Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose that someone notes that the digits of π starting at some position n start looking like they have an odd pattern, and it occurs to ...

One thinks of virtue ethics as a unified family of ethical systems. But it is interesting to note just how different virtue ethical systems ...

Kripke famously argued that unicorns cannot exist. For “unicorn” would have to refer to a natural kind. But there are multiple non-actual na...

Suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that there wa...

A moral relativist has a fundamental choice whether to define moral concepts in terms of moral beliefs or non-doxastic moral attitudes such ...

It’s just occurred to me that simple moral relativism on its face just makes no sense as a metaethical position. It holds: What it is for ...

In ethics, we seek a theory of obligation whose predictions match our best intuitions. Suppose that explorers on the moon find a booklet wi...

In the philosophy of mind, those who take anti-reductionism really seriously will also reject the supervenience of the mental on the non-men...

The B -properties supervene on the A -properties provided that any two possible worlds with the same A -properties have the same B -properti...

Start with this Aristotelian thought: Everything should to fulfill its nature, and every “should” fact is a norm specifying the norm of fu...

My main objection to natural law ethics has for a long time been that it looks egoistic because it is eudaimonistic. One version of that wor...

It looks like the laws of physics include "free parameters", constants that we feel could well have had other values than they do....

Assume deontology. Can one make a promise so strong that one shouldn't break it even if breaking it saves a number of lives? I don't...

I haven't been following the grounding literature, so this may be old hat, in which case I will be grateful for references. The followin...

One can fear that a certain medical procedure is wrong, one can hope that one's musical composition is beautiful, one can wis...

Here is an interesting line of thought. Consider these two questions: What is it for x and y to be identical? What necessary and...

The following simple and valid argument came out of discussions with Mark Murphy (who has a forthcoming book that contains related arguments...

Consider this metaethical naturalist view: Every moral property is identical with a natural property. Here is a simple argument...

Cognitivist normative moral relativism is the thesis that for all x and A : x morally ought to A if and only if x believes that she ...

Divine command metaethics (DCM) says that the obligatory is defined as what God commands. (Variants on which the obligatory is ...