Fifty Years of Moral Paradox

Moral philosophers have spent much of the past fifty years studying how to aggregate goods and bags. I argue we won’t find the answers we are looking for. This has important implications for the nature of moral reasoning. Relevant papers below. Email me for pre-prints of unpublished articles.

  • New Wave Lexical Totalism has a Negativity Problem.
    Paper under review
    A paper about why contemporary violations of ‘continuity’ in welfare orderings don’t resolve axiological paradoxes.
  • A New Case for Moral Skepticism: The Argument from Paradox
    Forthcoming at Journal of Philosophy
    My main paper on this subject. I argue that the axiological paradoxes support a strong form of moral scepticism.
  • Why Moral Paradoxes Support Error Theory
    Journal of Philosophy 2023.
    I argue that the existence of moral paradoxes provides a defence fagainst the charge that moral error theories are implausible.
  • A New Argument for Moral Error Theory
    Nous 2022.
    Do the paradoxes of axiology support moral error theory? I explore the routes to this conclusion.
  • What are Paradoxes?
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2023).
    A paper about the nature of paradoxes. Of peripheral relevance to the overall project.
  • Does the Repugnant Conclusion Have Any Probative Force?
    Philosophical Studies (2017).
    An early paper about one of the paradoxical implications of simple aggregation of goods.