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  1. Aristotelian Naturalism vs. Mutants, Aliens and the Great Red Dragon.Scott Woodcock - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (4):313-328.
    In this paper I present a new objection to the Aristotelian Naturalism defended by Philippa Foot. I describe this objection as a membership objection because it reveals the fact that AN invites counterexamples when pressed to identify the individuals bound by its normative claims. I present three examples of agents for whom the norms generated by AN are not obviously authoritative: mutants, aliens, and the Great Red Dragon. Those who continue to advocate for Foot's view can give compelling replies to (...)
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  2. Pedagogy and People-Seeds: Teaching Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion”.Scott Woodcock - 2005 - Teaching Philosophy 28 (3):213-235.
    Judith Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” is one of the most widely taught papers in undergraduate philosophy, yet it is notoriously difficult to teach. Thomson uses simple terminology and imaginative thought experiments, but her philosophical moves are complex and sometimes difficult to explain to a class still mystified by the prospect of being kidnapped to save a critically ill violinist. My aim here is to identify four sources of difficulty that tend to arise when teaching this paper. In my experience, (...)
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  3. Virtue Ethics Must be Self-Effacing to be Normatively Significant.Scott Woodcock - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (3):451-468.
    If an ethical theory sometimes requires that agents be motivated by features other than those it advances as justifications for the rightness or wrongness of actions, some consider this type of self-effacement to be a defeater from which no theory can recover. Most famously, Michael Stocker argues that requiring a divided moral psychology in which reasons are partitioned from motives would trigger a “malady of the spirit” for any agent attempting to live according to the prescriptions of modern ethical theories. (...)
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  4. Thinking the Right Way (at the Right Time) about Virtues and Skills. [REVIEW]Scott Woodcock - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2):577-586.
    I discuss three features of Matt Stichter’s new book The Skillfulness of Virtue. The thesis of the book is that virtue is best conceptualized as a type of skill, and the chapters of the book explore the implications of this thesis for our understanding of moral development, social psychology and comparisons of virtuous agents with agents who exhibit familiar types of non-moral expertise. The features of the book that I examine are (1) Stichter’s rejection of an ability to articulate reasons (...)
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