Fritz J. McDonald

Title: Associate Professor
Office: 653 Mathematics and Science Center
E-mail: [email protected]

Fritz McDonald is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Oakland University.

His research focuses on metaethics and the philosophy of language. Metaethics is the study of the nature of ethics--including the metaphysics of ethical reality, the semantics of moral language, and issues such as knowledge and truth in ethics. Dr. McDonald's work in metaethics focuses on moral truth and agency. Regarding truth, Dr. McDonald has drawn on deflationary accounts of truth to make a case for objective moral truth. He has developed accounts of the metaphysics of morality that make sense of distinctions between metaethical realists and antirealists. In his work on agency, Dr. McDonald has made a case for a compatibilist account of moral agency, holding that causal determinism and freedom of the will, in the most important senses, are compatible. He is currently working on a project relating the notion of a person to practical and moral responsibility. Dr. McDonald's work has been published in venues including Acta Analytica, AI and Ethics, American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, Analysis, The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, The Croatian Journal of Philosophy, Existenz,The Journal of Moral Philosophy, The Journal of Value Inquiry, Neuroethics, The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Psychology, and Philosophy in Review. He has presented his work throughout the United States and in Canada, Croatia, Finland, India, Mexico, and Poland.