16 found
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  1. Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality.Alex Gregory - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire? This book defends “desire-as-belief”, the view that desires are just a special subset of our beliefs: normative beliefs. This view entitles us to accept orthodox models of human motivation and rationality that explain those things with reference to desire, but nonetheless to also make room for our normative beliefs to play a role in those domains. And this view tells us to diverge from the orthodox (...)
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  2. The Guise of Reasons.Alex Gregory - 2013 - American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (1):63-72.
    In this paper it is argued that we should amend the traditional understanding of the view known as the guise of the good. The guise of the good is traditionally understood as the view that we only want to act in ways that we believe to be good in some way. But it is argued that a more plausible view is that we only want to act in ways that we believe we have normative reason to act in. This change (...)
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  3. Normative reasons as good bases.Alex Gregory - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (9):2291-2310.
    In this paper, I defend a new theory of normative reasons called reasons as good bases, according to which a normative reason to φ is something that is a good basis for φing. The idea is that the grounds on which we do things—bases—can be better or worse as things of their kind, and a normative reason—a good reason—is something that is just a good instance of such a ground. After introducing RGB, I clarify what it is to be a (...)
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  4. Might Desires Be Beliefs About Normative Reasons?Alex Gregory - 2017 - In Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.), The Nature of Desire. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 201-217.
    This paper examines the view that desires are beliefs about normative reasons for action. It describes the view, and briefly sketches three arguments for it. But the focus of the paper is defending the view from objections. The paper argues that the view is consistent with the distinction between the direction of fit of beliefs and desires, that it is consistent with the existence of appetites such as hunger, that it can account for counterexamples that aim to show that beliefs (...)
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  5. Why Do Desires Rationalize Actions?Alex Gregory - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.
    I begin the paper by outlining one classic argument for the guise of the good: that we must think that desires represent their objects favourably in order to explain why they can make actions rational (Quinn 1995; Stampe 1987). But what exactly is the conclusion of this argument? Many have recently formulated the guise of the good as the view that desires are akin to perceptual appearances of the good (Oddie 2005; Stampe 1987; Tenenbaum 2007). But I argue that this (...)
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  6. Changing Direction on Direction of Fit.Alex Gregory - 2012 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (5):603-614.
    In this paper, I show that we should understand the direction of fit of beliefs and desires in normative terms. After rehearsing a standard objection to Michael Smith’s analysis of direction of fit, I raise a similar problem for Lloyd Humberstone’s analysis. I go on to offer my own account, according to which the difference between beliefs and desires is determined by the normative relations such states stand in. I argue that beliefs are states which we have reason to change (...)
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  7. A very good reason to reject the buck-passing account.Alex Gregory - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2):287-303.
    This paper presents a new objection to the buck-passing account of value. I distinguish the buck-passing account of predicative value from the buck-passing account of attributive value. According to the latter, facts about attributive value reduce to facts about reasons and their weights. But since facts about reasons’ weights are themselves facts about attributive value, this account presupposes what it is supposed to explain. As part of this argument, I also argue against Mark Schroeder's recent account of the weights of (...)
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  8. Hedonism.Alex Gregory - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge.
    An overview of the hedonistic theory of wellbeing.
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  9. Are All Normative Judgments Desire-Like?Alex Gregory - 2017 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (1):29-55.
    In this paper I first argue against one attractive formulation of the motivation argument, and against one attractive formulation of noncognitivism. I do so by example: I suggest that other-regarding normative judgments do not seem to have motivational powers and do not seem to be desires. After defending these two claims, I argue that other views can accommodate the motivational role of normative judgment without facing this objection. For example, desire-as-belief theories do so, since such theories only say that some (...)
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  10. How Verbal Reports of Desire May Mislead.Alex Gregory - 2017 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (4):241-249.
    In this paper I highlight two noteworthy features of assertions about our desires, and then highlight two ways in which they can mislead us into drawing unwarranted conclusions about desire. Some of our assertions may indicate that we are sometimes motivated independently of desire, and other assertions may suggest that there are vast divergences between our normative judgements and our desires. But I suggest that some such assertions are, in this respect, potentially misleading, and have in fact misled authors such (...)
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  11. Disability as Inability.Alex Gregory - 2020 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 18 (1):23-48.
    If we were to write down all those things that we ordinarily categorise as disabilities, the resulting list might appear to be extremely heterogeneous. What do disabilities have in common? In this paper I defend the view that disabilities should be understood as particular kinds of inability. I show how we should formulate this view, and in the process defend the view from various objections. For example, I show how the view can allow that common kinds of inability are not (...)
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  12. Disability and Well-Being.Alex Gregory - 2013 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.
    This entry discusses the relationship between disability and well‐being. Disabilities are commonly thought to be unfortunate, but whether this is true is unclear, and, if it is true, it is unclear why it is true. The entry first explains the disability paradox, which is the apparent discrepancy between the level of well‐being that disabled people self‐report, and the level of well‐being that nondisabled people predict disabled people to have. It then turns to an argument that says that disabilities must be (...)
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  13. Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, The Value Gap(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. xv + 215. [REVIEW]Alex Gregory - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (2).
    Rønnow-Rasmussen’s book explores the distinction between two kinds of value: good, and good-for. Rønnow-Rasmussen provides a reductive theory of both kinds of goodness: a fitting attitude account of goodness, on which facts about value reduce to facts about the norms governing agents’ attitudes. But Rønnow-Rasmussen argues that they conflict in an especially sharp way, so that we have a kind of choice about which to prioritise, and no obvious grounds on which to choose one over the other. I articulate some (...)
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  14. Slaves of the passions? On Schroeder's new humeanism. [REVIEW]Alex Gregory - 2009 - Ratio 22 (2):250-257.
  15. What is This Thing Called Happiness? by Fred Feldman. [REVIEW]Alex Gregory - 2013 - Mind 122 (487):fzt092.
    A review of Feldman's "What is this thing called happiness"?
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  16. Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language By Stephen Finlay. [REVIEW]Alex Gregory - 2015 - Analysis 75 (4):687-689.
    A review of Finlay's Confusion of Tongues.
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