Atheist Ethicist

It's a rainy night, you are out on some back road with no cell phone coverage, and you have a flat tire. Reason and a few true beliefs...

Here, we take a look at Railton's moral realism. Recall, in Railton's argument for non-moral value realism, he used an example of ...

There are three things that we must have for a moral system to emerge. (1) Intentional agents - agents that act on beliefs to fulfill desi...

Thomas Hobbes is credited with providing one of the cleanest accounts of common moral relativism. It is also an account in which we can clea...

If moral values are a part of the real world, then they must be a part of the explanation of things. When we ask why something happened (o...

Every subjectively true statement worth its salt can be rephrased as an objectively true statement. My preference for butterscotch over ch...

I have encountered elsewhere a common argument for the subjectivity of morality that really makes no sense. I have presented this response b...

On his way to establishing moral realism, Peter Railton first worked to establish value realism. ("Moral Realism", The Philosophic...

Twice in my recent philosophical wanderings a I have bumped into David Hume's sensible knave. Hume's sensible knave is a person wh...

I know that it is a lot of fun to imagine that one's political opponents are nothing but a bunch of villainous monsters - utterly lackin...

In my first post in this series, I wrote about how desirism handles an issue that Peter Railton brought up in his article, Moral Realism, (T...

We have a problem when it comes to talking about whether or not values are real. The standard definition of "realism" on a subje...

A member of the studio audience has asked for my opinion on Peter Railton's Naturalistic Reductionism. The thesis that I defend in th...

Is "Living the life of a good person" compatible with "Having a good life?" Well, not directly. And it doesn't rea...

Some philosophers do not like mental state theories, often for these two reasons: (i) a person can be radically deceived about his situatio...

Chris Heathwood seeks to defend a theory of well-being that he calls "Subjective a Desire Satisfactionism" ("Desire Satisfact...

In the previous posting, I address the question of whether values are objective. They clearly are not objective in one sense. Values exist...