Research
You can find these papers for download here. For further information (or comments) on any of these, please feel free to e-mail me: pjwerner1@gmail.com
Moral Perception
"Attentional Moral Perception", 2022, Journal of Moral Philosophy (with Jonna Vance)
Abstract: Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate...
"Toward a Perceptualist Solution to Epistemologial Objections to Non-Naturalism", 2023, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.
Stance-independent non-naturalist moral realism is subject to two related epistemological objections. First, there is the metaethical descendant of the Benacerraf problem. Second, there are evolutionary debunking arguments. Standard attempts to solve these epistemological problems have not appealed...
"Moral Perception", 2020, Philosophy Compass.
Moral perceptualism is the theory that perception and perceptual experience is attuned to moral features in our environment. This idea has received renewed attention in the last 15–20 years, for its potential to do theoretical work in moral epistemology and moral psychology. In this paper, I...
"Which Moral Properties are Eligible for Perceptual Awareness?", 2019, Journal of Moral Philosophy
Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an...
"Moral Perception Without (Prior) Background Knowledge", 2018 in the Journal of Moral Philosophy.
Abstract: Proponents of impure moral perception claim that, while there are perceptual moral experiences, these experiences will epistemically depend on a priori justified moral knowledge. Proponents of pure moral perception claim that moral experiences can justify independently of substantive a...
"A Posteriori Ethical Intuitionism and the Problem of Cognitive Penetrability", 2017 in the European Journal of Philosophy.
Abstract: According to a posteriori ethical intuitionism (AEI), perceptual experiences can provide non-inferential justification for at least some moral beliefs. Moral epistemology, for the defender of AEI, is less like the epistemology of math and more like the epistemology of tables and chairs....
"Moral Perception and the Contents of Experience", 2016 in the Journal of Moral Philosophy.
Abstract: I defend the thesis that at least some moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. I argue for this claim using a contrast argument, a type of argument commonly found in the literature on the philosophy of perception. I first appeal to psychological research on what I call...
Dissertation
My dissertation, "Seeing Right from Wrong: A Defense of A Posteriori Ethical Intuitionism" (2016), is available here.
How Naive is Contentful Moral Perception?, 2023, Philosophies
According to contentful moral perception (CMP), moral properties can be perceived in the same sense as tables, tigers, and tomatoes. Recently, Heather Logue (2012) has distinguished between two potential ways of perceiving a property. A Kantian Property (KP) in perception is one in which a...
Philosophy of Mind
"Losing Grip on the Third Realm: Against Naive Realism for Intuitions", (with Bar Luzon), 2022, Analysis.
Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (factive) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation which is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a...
"An Epistemic Argument for Liberalism about Perceptual Content", 2018 in Philosophical Psychology
This paper concerns the question of which properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. According to conservatives, only low-level properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Liberals, on the other hand, claim that high-level properties, such as natural kind...
"Character (alone) Doesn't Count: Phenomenal Character and Narrow Intentional Content", 2015 in American Philosophical Quarterly.
Abstract: Proponents of phenomenal intentionality share a commitment that, for at least some paradigmatically intentional states, phenomenal character constitutively determines narrow intentional content. If this is correct, then any two states with the same phenomenal character will have the same...
"Seemings: still dispositions to believe", 2013 in Synthese.
Abstract: According to phenomenal conservatism, seemings can provide prima facie justification for beliefs. In order to fully assess phenomenal conservatism, it is important to understand the nature of seemings. Two views are that (SG) seemings are a sui generis propositional attitude, and that...
Metaethics
"Normative Concepts and the Return to Eden", 2022, Philosophical Studies.
Imagine coming across an alternative community such that, while they have normative terms like 'ought' with the same action-guiding roles and relationships to each other, their normative terms come to pick out different properties. When we come across such a community, or even just imagine it,...
"Getting a Moral Thing into a Thought", 2020, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 15.
Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to the natural, and causally inefficacious. It has been widely discussed that non-naturalism faces a serious epistemological challenge. A less discussed problem for non-naturalism concerns the...
"Why conceptual competence won’t help the non naturalist epistemologist", 2018 in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
Abstract: Non-naturalist normative realists face an epistemological objection: They must explain how their preferred route of justification ensures a non-accidental connection between justified moral beliefs and the normative truths. One strategy for meeting this challenge begins by pointing out...
Political Philosophy
"A Defense of Spoiler Voting" (with W. Scott Looney), 2020, Public Affairs Quarterly.
A familiar debate in first-past-the-post democracies is whether ideologically disenfranchised voters should cast their vote for minor party candidates. We argue that voting for minor party candidates will sometimes be the best strategic option for voters with non-mainstream ideologies. Major...
"Self-ownership and non-culpable proviso violations", 2015 in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
Abstract: Left and right libertarians alike are attracted to the thesis of self-ownership (SO) because, as Eric Mack says, they ‘believe that it best captures our common perception of the moral inviolability of persons’. Further, most libertarians, left and right, accept that some version of the...
Normative Theory
"You Oughta Know: A Defence of Obligations to Learn" (with Teresa Bruno-Niño), 2019 in Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives learning, practising, and performing a wide range of skills. Many of us also have a great amount of control over which skills we learn and develop. From choices as significant as career pursuits to those as minor as how we spend our weeknight...