Conceptual ethics
9 writings
Reasons of Love and Conceptual Good-for-Nothings
In Themes from Susan Wolf. Michael Frauchiger and Markus Stepanians (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter. In Press.
Appealing to the instrumentality of concepts raises the worry of yielding the “wrong kind of reasons.” Drawing on Susan Wolf’s work on “reasons of love,” I argue this worry is misplaced. I further explore Wolf’s notion of “valuable good-for-nothings” to demonstrate how non-instrumental values ultimately reinforce the importance of reasons of love in concept use.
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The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780198926283.001.0001
Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering.
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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.
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Debunking Concepts
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 (1): 195–225. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.5840/msp2023111347
Argues that the debunking of concepts should extend beyond assessing their epistemological merits to include their evaluation on moral, social, and political grounds, based on their societal functions and effects.
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Genealogy, Evaluation, and Engineering
The Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010
Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Points of Concepts: Their Types, Tensions, and Connections
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (8): 1122–1145. 2019. doi:10.1080/00455091.2019.1584940
By distinguishing four senses in which concepts might be said to have a “point,” this paper resolves the tension between the ambition of point-based explanations to be informative and the claim—central to Dummett’s philosophy of language, but also to the literature on thick concepts—that mastering concepts already requires grasping their point.
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