Daniel Robert Fogal
Daniel Robert Fogal
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Assistant Professor of Bioethics
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Professional overview
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Daniel Fogal is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Bioethics and Faculty Adviser for the Bioethics Minor. He earned his B.A. from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and his Ph.D. from NYU.
Fogal specializes in bioethics, metaethics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Current and future work includes how best to understand the notion of rationality relevant to decision-making capacity and informed consent, the moral significance of irrational values and beliefs, the epistemological implications of the internet, and conceptual engineering in bioethics. Past research has included work on the nature of rationality (‘Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure’, Mind), the nature of normative explanations (‘The Metaphysics of Moral Explanations’ Oxford Studies in Metaethics), and the nature of both normative and motivating reasons (‘Reasons, Reason, and Context’, in Weighing Reasons; ‘Deflationary Pluralism about Motivating Reasons’, in The Factive Turn in Epistemology). In addition to teaching and research, Fogal has been active in philosophical outreach programs and in organizing professional conferences and workshops.
Prior to his current appointment, Fogal was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the NYU Center for Bioethics, and prior to that he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Uppsala University in association with the Varieties of Normativity project (principal investigator: Matti Eklund).
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Publications
Publications
Reasons and belief
AbstractFogal, D. (n.d.).Publication year
2024Journal title
Nous-Supplement: Philosophical IssuesVolume
34Issue
1Page(s)
323-348AbstractMuch recent work in epistemology has concerned the relationship between the epistemic and the practical, with a particular focus on the question of how, if at all, practical considerations affect what we ought to believe. Two main positive accounts have been proposed: reasons pragmatism and pragmatic encroachment. According to reasons pragmatism, practical (including moral) considerations can affect what we ought to believe by constituting distinctively practical (i.e., non-epistemic) reasons for or against belief. According to pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations bear on what we ought to believe by affecting epistemic justification (e.g. how much justification is required to justifiably believe). Both debates center around intuitive judgments about cases together with various principles involving reasons (or justification) and belief, with many contributors in the pragmatism and—to a lesser extent—encroachment debates helping themselves to talk of belief without saying much about what exactly they have in mind. There has also been a tendency to overlook potentially relevant distinctions among different kinds of reasons that have been drawn elsewhere. The goal of this paper is to argue that greater clarity and care concerning both reasons and belief is called for. Increased sensitivity to various subtleties will not only minimize the chances of unwittingly engaging in merely verbal disputes but also allow us to better navigate the pragmatism and encroachment debates.What the cluster view can do for you
Fogal, D., & Worsnip, A. (n.d.). In Oxford Studies in Metaethics (1–).Publication year
2024Volume
19Page(s)
54-79Ditching decision-making capacity
AbstractFogal, D., & Schwan, B. (n.d.).Publication year
2023Journal title
Journal of Medical EthicsAbstractDecision-making capacity (DMC) plays an important role in clinical practice - determining, on the basis of a patient's decisional abilities, whether they are entitled to make their own medical decisions or whether a surrogate must be secured to participate in decisions on their behalf. As a result, it is critical that we get things right - that our conceptual framework be well-suited to the task of helping practitioners systematically sort through the relevant ethical considerations in a way that reliably and transparently delivers correct verdicts about who should and should not have the authority to make their own medical decisions. Unfortunately, however, the standard approach to DMC does not get things right. It is of virtually no help in identifying and clarifying the relevant ethical considerations. And, embedded in the prevailing anti-paternalist paradigm, DMC assessments obfuscate and distort the underlying ethical justification for granting or withholding decisional authority. Here, we describe the core commitments of the standard approach to DMC and then highlight three problems with it. We then argue that these problems are significant enough that they call for more than merely tinkering and fine-tuning; variations of the standard approach cannot adequately address them. Instead, we should ditch DMC.Explaining normative reasons
AbstractFogal, D., & Risberg, O. (n.d.).Publication year
2023Journal title
NousVolume
57Issue
1Page(s)
51-80AbstractIn this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative reason to be normatively fundamental. Support-explanationism, we argue, enjoys many of the virtues of these views while avoiding their drawbacks. We conclude by exploring several further important implications: among other things, we argue that the influential metaphor of ‘weighing’ reasons is inapt, and propose a better one; that, contrary to what Berker (2019) suggests, there's no reason for non-naturalists about normativity to accept the Reasons-First view; and that, contrary to what Wodak (2020b) suggests, explanationist views can successfully accommodate what he calls ‘redundant reasons’.The weight of reasons
AbstractFogal, D., & Risberg, O. (n.d.).Publication year
2023Journal title
Philosophical StudiesVolume
180Issue
9Page(s)
2573-2596AbstractThis paper addresses the question of how the ‘weight’ or ‘strength’ of normative reasons is best understood. We argue that, given our preferred analysis of reasons as sources of normative support, this question has a straightforward answer: the weight of a normative reason is simply a matter of how much support it provides. We also critically discuss several competing views of reasons and their weight. These include views which take reasons to be normatively fundamental, views which analyze reasons as evidence concerning what one ought to do, views which analyze reasons in terms of good reasoning, and views which analyze reasons as explanations of ought-facts, fittingness-facts, or goodness-facts.Which Reasons? Which Rationality?
AbstractFogal, D., & Worsnip, A. (n.d.).Publication year
2021Journal title
ErgoVolume
8Page(s)
306-343AbstractThe slogan that rationality is about responding to reasons has a turbulent history: once taken for granted; then widely rejected; now enjoying a resurgence. The slogan is made harder to assess by an ever-increasing plethora of distinctions pertaining to reasons and rationality. Here we are occupied with two such distinctions: that between subjective and objective reasons, and that between structural rationality (a.k.a. coherence) and substantive rationality (a.k.a. reasonableness). Our paper has two main aims. The first is to defend dualism about rationality—the view that affirms a deep distinction between structural and substantive rationality—against its monistic competitors. The second aim is to answer the question: with the two distinctions drawn, what becomes of the slogan that rationality is about responding to reasons? We’ll argue that structural rationality cannot be identified with responsiveness to any kind of reasons. As for substantive rationality, we join others in thinking that the most promising reasons-responsiveness account of substantive rationality will involve an “evidence-relative” understanding of reasons. But we also pose a challenge for making this idea precise—a challenge that ultimately calls into question the fundamentality of the notion of a reason even with respect to the analysis of substantive rationality.Rational requirements and the primacy of pressure
AbstractFogal, D. (n.d.).Publication year
2019Journal title
MindVolume
129Issue
516Page(s)
1033-1070AbstractThere are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one’s attitudinal mental states, independently of whether those states are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associated with a distinctive set of requirements that mandate or prohibit certain combinations of attitudes, and it’s in virtue of violating these requirements that incoherent agents are irrational. I think the standard view is mistaken. The goal of this paper is to explain why, and to motivate an alternative account: rather than corresponding to a set of law-like requirements, structural rationality should be seen as corresponding to a distinctive kind of pro tanto rational pressure—that is, something that comes in degrees, having both magnitude and direction. Something similar is standardly assumed to be true of substantive rationality. On the resulting picture, each dimension of rational evaluation is associated with a distinct kind of rational pressure—substantive rationality with (what I call) justificatory pressure and structural rationality with attitudinal pressure. The former is generated by one’s reasons while the latter is generated by one’s attitudes. Requirements turn out to be at best a footnote in the theory of rationality.Deflationary pluralism about motivating reasons
AbstractFogal, D. (n.d.). In The Factive Turn in Epistemology (1–).Publication year
2018Page(s)
193-218AbstractIntroduction Let’s begin with the seemingly obvious: We believe lots of things, and we believe things for reasons. What we believe often changes - we gain and lose beliefs over time - as do our reasons for believing - we revise and update our beliefs in response to new information. However, we don’t always believe for good reasons. Instead, we sometimes believe for bad reasons - reasons that are defective in some way, whether in kind, quality, quantity, or strength. But at least in general, when we believe for good reasons, we thereby put ourselves in a position to know. The world is mostly responsible for the rest. Although it’s hard to deny the appeal of such intuitive reflections, talk of reasons for believing and believing for reasons can be confusing. That’s because there are several distinct strains in such talk, and failing to be sensitive to their differences - as well as similarities and relationship to each other - can easily lead one astray. It can also make it easy to engage in verbal disputes, or construct arguments whose plausibility or significance is merely apparent. This chapter will be concerned with one such dispute: over the nature of so-called motivating reasons. Motivating reasons are standardly characterised as the reasons for which or on the basis of which we do things - where ‘doing things’ includes performing actions as well as forming (and sustaining) beliefs, intentions, and the like. Although special attention will be paid to cases involving belief, much of the chapter will be concerned with motivating reasons more generally. Motivating reasons are standardly distinguished from the reasons there are to do things, also known as ʼnormative’ reasons. The class of motivating reasons is usually thought to be important because such reasons provide a distinctive kind of ‘rationalising’ explanation of our actions and attitudes, rendering them intelligible. They are also commonly thought to play an important role in determining whether an action or attitude is ‘properly based’ or ‘well-grounded’, and hence apt candidates for properties such as being creditworthy as well as being rational or justified.New Work on speech acts
AbstractFogal, D., Harris, D. W., & Moss, M. (n.d.). (1–).Publication year
2018AbstractThe essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.On the scope, jurisdiction, and application of rationality and the law
Fogal, D. (n.d.).Publication year
2018Journal title
ProblemaIssue
12Page(s)
21-57Speech acts
AbstractHarris, D. W., Fogal, D., & Moss, M. (n.d.). In New Work on Speech Acts: The contemporary theoretical landscape (1–).Publication year
2018Page(s)
1-39AbstractThis introduction is both a capsule history of major work in speech-act theory and an opinionated guide to its current state, organized around five major accounts of what speech acts fundamentally are. We first consider the two classical views, on which a speech act is the kind of act it is mainly due to convention (Austin), or to intention (Grice). We then spell out three other broad approaches, which conceive of speech acts primarily in terms of their function, or as the expression of mental states, or as constituted by norms. With these five families of views laid out, we relate them in turn to the apparatus of conversational score and discourse context; to the project of speech-act taxonomy; and to the theory of force. Last, we review applications of speech-act theory to matters legal and political, and to ethically significant phenomena like silencing, derogation, and coercion.Contextualism about epistemic reasons
Fogal, D., & Sylvan, K. (n.d.). In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism (1–).Publication year
2017Page(s)
375-387Descartes and the possibility of enlightened freedom
AbstractFogal, D. (n.d.).Publication year
2017Journal title
Res PhilosophicaVolume
94Issue
4Page(s)
499-534AbstractThis paper offers a novel interpretation of Descartes's conception of freedom that resolves an important tension at the heart of his view. It does so by appealing to the important but overlooked distinction between possessing a power, exercising a power, and being in a position to exercise a power.