Mark van Roojen's Philosophy Page

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I'm Mark van Roojen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. I mainly teach and publish in the areas of ethics, metaethics and political philosophy. Here is a very quick overview of the things I work on.

Metaethics

Most of my publications have been on metaethics, a reasonably abstract subfield of ethics having to do with issues surrounding the nature of moral judgements and properties. If you want a label, my current views in metaethics are a version of cognitivist anti-Humean rationalism. Unless you're up on metaethics yourself, this probably doesn't mean much to you. Basically I think that morality or ethics has a subject matter that one can form beliefs about, and that if you get it right those beliefs are true. I also think that the subject matter of these areas is such that it has an essential and important connection with justifications and reasons for acting in particular ways. And I think that beliefs about these subjects can provide motivation to act on these reasons. Probably that's still not much help. You might, for example, think that what I said isn't terribly controversial or contentful. To get a sense of why people think almost any view on these matters is controversial you'd probably need to do further reading, some of which you can find on Jimmy Lenman's web-based metaethics bibliography. For a sample of something in metaethics that is supposed to be more accessible to a general audience I have an entry about non-cognitivism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/ . It was posted there in January of 2004 and revised more recently. As with many narratives, the first version of the entry was a bit more unified than the current version which was revised in light of recent developments. If I were writing it from scratch today it might wind up with a different emphasis and structure because of this. But it is not a bad intro to the subject matter.

Normative Ethics and Political Philosophy

Within normative ethics I am quite interested in the debates between consequentialists and non-consequentialists and in particular in the best ways to defend non-consequentialism. The paper on satisficing and maximizing that is in the Byron volume by Cambridge University Press ( pdf here) summarized at abstracts page probably is the best example of my work on such issues. In political philosophy I am most interested in issues of distributive justice, though I am also trying to get a handle on democratic theory.

Getting Access to My Published Work
If you are interested in any of this, you can check out a page with abstracts of my published work along with links to pdfs of most of the articles I've completed and published. I do need to update it a bit soon.
More Recent and Current Work

As for stuff I'm still working on, I have a paper on moral rationalism and rational amoralism that I've been working on for many years which will appear in Ethics in the April issue of this year (due out in June). It is about the ways in which a moral rationalist account of ethics can handle the idea that rational people may act immorally or amorally. One of the things I like about it is some discussion of the interaction between Frege's Puzzle and Internalism about moral judgements. I've got a draft of a relatively recent version of that paper which is a bit longer than the final version will be. It is lot of useful help on it from people who've read it and given me comments. That version is now linked on my unpublished work page until it comes out in June.

I also have a paper I've been working on that argues that a Rawlsian Conception of Justice according to which the smallest representative share of social goods should be as great as possible is in fact required by the proper understanding of our prima facie duty not to harm other people. A version of that is now out in Acta Analytica, but I have a longer version of it that can be downloaded from the page below.

And I have two papers I have presented at RoME conferences in Colorado. One is on practical conditionals and the other is on moral intuitionism and empirical debunking arguments. I'll be working on the second one over this coming summer and Fall for a forthcoming volume on Intuitions.
You can find PDFs of all of these papers on my As Yet Unpublished Papers page for your reading pleasure.