Mark van Roojen's As Yet Unpublished Philosophy Papers Page

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Back to my Philosophy Page.

My vita (PDF format).

Abstracts of published work with links to papers.

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My Timberframe Cabin Page.

I'm Mark van Roojen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. This page has drafts of some of my unpublished papers for you to download if you like. I've recently updated the version of the first of these papers and I think it is better than the last in some significant ways.

Metaethics

Moral Rationalism and Rational Amoralism has been accepted at Ethics and the link is to what I believe will be the final version. I got lots of helpful comments from lots of people on it over the years and I hope I remembered them all in the notes.

Here is a copy of my Conditionals Paper from RoMe I Conference. I gave this paper at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Conference in Boulder in August 2008. I now think that the issue is not really about conditionals, but instead about practical reasoning. So the thesis should be that if you are going to use conditionals to talk about practical rationality, you should use conditionals which allow detachment. I don't know whether more will come of this paper or not.

I've also just now finished a draft of a paper I presented at the Second Rocky Mountain Ethics Conference (a.k.a. RoME II) this past August 6-9. This paper is an exploration of what intuitionist moral epistemologists can say to answer empirical challenges to their views about justified moral beliefs. Extant moral intuitionsts all seem to be "moderate foundationalists" and these attacks seem to show that many putative foundational beliefs are not formed by processes that are reliable enough to consititute justification sufficient to believe them. My basic idea is to propose that they drop back to a weak foundationalist view of justification similar to that once championed by Bertrand Russell. The paper is currently titled "Moral Intuitionism, Experiments and Skeptical Arguments" and if you click the title you'll get a pdf of that paper. Since I'm not an epistemologist, presenting it at the conference gave me an opportunity to find out if there is something obvious that I'm missing. I got lots of helpful comments to think about. If you read it and think there is something I'm missing, obvious or not, please feel free to email me about it.

Normative Ethics and Political Philosophy

A New Argument for the Maximin Principle draft of July 2007.
I gave a version of this paper in Bled in Summer 2008 and that version is now out in Acta Analytica. You can find that version at Springer's website at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/e5n153g878777708/fulltext.pdf. The version here is different enough that I'm leaving it up and it is free.