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  1. Reason in its Practical Application.E. Sonny Elizondo - 2013 - Philosophers' Imprint 13:1-17.
    Is practical reason a cognitive faculty? Do practical judgments make claims about a subject matter that are appropriately assessed in terms of their agreement with that subject matter? According to Kantians like Christine Korsgaard, the answer is no. To think otherwise is to conflate the theoretical and the practical, the epistemic and the ethical. I am not convinced. In this paper, I motivate my skepticism through examination of the very figure who inspires Korsgaard’s rejection of cognitivism: Kant. For as I (...)
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  2. Morality is its own Reward.E. Sonny Elizondo - 2016 - Kantian Review 21 (3):343-365.
    Traditionally, Kantian ethics has been thought hostile to agents' well-being. Recent commentators have rightly called this view into question, but they do not push their challenge far enough. For they leave in place a fundamental assumption on which the traditional view rests, viz., that happiness is all there is to well-being. This assumption is important, since, combined with Kant’s rationalism about morality and empiricism about happiness, it implies that morality and well-being are at best extrinsically related. Since morality can only (...)
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  3. More Than a Feeling.E. Sonny Elizondo - 2014 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 44 (3-4):425-442.
    According to rationalist conceptions of moral agency, the constitutive capacities of moral agency are rational capacities. So understood, rationalists are often thought to have a problem with feeling. For example, many believe that rationalists must reject the attractive Aristotelian thought that moral activity is by nature pleasant. I disagree. It is easy to go wrong here because it is easy to assume that pleasure is empirical rather than rational and so extrinsic rather than intrinsic to moral agency, rationalistically conceived. Drawing (...)
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  4. Taking metaphysics seriously: Kant on the foundations of ethics.E. Sonny Elizondo - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):793-807.
    Ask most philosophers for an example of a moral rationalist, and they will probably answer “Kant.” And no wonder. Kant’s first great work of moral philosophy, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, opens with a clarion call for rationalism, proclaiming the need to work out for once a pure moral philosophy, a metaphysics of morals. That this metaphysics includes the first principle of ethics, the moral law, is obvious. But what about the second principles, particular moral laws, such as duties (...)
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  5. Kantian Naturalism.E. Sonny Elizondo - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    I offer a qualified defence of Kant’s natural teleological argument, that is, his inference from the (un)naturalness of an act to its (im)morality. Though I reject many of Kant’s conclusions, I think the form of argument he uses to support these conclusions is not as wrong-headed as it might at first appear. I consider and answer two objections: first, that the argument is inconsistent with Kant’s moral rationalism; and second, that the argument is inconsistent with post-Kantian developments in science. I (...)
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  6. Kantian Eudaimonism.E. Sonny Elizondo - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (4):655-669.
    My aim in this essay is to reorient our understanding of the Kantian ethical project, especially in relation to its assumed rivals. I do this by considering Kant's relation to eudaimonism, especially in its Aristotelian form. I argue for two points. First, once we understand what Kant and Aristotle mean by happiness, we can see that not only is it the case that, by Kant's lights, Aristotle is not a eudaimonist. We can also see that, by Aristotle's lights, Kant is (...)
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  7. Kantian Cognitivism.E. Sonny Elizondo - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (4):711-725.
    According to many of its advocates, one of the main attractions of Kantian moral philosophy is its metaethical innocence. The most interesting argument for such innocence appeals to Kantians' rationalism. Roughly, if moral action is simply rational action, then we do not need to appeal to anything beyond rationality to certify moral judgment. I assess this argument by reflecting on (dis)analogies between moral and logical forms of rationalism. I conclude that the Kantian claim to metaethical innocence is overstated. Kantians cannot (...)
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  8. The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life. [REVIEW]E. Sonny Elizondo - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (262):181-183.
    A Review of Paul Bloomfield's book _The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life_ (OUP 2014).
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