"What is It to Wrong Someone?"
"To Hell with the Turkeys." In Douglas MacLean, ed., Values at Risk, pp. 113-135. Maryland Studies in Public Philosophy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1986.
"Some Remarks on the Role of Generality in Practice."
PhD Dissertation, UCLA, 1992.
Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International
(March 1993), 53(9A):3245-A.
Abstract: "This essay is about the concepts of a disposition and of a practice as they have
been employed in ethical theory. Throughout the work, the obligation of
promises is taken as a typical example of a moral requirement. In Chapters 1
and 2, I introduce two familiar tendencies in moral philosophy. One turns on the
concepts of rule and practice, and is exemplified by John Rawls' 'Two Concepts
of Rules'; the other turns on the concept of a disposition or a virtue, and is
exemplified by Philippa Foot's 'Moral Beliefs' and David Gauthier's Morals by
Agreement. I attempt to dispell the appearance that Anscombe's notion of
consequentialism must bear on the issues they raise. In Chapters 3 and 4, I
introduce several further doctrines, due to Warren Quinn and to David Gauthier,
as objects with which to compare the two tendencies. I suggest that they differ
from the latter in that their central concepts lack the link to generality which we
find in the concepts of a practice and of a disposition. I discuss principles
linking the goodness or rationality of practices, dispositions, intentions, plans,
threats, and so forth, with the goodness or rationality of the individual actions
that manifest or accord with them. In Chapters 5 and 6, I attack Rawls'
conception of the conditions for the identity, difference and existence of
practices, and parallel treatments of the concept of a disposition. I make a start
at explaining the concepts in a different way, beginning with a discussion of the
forms of explanation that appeal to the category of a life form or species. I
suggest provisionally that a practice, and the intuitively corresponding
dispositions in the souls of its bearers, are all the same item; we fail to see this
because we tend to sociologize what we put under the one name, and to
psychologize what we put under the other."
"The Representation of Life." In Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn, eds., Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
"Aquinas, Locke, and Self-Defense." University of Pittsburgh Law Review (Spring 1996), 57(3):677-684.
Review of Warren Quinn's Morality and Action. Philosophical Review (April 1996), 105(2):270-272.
"The Living Individual and its Kind."
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (August 1998), 21(4):591.
Response to an article by Scott Atran
"Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science:
Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars" in this issue, pp. 547-569.