Mark van Roojen's As Yet Unpublished Philosophy Papers Page

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Back to my Philosophy Page.

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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 This page has drafts of some of my unpublished papers for you to download if you like.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" is now out electronically at Ethics and was the subject of a blog discussion at Pea Soup (the philosophy and ethics blog), cosponsered by Pea Soup and Ethics. Ethics made the paper available free from their site (linked above) for a month. Russ Shafer-Landau was kind enough to start of the discussion with a commentary. (The first link above is now to a PDF of the final paper as published by Ethics as allowed by their publication agreement, but if you or you institution has a subjscription you can find it directly through the second link in the paragraph, and I encourage you to go there to increase their traffic.)

I got lots of helpful comments from lots of people on this paper over the years and I hope I remembered them all in the notes. Some of that help came after I submitted the final version to the press, so it isn't sufficiently noted. The Ethics editorial staff, and especially the Managing Editor, Catherine Galko Campbell, were very helpful after I submitted the final manuscript and careful about small details that made the final product better.

I'll be moving the links to this paper to the published work soon.

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 really be that if you are going to use conditionals to talk about practical rationality, you should use conditionals which allow detachment. (Note that that description of the point is itself an instance of the phenomenon under discussion.) I don't know whether more will come of this paper or not, but I will leave it here in the meantime.

I've also finished a new draft of a paper I presented at the Second Rocky Mountain Ethics Conference (a.k.a. RoME II) in August of 2009. 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. It has now been revised in light of the conference presentation and some email comments I got from helpful readers. This is still officially a "first draft" though it is supposed to be published in a volume entitled "Intuitions", edited by Anthony Booth & Darrell Rowbottom, under contract with OUP. 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

I'll be givng a paper on what is known as the "circularity objection" to Scanlon's account of promising at the Third Annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics early in January 2012. The paper is password protected at the Arizona site, but you can find a copy of it here. I argue that the objection really comes to a wrong kind of reasons for belief objection and then try to overcome it without resort to social practices. As befits a workshop paper, it is a first draft.

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.