Professor NEIL SINCLAIR's Outputs (26)

The explanationist argument for moral realism (2011)
Journal Article
Sinclair, N. (2011). The explanationist argument for moral realism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 41(1),

In this paper I argue that the explanationist argument in favour of moral realism fails. According to this argument, the ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations provides strong evidence for, or entails, the metaphysical c... Read More about The explanationist argument for moral realism.

Free thinking for expressivists (2008)
Journal Article
Sinclair, N. (2008). Free thinking for expressivists. Philosophical Papers, 37(2), https://doi.org/10.1080/05568640809485222

This paper replies to Zangwill’s argument that quasi-realists cannot accommodate the conceptual status of claims of moral mind-independence embedded in ordinary moral thought. I argue that this conceptual status is compatible with an ‘internal readin... Read More about Free thinking for expressivists.

Propositional clothing and belief (2007)
Journal Article
Sinclair, N. (2007). Propositional clothing and belief. Philosophical Quarterly, 57(228), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.488.x

Moral discourse is propositionally clothed, that is, it exhibits those features – such as the ability of its sentences to intelligibly embed in conditionals and other unasserted contexts – that have been taken by some philosophers to be constitutive... Read More about Propositional clothing and belief.

Expressivism and the practicality of moral convictions (2007)
Journal Article
Sinclair, N. (2007). Expressivism and the practicality of moral convictions. Journal of Value Inquiry, 41(2-4), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-007-9080-x

Many expressivists have employed a claim about the practicality of morality in support of their view that moral convictions are not purely descriptive mental states. In this paper I argue that all extant arguments of this form fail. I distinguish six... Read More about Expressivism and the practicality of moral convictions.

The moral belief problem (2006)
Journal Article
Sinclair, N. (2006). The moral belief problem. Ratio, 19(2), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2006.00323.x

The moral belief problem is that of reconciling expressivism in ethics with both minimalism in the philosophy of language and the syntactic discipline of moral sentences. It is argued that the problem can be solved by distinguishing minimal and robus... Read More about The moral belief problem.

Two kinds of naturalism in ethics (2006)
Journal Article
Sinclair, N. (2006). Two kinds of naturalism in ethics. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 9(4), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9017-7

What are the conditions on a successful naturalistic account of moral properties? In this paper I discuss one such condition: the possibility of moral concepts playing a role in good empirical theories on a par with those of the natural and social sc... Read More about Two kinds of naturalism in ethics.