Publications

Book

The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty: A Study of Thick Concepts in Ethics
In addition to thin concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to thick concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind — concepts that somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. Thick concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in content, and many philosophers claimed them to have deep and distinctive significance in ethics and metaethics. In this first book-length treatment of thick concepts, Pekka Väyrynen argues that all this is mistaken. Through detailed attention to the language of thick concepts, he defends a novel theory on which the relationship between thick words and evaluation is best explained by general conversational and pragmatic norms. Drawing on general principles in philosophy of language, he argues that many prominent features of thick words and concepts can be explained by general factors that have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. If evaluation is not essential to the sort of thinking we do with thick concepts, claims for the deep and distinctive significance of the thick are undermined. The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty is a fresh and innovative treatment of an important topic in moral philosophy and sets a new agenda for future work. It will be essential reading to anyone interested in the analysis and the broader philosophical significance of evaluative and normative language.

(Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback October 2015.)

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Reviews and critical notices: Journal of Moral Philosophy ¦ Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews ¦ Times Literary Supplement ¦ Ethics ¦ Philosophical Quarterly ¦ Choice ¦ Disputatio

Journal articles

Explanatory Pluralism in Normative Ethics
Some theorists of normative explanation argue that we can make sense of debates between first-order moral theories such as consequentialism and its rivals only if we understand their explanations of why the right acts are right and the wrong acts are wrong as generative grounding explanations. Others argue that the standard form of normative explanation is, instead, some kind of unification. Neither sort of explanatory monism can account for all the explanations of particular moral facts that moral theorists seek to state and defend. This paper argues that we can do better if we accept normative explanatory pluralism, the view that at least some particular moral facts have more than one type of correct complete explanation. Such pluralism is supported by what goes on in actual moral inquiry, parallels an independently plausible form of pluralism about scientific explanation, and can offer principled responses to central objections.

Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 14 (2024).
PhilPapers

Practical Commitment in Normative Discourse
Many normative judgments play a practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is natural to wonder whether the phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic. The standard assumption in moral philosophy is that at least terms which can be used to express “thin” normative concepts – such as good, right, and ought – are associated with certain practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But this view is rarely given explicit defense or even articulation. I’ll consider several versions of the view, and argue that even the most promising among them are problematic. Terms like ought are often used in ways where their customary practical role is absent. Such cases give us a choice: either offer some plausible explanation of why the relevant practical upshots don’t show up in these cases despite featuring in our semantic theory for these expressions, or else don’t build them into that theory. I argue that plausible explanations of the requisite sort aren’t forthcoming in either descriptive semantics or metasemantics for normative language. In closing I briefly consider the prospects for a pragmatic account of the phenomenon and some broader ramifications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity.

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (2022), 175-208. Open access.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.26556/jesp.v21i2.1484

Normative Naturalism on Its Own Terms
Normative naturalism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine: there are normative facts and properties, and these fall into the class of natural facts and properties. Many objections to naturalism rely on additional assumptions about language or thought, but often without adequate consideration of just how normative properties would have to figure in our thought and talk if naturalism were true. In the first part of the paper, I explain why naturalists needn’t think that normative properties can be represented or ascribed in wholly non-normative terms. If so, certain prominent objections to normative naturalism fail. In the second part, I consider the objection that normative properties are “just too different” from (other) natural properties to themselves be natural properties. I argue that naturalists have no distinctive trouble making sense of thought and talk involving forms of “genuine” or “authoritative” normativity which can drive a non-question-begging form of the objection.

Organon F 28 (2021), 505-530 (Special Issue: Value in Language). Open access.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.31577/orgf.2021.28302 | Erratum

Against Moral Contingentism
The conventional wisdom in ethics is that pure moral laws are metaphysically necessary. By contrast, Moral Contingentism holds that pure moral laws are metaphysically contingent. This paper raises a normative objection to Moral Contingentism: it is worse equipped than Moral Necessitarianism to account for the normative standing or authority of the pure moral laws to govern the lives of the agents in the worlds where they hold. Since morality is widely taken to have such a standing, failing to account for it would be a significant problem. At minimum, the objection also shows that the debate about the modal status of moral principles isn’t a debate solely within modal metaphysics, but has implications for topics in moral philosophy.

Thought 10 (2021), 209-217. Open access.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1002/tht3.494

Normative Explanation Unchained
Normative theories aim to explain why things have the normative features they have. This paper argues that, contrary to some plausible existing views, one important kind of normative explanations which first-order normative theories aim to formulate and defend can fail to transmit downward along chains of metaphysical determination of normative facts by non-normative facts. Normative explanation is plausibly subject to a kind of a justification condition whose satisfaction may fail to transmit along the relevant kind of metaphysical hierarchy. A broader aim of the paper is to contribute to systematic theorizing about normative explanation: whereas there has been a great deal of work on scientific explanation, there has been little by way of systematic exploration of what sort of explanations normative theories aim to formulate and defend.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2021), 278-297. Open access.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1111/phpr.12717

Normative Explanation and Justification
Normative explanations of why things are wrong, good, or unfair are ubiquitous in ordinary practice and normative theory. This paper argues that normative explanation is subject to a justification condition: a correct complete explanation of why a normative fact holds must identify features that would go at least some way towards justifying certain actions or attitudes. I first explain and motivate the condition I propose. I then support it by arguing that it fits well with various theories of normative reasons, makes good sense of certain legitimate moves in ordinary normative explanatory discourse, and helps to make sense of our judgments about explanatory priority in certain cases of normative explanation. This last argument also helps to highlight respects in which normative explanation won’t be worryingly discontinuous with explanations in other domains even though these other explanations aren’t subject to the justification condition. Thus the paper aims not only to do some constructive theorizing about the relatively neglected topic of normative explanation but also to cast light on the broader question of how normative explanation may be similar to and different from explanations in other domains.

Noûs 55 (2021), 3-22.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1111/nous.12283

Reasons Why in Normative Explanation
Normative explanations, which specify why things have the normative features they do, are ubiquitous in normative theory and ordinary thought. But there is much less work on normative explanation than on scientific or metaphysical explanation. Skow (2016) argues that a complete answer to the question why some fact Q occurs consists in all of the reasons why Q occurs. This paper explores this theory as a case study of a general theory that promises to offer us a grip on normative explanation which is independent of particular normative theories. I first argue that the theory doesn’t give an adequate account of certain enablers of reasons which are important in normative explanation. I then formulate and reject three responses on behalf of the theory. But I suggest that since theories of this general sort have the right kind of resources to illuminate how normative explanation might be similar to and different from explanations in other domains, they nonetheless merit further exploration by normative theorists.

Inquiry 62 (2019), 607-623.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1080/0020174X.2018.1562376

A Simple Escape from Moral Twin Earth
This paper offers a simple response to the Moral Twin Earth (MTE) objection to Naturalist Moral Realism (NMR). NMR typically relies on an externalist metasemantics such as a causal theory of reference. The MTE objection is that such a theory predicts that terms like ‘good’ and ‘right’ have a different reference in certain twin communities where it’s intuitively clear that the twins are talking about the same thing when using ‘good’. I argue that Boyd’s causal regulation theory, the original target of the MTE objection, was never vulnerable to this objection. The theory contains an epistemic constraint on reference which implies that either the property that causally regulates uses of ‘good’ isn’t different for the twin communities or, in scenarios where the reference is different, the communities diverge in ways where it’s not intuitively clear that ‘good’ has the same reference for them.

Thought 7 (2018), 109-118.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1002/tht3.375

Shapelessness in Context
Many philosophers believe that the extensions of evaluative terms and concepts aren’t unified under non-evaluative similarity relations and that this “shapelessness thesis” (ST) has significant metaethical implications regarding non-cognitivism, ethical naturalism, moral particularism, thick concepts and more. ST is typically offered as an explanation of why evaluative classifications appear to “outrun” classifications specifiable in independently intelligible non-evaluative terms. This paper argues that both ST and the outrunning point used to motivate it can be explained on the basis of more general factors that have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. If so, there is no reason to expect ST to carry the sorts of metaethical implications that get attributed to it. I also show that my main argument is robust across certain complications that are raised by the context-sensitivity of many evaluative terms but have so far been ignored in discussions of ST and related matters.

Noûs 48 (2014), 573-593.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0068.2012.00877.x

Essential Contestability and Evaluation
Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be “essentially contestable”. This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyse disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like democracy, freedom, genocide, rape, coercion, and the rule of law. Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who coined the term), for instance, argues that the central structural features of essentially contestable concepts secure their evaluativeness. I’ll argue that these (widely held) central features are exemplified by many evaluative and non-evaluative terms alike, owing to more general factors (such as multidimensionality) which have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. The role of these factors in semantic interpretation is subject to a certain kind of “metasemantic” disputes which have the features of the disputes characteristically admitted by essentially contestable concepts (whether evaluative or not) and which can be similarly substantive and worthwhile. In closing I’ll discuss how my argument shows that our understanding of evaluative disagreement needs refinement. The overall upshot is that essential contestability shows nothing deep or distinctive about the evaluative in particular.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2014), 471-488.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1080/00048402.2013.868008

Grounding and Normative Explanation
This paper concerns non-causal normative explanations such as ‘This act is wrong because/in virtue of__’. The familiar intuition that normative facts aren’t brute or ungrounded but anchored in non- normative facts seems to be in tension with the equally familiar idea that no normative fact can be fully explained in purely non- normative terms. I ask whether the tension could be resolved by treating the explanatory relation in normative explanations as the sort of ‘grounding’ relation that receives extensive discussion in recent metaphysics. I argue that this would help only under controversial assumptions about the nature of normative facts, and perhaps not even then. I won’t try to resolve the tension, but draw a distinction between two different sorts of normative explanations which helps to identify constraints on a resolution. One distinctive constraint on normative explanations in particular might be that they should be able to play a role in normative justification.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (2013), 155-178.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8349.2013.00224.x

Thick Concepts: Where's Evaluation?
This paper presents an alternative to the standard view that the evaluations that the so-called “thick” terms and concepts in ethics may be used to convey belong to their sense or semantic meaning. I describe a large variety of linguistic data that are well explained by the alternative view that the evaluations that (at least a very wide range of) thick terms and concepts may be used to convey are a certain kind of defeasible implications of their utterances which can be given a conversational explanation. I then provide some reasons to think that this explanation of the data is superior to the standard view, but a fuller assessment must await further work. In closing I briefly survey the largely deflationary consequences of this account regarding the significance of thick terms and concepts for evaluative thought and judgment.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics 7 (2012), 235-270.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653492.003.0008

Thick Concepts and Variability
Some philosophers hold that so-called “thick” terms and concepts in ethics (such as ‘cruel,’ ‘selfish,’ ‘courageous,’ and ‘generous’) are contextually variable with respect to the valence (positive or negative) of the evaluations that they may be used to convey. Some of these philosophers use this variability claim to argue that thick terms and concepts are not inherently evaluative in meaning; rather their use conveys evaluations as a broadly pragmatic matter. I argue that one sort of putative examples of contextual variability in evaluative valence that are found in the literature fail to support the variability claim and that another sort of putative examples are open to a wide range of explanations that have different implications for the relationship between thick terms and concepts and evaluation. I conclude that considerations of contextual variability fail to settle whether thick terms and concepts are inherently evaluative in meaning. In closing I suggest a more promising line of research.

Philosophers’ Imprint 11(1) (2011). Open access.
PhilPapers | hdl: 2027/spo.3521354.0011.001

Objectionable Thick Concepts in Denials
So-called “thick” moral concepts are distinctive in that they somehow “hold together” evaluation and description. But how? This paper argues against the standard view that the evaluations which thick concepts may be used to convey belong to sense or semantic content. That view cannot explain linguistic data concerning how thick concepts behave in a distinctive type of disagreements and denials which arise when one speaker regards another’s thick concept as “objectionable” in a certain sense. The paper also briefly considers contextualist, presuppositional, and implicature accounts of the evaluative contents of thick concepts, but finds none clearly superior to the others.

Philosophical Perspectives 23 (2009), 439-469.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1111/j.1520-8583.2009.00179.x

Normative Appeals to the Natural
Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti-realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non-parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be accepted by more or less everyone who accepts NAN) to back up this consensus. I show that we cannot establish versions of NAN which are interesting in their own right (and not merely as instances of a general naturalistic ontology) by appealing to the nature of natural properties or the kind of in-virtue-of relation to which NAN refers, plus other plausible nonparochial assumptions. On the way, I distinguish different types of ‘in virtue of claims. I conclude by arguing that the way in which assessment of meta-ethical hypotheses is theory-dependent predicts the failure of non-parochial justifications of NAN.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2009), 279-314.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2009.00279.x

A Theory of Hedged Moral Principles
This paper offers a general model of substantive moral principles as a kind of hedged moral principles that can (but don’t have to) tolerate exceptions. I argue that the kind of principles I defend provide an account of what would make an exception to them permissible. I also argue that these principles are nonetheless robustly explanatory with respect to a variety of moral facts; that they make sense of error, uncertainty, and disagreement concerning moral principles and their implications; and that one can grasp these principles without having to grasp any particular list of their permissibly exceptional instances. I conclude by pointing out various advantages that this model of principles has over several of its rivals. The bottom line is that we should find nothing peculiarly odd or problematic about the idea of exception-tolerating and yet robustly explanatory moral principles.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics 4 (2009), 91-132.
PhilPapers

Slim Epistemology with a Thick Skin
The distinction between “thick” and “thin” value concepts, and its importance to ethical theory, has been an active topic in recent meta-ethics. This paper defends three claims regarding the parallel issue about thick and thin epistemic concepts. (1) Analogy with ethics offers no straightforward way to establish a good, clear distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts. (2) Assuming there is such a distinction, there are no semantic grounds for assigning thick epistemic concepts priority over the thin. (3) Nor does the structure of substantive epistemological theory establish that thick epistemic concepts enjoy systematic theoretical priority over the thin. In sum, a good case has yet to be made for any radical theoretical turn to thicker epistemology.

Philosophical Papers 37 (2008), 389-412. (Special issue: Epistemology Through Thick & Thin)
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1080/05568640809485228

Some Good and Bad News for Ethical Intuitionism
The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non-inferential. Against this, Sturgeon has recently objected that if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their foundationalism commits them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. I show that irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non-inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a posteriori, their commitment to the autonomy of ethics and foundationalism does not entail any implausible non-inferential knowledge in areas outside ethics (such as the past, the future, or the unobservable). However, each form of intuitionism does require a controversial stand on certain unresolved issues outside ethics.

Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2008), 489-511.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.528.x

Moral Generalism: Enjoy in Moderation
I defend moral generalism against particularism. Particularism, as I understand it, is the negation of the generalist view that particular moral facts depend on the existence of a comprehensive set of true moral principles. Particularists typically present “the holism of reasons” as powerful support for their view. While many generalists accept that holism supports particularism but dispute holism, I argue that generalism accommodates holism. The centerpiece of my strategy is a novel model of moral principles as a kind of “hedged” principles that incorporate an independently plausible “basis thesis” concerning the explanation of moral reasons. The model implies that moral reasons requires the existence of a comprehensive set of true hedged principles, and so it captures generalism. But the model also offers an alternative explanation of holism, and so it undercuts much of the motivation for particularism. I defend this moderate (because holism-tolerating) form of generalism against a number of objections, and show how it can be used to defeat three distinct arguments from holism to particularism.

Ethics 116 (2006), 707-741.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1086/505232

Ethical Theories and Moral Guidance
Let the Guidance Constraint be the following norm for evaluating ethical theories: Other things being at least roughly equal, ethical theories are better to the extent that they provide adequate moral guidance. I offer an account of why ethical theories are subject to the Guidance Constraint, if indeed they are. We can explain central facts about adequate moral guidance, and their relevance to ethical theory, by appealing to certain forms of autonomy and fairness. This explanation is better than explanations that feature versions of the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In closing, I address the objection that my account is questionable because it makes ethical theories subject not merely to purely theoretical but also to morally substantive norms.

Utilitas 18 (2006), 291-309.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1017/S0953820806002056

Resisting the Buck-Passing Account of Value
I first distinguish between different forms of the buck-passing account of value and clarify my target in other respects on buck-passers’ behalf. I then raise a number of problems for the different forms of the buck-passing view that I have distinguished.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1 (2006), 295-324.
PhilPapers

Particularism and Default Reasons
This paper addresses a recent suggestion that moral particularists can extend their view to countenance default reasons (at a first stab, reasons that are pro tanto unless undermined) by relying on certain background expectations of normality. I first argue that if default reasons rest on normality claims, those claims won’t bestow upon default reasons any definite degree of extensional generality. Their generality depends rather on the contingent distributional aspects of the world, which no theory of reasons should purport to settle. Appeals to default reasons cannot therefore uniquely support particularism. But this argument also implies that if moral generalism entailed that moral reasons by necessity have invariant valence, it would be a non-starter. Since generalism is not a non-starter, my argument forces us to rethink the parameters of the generalism-particularism debate. In closing, I outline the sort of generalism that I think is motivated by my discussion, and then articulate some worries this view raises about the theoretical usefulness of the label ‘default reason’. (Note: The outline of moral generalism provided in this paper is superseded by those in “Moral Generalism: Enjoy in Moderation” and “A Theory of Hedged Moral Principles”.)

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2004), 53-79.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1023/B:ETTA.0000019980.79568.2f

Research articles in volumes

Normative Commitments in Metanormative Theory
First-order normative theories concerning what’s right and wrong, good and bad, etc. and metanormative theories concerning the nature of first-order normative thought and talk are widely regarded as independent theoretical enterprises. This paper argues that several debates in metanormative theory involve views that have first-order normative implications, even as the implications in question may not be immediately recognizable as normative. I first make my claim more precise by outlining a general recipe for generating this result. I then apply this recipe to three debates in metaethics: the modal status of basic normative principles, normative vagueness and indeterminacy, and the determination of reference for normative predicates. In each case I argue that certain views on each issue carry first-order normative commitments, in accordance with my recipe.

In Methodology and Moral Philosophy, ed. Jussi Suikkanen and Antti Kauppinen (Routledge, 2019), 193-213.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.4324/9780429452284-10

Doubts about Moral Perception
This paper defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Standard examples of moral perception are better explained as transitions in thought whose degree of psychological immediacy varies with how readily non-moral perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject’s background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are normally disposed to have when they represent things as being morally a certain way.

In Evaluative Perception, ed. Anna Bergqvist and Robert Cowan (Oxford University Press, 2018), 109-128.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198786054.003.0006

Thick Concepts and Underdetermination
Thick terms and concepts in ethics somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. The non-evaluative aspects of thick terms and concepts underdetermine their extensions. Many writers argue that this underdetermination point is best explained by supposing that thick terms and concepts are semantically evaluative in some way such that evaluation plays a role in determining their extensions. This paper argues that the extensions of thick terms and concepts are underdetermined by their meanings in toto, irrespective of whether their extensions are partly determined by evaluation; the underdetermination point can therefore be explained without supposing that thick terms and concepts are semantically evaluative. My argument applies general points about semantic gradability and context-sensitivity to the semantics of thick terms and concepts.

In Thick Concepts, ed. Simon Kirchin (Oxford University Press, 2013), 136-160.
PhilPapers | doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199672349.003.0008

A Wrong Turn to Reasons?
This paper argues that the recent metaethical turn to reasons as the fundamental units of normativity offers no special advantage in explaining a variety of other normative and evaluative phenomena, unless perhaps a form of reductionism about reasons is adopted which is rejected by many of those who advocate turning to reasons.

In New Waves in Metaethics, ed. Michael Brady (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 185-207.
PhilPapers  |  doi: 10.1057/9780230294899_10

Usable Moral Principles
One prominent strand in contemporary moral particularism concerns the claim of “principle abstinence” that we ought not to rely on moral principles in moral judgment because they fail to provide adequate moral guidance. I argue that moral generalists can vindicate this traditional and important action-guiding role for moral principles. My strategy is to argue, first, that, for any conscientious and morally committed agent, the agent’s acceptance of (true) moral principles shapes their responsiveness to (right) moral reasons and, second, that if so, then those principles can contribute non-trivially to some reliable strategy for acting well that is available for use in the agent’s practical thinking. My defense of these two claims appeals to an account of moral principles as a kind of hedged principles which I defend elsewhere, but my general line of argument should be acceptable to many other forms of generalism as well. I defend the epistemic significance of hedged principles in moral deliberation, and argue that the need for sensitivity to particulars in moral judgment doesn’t supplant principles in moral guidance. I finish by arguing that the generalist model of moral guidance developed here isn’t undermined by evidence from cognitive science about how we make moral judgments in actual practice, and that it compares favorably to particularism with respect to its capacity to offer adequate moral guidance.

In Challenging Moral Particularism, ed. Mark Lance, Matjaž Potrč, and Vojko Strahovnik (Routledge, 2008), 75-106.
PhilPapers

Contributions to handbooks and encyclopedias

Varieties of Normative Explanation
Philosophers pursue a number of different explanatory projects when explaining various sorts of normative phenomena. This chapter takes some steps towards understanding this variety. I lay some general ground about explanation. I describe some key axes of debate about explanations that first-order normative inquiry typically seeks to state and defend. And I briefly discuss how two other sorts of normative explanation that seem more concerned with the foundations of normative domains like ethics and practical reason might be understood and how they relate to first-order normative explanations.

Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Metaethics, ed. David Copp and Connie Rosati.
PhilPapers

Moral Generalism and Moral Particularism
This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics. It’s an updated version of “Moral Particularism”, in Christian B. Miller (ed.), Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum, 2011), pp. 247-260.

In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics, ed. Christian B. Miller (Bloomsbury, 2023), 381-396.
PhilPapers

Thick Ethical Concepts
Evaluative terms and concepts are often divided into “thin” and “thick”. We don’t evaluate actions and persons merely as good or bad, or right or wrong, but also as kind, courageous, tactful, selfish, boorish, and cruel. The latter evaluative concepts are “descriptively thick”: their application somehow involves both evaluation and a substantial amount of non-evaluative description. This article surveys various attempts to answer four fundamental questions about thick terms and concepts. (1) A “combination question”: how exactly do thick terms and concepts relate evaluation and non-evaluative description? (2) A “location question”: is evaluation somehow inherent to thick terms and concepts, such as perhaps an aspect of their meaning, or merely a feature of their use? (3) A “delineation question”: how do thick terms differ from the thin and from other kinds of evaluative terms? (4) Given answers to these questions, what broader philosophical significance and applications might thick concepts have?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. First published 09/2016; substantive revision 02/2021.
SEP

Reasons and Moral Principles
This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate and related issues concerning the relationship between normative reasons for action and moral principles.

In The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, ed. Daniel Star (Oxford University Press, 2018), 839-861.
PhilPapers | OUP

The Supervenience Challenge to Non-Naturalism
This paper is a survey of the supervenience challenge to non-naturalist moral realism. I formulate a version of the challenge, consider the most promising non-naturalist replies to it, and suggest that no fully effective reply has yet been given.

In The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, ed. Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett (Routledge, 2017), 170-184.
PhilPapers | Routledge

Moral Particularism
This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics.

In The Continuum Companion to Ethics, ed. Christian B. Miller (Continuum Press, 2011), 247-260.
PhilPapers

A full list of publications is in my CV.