Jacob Ross

About

Jacob Ross is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, based in the USC School of Philosophy. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University. His research primarily focuses on ethics, epistemology, and practical reason, contributing to these fields through various publications and forthcoming papers. Ross's work explores foundational issues in moral philosophy, such as moral skepticism, the nature of moral blame, and the relationship between moral beliefs and explanations, as well as epistemic topics like knowledge, belief, and meta-epistemic beliefs. He has engaged with complex philosophical problems including the principle of sufficient reason, the nature of personal obligation, and the implications of fission cases for self-interest theories. His approach often involves critical analysis of existing theories and proposing alternative frameworks, demonstrating a deep engagement with both normative and metaethical questions.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Humanities
• Law
• Business
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Knowledge Dethroned

  Analytic Philosophy · 2017-12-01 · 8 citations

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• Evaluative Uncertainty and Permissible Preference

  The Philosophical Review · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

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  There has recently been an explosion of interest in rational and moral choice under evaluative uncertainty—uncertainty about values or reasons. However, the dominant views on such choice have at least three major problems: they are overly demanding, they are incompatible with supererogation, and they cannot be applied to agents with credence in indeterminate evaluative theories. The authors propose a unified view that solves all these problems. According to this view, permissible options maximiz…

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• Idealism and Fine-Tuning

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-01-18 · 3 citations

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  This chapter argues that, given certain background assumptions, a kind of idealism follows from a version of the fine-tuning thesis. The kind of idealism in question ascribes explanatory priority, not ontological priority, to the mental. The version of the fine-tuning thesis in question is the strong fine-tuning for consciousness thesis, according to which (i) the values of the fundamental physical parameters are fine-tuned for consciousness and (ii) this fine-tuning for consciousness is not the…

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• From Teleosemantics to Normative Ethics

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-10-24 · 1 citations

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  The morally wrong actions, it seems, are the actions that are worthy of moral disapproval. Hence, one way to approach normative ethics is to ask the following question: Toward what kinds of action is moral disapproval fitting or correct? Chapter 13 argues that we can answer this question by adopting a teleosemantic framework. The chapter proceeds in three stages. It begins by proposing and defending a teleological theory of the contents of attitudes in general. The account proposed implies that…

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• Knowledge, Safety, and Meta‐Epistemic Belief

  Pacific philosophical quarterly · 2018-06-07 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article raises problems both for the view that safe belief is necessary for knowledge and for the view that it is sufficient. Focusing on ‘meta‐epistemic beliefs,’ or beliefs about the epistemic status of one's own beliefs, it is shown that the necessity claim has counterintuitive implications and that the sufficiency claim implies a contradiction. It is then shown that meta‐epistemic beliefs raise similar problems for a wide range of accounts of knowledge, and hence that they prov…

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Frequent coauthors

• Mark Schroeder

  10 shared

• Andy Mueller

  Goethe University Frankfurt

  4 shared

• Valéria Nobre Leal de Souza Oliva

  3 shared

• Daniel Howard‐Snyder

  3 shared

• Alessandro Allen

  3 shared

• Jon G. Dean

  3 shared

• Mikaila Reyes

  3 shared

• Lora Khatib

  University of California, San Diego

  3 shared

Education

• B.A.

  University of Southern California

Awards & honors

• Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (2017)
• Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 7 (2012)
• Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 2 (2012)
• Philosophical Review (2010)
• Philosophical Perspectives (2014)

Similar researchers at University of Southern California

• Lu Chenh-72
• Scott Soamesh-47