate into that consequentialist framework), with publications on (among other things) the nature of well–being, the concept of intrinsic value, and problems involving ranking worlds with infinite amounts of utility. For the last several years I have been working on the nature of moral desert. I think that desert is a far more complex topic than has been previously appreciated, but that we can make progress in better understanding the alternative possible views that are available here by representing these views in graphs. Hence the title of my main work in progress, The Geometry of Desert.

Education PhD 1982, Princeton

Current or Recent Courses Taught

• Introduction: Ethics
• Death
• Normative Ethics
• Moral Epistemology

Selected Publications

Books

• The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1989)
• Normative Ethics (Westview, 1998)

Articles

• "The Additive Fallacy", Ethics 99, #1 (October, 1988): 5-31.
• "The Structure of Normative Ethics", Philosophical Perspectives 6(1992): 223-242.
• "Me and My Life", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 94 (1994): 309-324.
• "Infinite Value and Finitely Additive Value Theory" (with Peter Vallentyne), The Journal of Philosophy 94, #1 (January, 1997): 5-26.
• "Equality and Desert", in What Do We Deserve, edited by Owen McLeod and Louis Pojman Oxford: 1998): 298-314.
• "Rethinking Intrinsic Value", The Journal of Ethics 2, #4 (1998): 277-297.
• "Evaluative Focal Points", in Morality, Rules, and Consequences, edited by Brad Hooker, Elinor Mason, and Dale Miller (Edinburgh: 2000): 134-155.
• "Thinking About Cases", Social Philosophy and Policy 18, #2 (2001): 44-63
• "Kantianism for >Consequentialists," forthcoming, Kant's Groundwork,ed. Allen Wood (Yale University Press).

Works in Progress

Book

• The Geometry of Desert

Articles

• Indeterminate Desert
• “Comparative Desert”