27 found
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  1. Full information accounts of well-being.David Sobel - 1994 - Ethics 104 (4):784-810.
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  2. Subjectivism and idealization.David Sobel - 2009 - Ethics 119 (2):336-352.
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  3. The impotence of the demandingness objection.David Sobel - 2007 - Philosophers' Imprint 7:1-17.
    Consequentialism, many philosophers have claimed, asks too much of us to be a plausible ethical theory. Indeed, the theory's severe demandingness is often claimed to be its chief flaw. My thesis is that as we come to better understand this objection, we see that, even if it signals or tracks the existence of a real problem for Consequentialism, it cannot itself be a fundamental problem with the view. The objection cannot itself provide good reason to break with Consequentialism, because it (...)
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  4. Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership.David Sobel - 2012 - Ethics 123 (1):32-60.
    Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counter-intuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people's rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this paper I consider the most sophisticated attempts to rectify this problem within a libertarian self-ownership framework. (...)
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  5. Morality and virtue: An assessment of some recent work in virtue ethics.David Copp & David Sobel - 2004 - Ethics 114 (3):514-554.
    This essay focuses on three recent books on morality and virtue, Michael Slote's 'Morals from Motives', Rosalind Hursthouse's 'On Virtue Ethics', and Philippa Foot's 'Natural Goodness'. Slote proposes an "agent-based" ethical theory according to which the ethical status of acts is derivative from assessments of virtue. Following Foot's lead, Hursthouse aims to vindicate an ethical naturalism that explains human goodness on the basis of views about human nature. Both Hursthouse and Slote take virtue to be morally basic in a way (...)
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  6. A robust hybrid theory of well-being.Steven Wall & David Sobel - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (9):2829-2851.
    This paper articulates and defends a novel hybrid account of well-being. We will call our view a Robust Hybrid. We call it robust because it grants a broad and not subservient role to both objective and subjective values. In this paper we assume, we think plausibly but without argument, that there is a significant objective component to well-being. Here we clarify what it takes for an account of well-being to have a subjective component. Roughly, we argue, it must allow that (...)
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  7. Against direction of fit accounts of belief and desire.David Sobel & Copp - 2001 - Analysis 61 (1):44-53.
    The authors argue against direction of fit accounts of the distinction between belief and desire.
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  8. Pain for objectivists: The case of matters of mere taste.David Sobel - 2005 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (4):437 - 457.
    Can we adequately account for our reasons of mere taste without holding that our desires ground such reasons? Recently, Scanlon and Parfit have argued that we can, pointing to pleasure and pain as the grounds of such reasons. In this paper I take issue with each of their accounts. I conclude that we do not yet have a plausible rival to a desire-based understanding of the grounds of such reasons.
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  9. Varieties of hedonism.David Sobel - 2002 - Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2):240–256.
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  10. Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for Action.David Sobel - 2001 - Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (2):218.
    These days, just about every philosophical debate seems to generate a position labeledinternalism. The debate I will be joining in this essay concerns reasons for action and their connection, or lack of connection, to motivation. The internalist position in this debate posits a certain essential connection between reasons and motivation, while the externalist position denies such a connection. This debate about internalism overlaps an older debate between Humeans and Kantians about the exclusive reason-giving power of desires. As we will see, (...)
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  11. Subjective accounts of reasons for action.David Sobel - 2001 - Ethics 111 (3):461-492.
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  12. Well-Being as the Object of Moral Consideration.David Sobel - 1998 - Economics and Philosophy 14 (2):249.
    The proposal I offer attempts to remedy the inadequacies of exclusive focus on well-being for moral purposes. The proposal is this: We should allow the agent to decide for herself where she wants to throw the weight that is her due in moral reflection, with the proviso that she understands the way that her weight will be aggregated with others in reaching a moral outcome. I will call this the "autonomy principle." The autonomy principle, I claim, provides the consequentialist's best (...)
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  13. The Case for Stance Dependent Reasons.David Sobel - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (2).
    Many philosophers maintain that neither one’s reasons for action nor well-being are ever grounded in facts about what we desire or favor. Yet our reasons to eat a flavor of ice cream we like rather than one we do not seem an obvious counter-example. I argue that there is no getting around such examples and that therefore a fully stance independent account of the grounding of our reasons is implausible. At least in matters of mere taste our “stance” plays a (...)
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  14. (2 other versions)Parfit's Case against Subjectivism 1.David Sobel - 2011 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 6.
    Derek Parfit, in On What Matters, argues that all subjective accounts of normative reasons for action are false. This chapter focuses on his “Agony Argument.” The first premise of the Agony Argument is that we necessarily have current reasons to avoid our own future agony. Its second premise is that subjective accounts cannot vindicate this fact. So, the argument concludes, subjective accounts must be rejected. This chapter accepts the first premise of this argument and that it is valid. The main (...)
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  15. Do the desires of rational agents converge?David Sobel - 1999 - Analysis 59 (3):137–147.
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  16. On the subjectivity of welfare.David Sobel - 1997 - Ethics 107 (3):501-508.
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  17. Desires, Motives, and Reasons: Scanlon’s Rationalistic Moral Psychology.David Copp & David Sobel - 2002 - Social Theory and Practice 28 (2):243-76.
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  18. Self-Ownership and the Conflation Problem.David Sobel - 2011 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Libertarian self-ownership views in the tradition of Locke, Nozick, and the left-libertarians have supposed that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against infringing upon our property. Such a conception makes sense when we are focused on property that is very important to its owner, such as a person’s kidney. However, this stringency of our property rights is harder to credit when we consider more trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining (...)
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  19. How to be a Subjectivist.David Sobel - 2020 - In Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Subjectivism, desires, reasons, well-being, ethics.
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  20. Subjectivism and blame.David Sobel - 2007 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (5):pp. 149-170.
    My favorite thing about this paper is that I think I usefully explicate and then mess with Bernard Williams's attempt to explain how his internalism is compatible with our ordinary practices of blame. There are a surprising number of things wrong with Williams's position. Of course that leaves my own favored subjectivism in a pickle, but still...
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  21. Is Subjectivism Incoherent?David Sobel - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (2):531-538.
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  22. "Understanding the Demandingness Objection".David Sobel - 2020 - In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. New York, USA: Oup Usa.
    This paper examines possible interpretations of the Demandingness Objection as it is supposed to work against Consequentialist ethical theories.
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  23. The Limits of the Explanatory Power of Developmentalism.David Sobel - 2010 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 7 (4):517-527.
    Richard Kraut's neo-Aristotelian account of well-being, Developmentalism, aspires to explain not only which things are good for us but why those things are good for us. The key move in attempting to make good on this second aspiration involves his claim that our ordinary intuitions about what is good for a person can be successfully explained and systematized by the idea that what benefi ts a living thing develops properly that living thing's potentialities, capacities, and faculties. I argue that Kraut's (...)
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  24. Disagreeing about how to disagree.Kate Manne & David Sobel - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (3):823-34.
    David Enoch, in Taking Morality Seriously, argues for a broad normative asymmetry between how we should behave when disagreeing about facts and how we should behave when disagreeing due to differing preferences. Enoch claims that moral disputes have the earmarks of a factual dispute rather than a preference dispute and that this makes more plausible a realist understanding of morality. We try to clarify what such claims would have to look like to be compelling and we resist his main conclusions.
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  25. The Point of Self-Ownership.David Sobel - 2016 - In David Schmidtz & Carmen Pavel (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Freedom. New York: Oup Usa. pp. 124-40.
    I examine what the point of self-ownership might best be thought to be.
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  26. The Ethics of Eating Meat.David Sobel - 2017 - Philosophic Exchange 46 (1).
    I explore the ethical issues involved in eating meat.
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  27. Practical reasons and mistakes of practical rationality.David Sobel - 2007 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 94 (1):299-321.
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