Metaethics 9
Internalism from the Ethnographic Stance: From Self-Indulgence to Self-Expression and Corroborative Sense-Making
The Philosophical Quarterly 75 (3): 1094–1120. 2025. doi:10.1093/pq/pqae051
Argues that Bernard Williams’s internalism about reasons is the philosophical underpinning of his liberalism, and that it needs to be understood in relation to his later work on the normativity of genealogical explanation and the ethnographic stance, where we imaginatively inhabit a conceptual and motivational perspective without endorsing it.
deliberation, ethics, genealogy, history, internalism, metaethics
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Virtues, Rights, or Consequences? Mapping the Way for Conceptual Ethics
Studia Philosophica: The Swiss Journal of Philosophy 83 (1): 9–22. 2024. doi:10.24894/StPh-en.2024.83002
Maps out the ways in which moral and political reflection on which concepts to use might take its cue from virtue-ethical, deontological, and consequentialist traditions, flagging the main difficulties facing each approach.
conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, metaethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, virtue ethics
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Ethics Beyond the Limits: New Essays on Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Mind 132 (525): 234–243. 2023. doi:10.1093/mind/fzaa077
Reviews a collection of essays on Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy and offers a substantive defense of Williams against Humean critiques, arguing that Williams does employ vindicatory genealogies for basic ethical concepts like obligation, but separates these from their distortion within the morality system. Synthesizes diverse interpretations of Williams’s relativism of distance and practical necessity, recasting them not as skepticism but as inquiries into authenticity and the irreducible first-person nature of deliberation. Frames the collection as evidence that Williams’s project was not merely destructive, but a liberating attempt to legitimize ethical thoughts that exist outside the rigid constraints of modern moral theory.
Bernard Williams, ethics, genealogy, morality system, metaethics, deliberation
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On the Self-Undermining Functionality Critique of Morality
European Journal of Philosophy 31 (2): 501–508. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.1111/ejop.12874
Reconstructs Reginster’s account of Nietzsche’s critique of morality as a “self-undermining functionality critique” and raise three problems for it.
functionality, function, genealogy, genealogical debunking, metaethics, morality
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Nietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics
Inquiry 66 (7): 1335–1364. Proceedings of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies. 2023. doi:10.1080/0020174X.2022.2164049
While Nietzsche appears to engage in two seemingly contrary modes of concept evaluation—one looks to concepts’ effects, the other to what concepts express—this article offers an account of the expressive character of concepts which unifies these two modes and yields a powerful approach to practical reflection on which concepts to use.
conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, genealogy, naturalism, revaluation of values, expressivism
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Choosing Values? Williams contra Nietzsche
The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 286–307. 2021. doi:10.1093/pq/pqaa026
Highlights enduring epistemic and metaphysical difficulties for any project of evaluating and improving the values we live by, including contemporary work in conceptual ethics and engineering, and argues that attempts to sidestep these difficulties fall prey to “Saint-Just’s illusion”—the mistake of believing that a set of values from one political context can be successfully transplanted into a different political context.
conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, conceptual change, genealogy, 19th century, 20th century
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Whence the Demand for Ethical Theory?
American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2): 135–46. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.2307/48614001
Offers a practical derivation of the need for public and judicial reasoning to take a more discursive and consistent form than private deliberation (a theme more fully explored in ch. 10 of my second book).
public reason, ethical theory, genealogy, metaethics, legitimacy, conceptual change
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On Ordered Pluralism
Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (3): 305–11. 2019. doi:10.1080/24740500.2020.1859234
Beginning with the debate concerning “moral justice forgiveness” and “gifted” forgiveness, this paper critically examines Miranda Fricker’s method for ordering plural conceptions of a practice. It argues that the selection of a paradigm case, such as “moral justice forgiveness,” is not absolute, but depends on which functional aspect of the practice one wishes to explain.
Fricker, conceptual engineering, metaethics, methodology, pluralism, moral psychology
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Nietzsche as a Critic of Genealogical Debunking: Making Room for Naturalism without Subversion
The Monist 102 (3): 277–297. 2019. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1093/monist/onz010
Argues that contrary to popular belief, Nietzsche’s genealogical method does not seek to subvert by revealing immanent and lowly naturalistic origins—quite the opposite: Nietzsche is a critic of genealogical debunking thus conceived, on the grounds that it threatens to make a universal acid of reflection in a world increasingly disenchanted by scientific advances. Instead, Nietzsche advocates an outlook which makes room for naturalistic understanding and redraws the contrast between vindicatory and subversive genealogies within the space of naturalistic origins.
genealogical debunking, genealogy, metaethics, naturalism, continental philosophy, 19th century
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