This chapter surveys a few of the central questions about philosophical perspectives on the ethics of belief, focusing especially on (1) questions about whether doxastic involuntarism is consistent with the normative approach to epistemology characteristic of any ethics of belief; (2) the status and interpretation of William Clifford's famous injunction against belief on "insufficient" evidence, and broader questions about the role of negative versus positive doxastic norms; (3) whether norms governing belief are distinctively epistemic norms, or are instead moral or (...) practical ones; and (4) how moral and political questions about belief bear on epistemic norms, including a discussion of doxastic wronging, racist beliefs, skepticism and rape culture, and epistemic partiality—whether, for instance, friendship requires beliefs that violate epistemic norms. (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

Consent theory in sexual ethics, Jonathan Ichikawa argues, has a Euthyphro problem. -/- It is widely held that sexual violations are explicable in terms of nonconsensual sexual contact. But a notion of consent adequate to explain many moral judgments typical of sexual ethics — a notion that vindicates the idea that consent cannot be coerced, that it must be sober, that children cannot consent to sex with adults, etc. — cannot, Ichikawa argues, be articulated, motivated, or explained (...) in a way independently of moral judgments about sexual wrongs. Consequently, if there is as tight a connection between consent and sexual violation as many people think there is, there is good reason to suppose that that connection must ultimately explain consent in terms of sexual wronging, rather than vice versa. The paper highlights some costs and drawbacks to this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma in sexual ethics. One central upshot of the argument will be that mainstream accounts of sexual ethics fail in their explanatory ambitions. Consent cannot play its canonical explanatory role. (shrink)

There are two central kinds of epistemological mistakes: believing things you shouldn’t, and failing to believe things that you should. The knowledge-first program offers a canonical explanation for the former: if you believe something without knowing it, you violate the norm to believe only that which you know. But the explanation does not extend in any plausible way to a story about what’s wrong with suspending judgment when one ought to believe. In this paper I explore prospects for a knowledge-centering (...) account of positive epistemic norms that describe epistemic duties to believe. (shrink)

Contextualist treatments of clashes of intuitions can allow that two claims, apparently in conflict, can both be true. But making true utterances is far from the only thing that matters — there are often substantive normative questions about what contextual parameters are appropriate to a given conversational situation. This paper foregrounds the importance of the social power to set contextual standards, and how it relates to injustice and oppression, introducing a phenomenon I call "contextual injustice," which has to do with (...) the unjust manipulation of conversational parameters in context-sensitive discourse. My central example applies contextualism about knowledge ascriptions to questions about knowledge regarding sexual assault allegations, but I will also discuss parallel dynamics in other examples of context-sensitive language involving politically significant terms, including gender terms. The central upshot is that the connections between language, epistemology, and social justice are very deeply interlinked. (shrink)

In “Against Arguments from Reference” (Mallon et al., 2009), Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (hereafter, MMNS) argue that recent experiments concerning reference undermine various philosophical arguments that presuppose the correctness of the causal-historical theory of reference. We will argue three things in reply. First, the experiments in question—concerning Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt example—don’t really speak to the dispute between descriptivism and the causal-historical theory; though the two theories are empirically testable, we need to look at quite different data (...) than MMNS do to decide between them. Second, the Gödel/Schmidt example plays a different, and much smaller, role in Kripke’s argument for the causal-historical theory than MMNS assume. Finally, and relatedly, even if Kripke is wrong about the Gödel/Schmidt example—indeed, even if the causal-historical theory is not the correct theory of names for some human languages—that does not, contrary to MMNS’s claim, undermine uses of the causalhistorical theory in philosophical research projects. (shrink)

How radical is the idea that reasons are factive? Some philosophers consider it a dramatic departure from orthodoxy, with surprising implications about the bearing of the external world on what credences it’s reasonable to have, what beliefs are epistemically appropriate, and what actions are rational. I deny these implications. In the cases where external matters imply differences in factive states, there will inevitably be important weaker factive states in common. For example, someone who knows it is raining has many factive (...) states in common with someone who has a Gettiered belief that it is raining, or one who falsely but justifiably believes that it is raining. The factive reasons denied to subjects in Gettier cases or skeptical scenarios are in an important sense redundant; appropriate belief or action supervenes on internal states, even if reasons must be factive (and even if appropriate belief and action supervenes on reasons). The degree to which the strategy is applicable depends substantively on epistemic assumptions about basic or foundational knowledge. I argue that even given a significantly externalist approach to the latter internalist intuitions about rational credence, belief, and action can be vindicated. (shrink)

The book develops and synthesises two main ideas: contextualism about knowledge ascriptions and a knowledge-first approach to epistemology. The theme of the book is that these two ideas fit together much better than it's widely thought they do. Not only are they not competitors: they each have something important to offer the other.

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the role of intuitions in the epistemology of armchair philosophy has been exaggerated. This suggestion is rehearsed and endorsed. What bearing does the rejection of the centrality of intuition in armchair philosophy have on experimentalist critiques of the latter? I distinguish two very different kinds of experimentalist critique: one critique requires the centrality of intuition; the other does not.

One of the more visible recent developments in philosophical methodology is the experimental philosophy movement. On its surface, the experimentalist challenge looks like a dramatic threat to the apriority of philosophy; ‘experimentalist’ is nearly antonymic with ‘aprioristic’. This appearance, I suggest, is misleading; the experimentalist critique is entirely unrelated to questions about the apriority of philosophical investigation. There are many reasons to resist the skeptical conclusions of negative experimental philosophers; but even if they are granted—even if the experimentalists are right (...) to claim that we must do much more careful laboratory work in order legitimately to be confident in our philosophical judgments— the apriority of philosophy is unimpugned. The kinds of scientific investigation that experimental philosophers argue to be necessary involve merely enabling sensory experiences. Although they are not enabling in the sense of permitting concept acquisition, they are enabling in another epistemically significant way that is also consistent with the apriority of philosophy. (shrink)

How should we understand good philosophical inquiry? Ernest Sosa has argued that the key to answering this question lies with virtue-based epistemology. According to virtue-based epistemology, competences are prior to epistemic justification. More precisely, a subject is justified in having some type of belief only because she could have a belief of that type by exercising her competences. Virtue epistemology is well positioned to explain why, in forming false philosophical beliefs, agents are often less rational than it is possible to (...) be. False philosophical beliefs are often unjustified—and the agent is thereby less rational for having them—precisely because these beliefs could not be formed by exercising competences. But, virtue epistemology is not well positioned to explain why, in failing to form some true philosophical beliefs, agents are less rational than it is possible to be. In cases where agents fall short by failing to believe philosophical truths, the problem is not that they believe things they shouldn’t, but that they lack beliefs they ought to have. We argue that Timothy Williamson's recent critique of the a priori/a posteriori distinction falls prey to similar problem cases. Williamson fails to see that a type of belief might be a priori justified if and only if, even without any special confirming experiences, agents fall short by failing to have this type of belief. We conclude that there are types of beliefs that are deeply a priori justified for any agent regardless of what epistemic competences the agent has. However, we also point out that this view has a problem of its own: it appears to make the acquisition of a priori knowledge too easy. We end by suggesting that a move back towards virtue-based epistemology is necessary. But in order for this move to be effective, epistemic competences will have to be understood very differently than in the reliabilist tradition. (shrink)

There is a New Idea in epistemology. It goes by the name of ‘knowledge first,’ and it is particularly associated with Timothy Williamson’s book Knowledge and Its Limits. In slogan form, to put knowledge first is to treat knowledge as basic or fundamental, and to explain other states—belief, justification, maybe even content itself—in terms of knowledge, instead of vice versa. The idea has proven enormously interesting, and equally controversial. But deep foundational questions about its actual content remain relatively unexplored. We (...) think that a wide variety of views travel under the banner of ‘knowledge first’ (and that the slogan doesn’t help much with differentiating them). Furthermore, we think it is far from straightforward to draw connections between certain of these views; they are more independent than they are often assumed to be. Our project here is exploratory and clarificatory. We mean to tease apart various ‘knowledge first’ claims, and explore what connections they do or do not have with one another. Our taxonomy is offered in §2, and connections are explored in §3. The result, we hope, will be a clearer understanding of just what the knowledge first theses are. We conclude, in §4, with some brief suggestions as to how we think the various theses might be evaluated. (shrink)

Critical notice of Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion's _Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion_.

I distinguish (§1) two projects in modal epistemology—one about how we come to know modal truths, and one about why we have the ability so to come to know. The latter, I suggest, (§§2–3) is amenable to an evolutionary treatment in terms of general capacities developed to evaluate quotidian modal claims. I compare (§4) this approach to a recent suggestion in a similar spirit by Christopher Hill and Timothy Williamson, emphasizing counterfactual conditionals instead of quotidian modals; I argue that while (...) there are some reasons to prefer the quotidian modals approach, there are none favoring the Hill/Williamson counterfactual approach. I conclude (§5) with a suggestion that the remaining questions both approaches leave unanswered ought not to be too troubling. (shrink)

An infuential twenty-first century philosophical project posits a central role for knowledge: knowledge is more fundamental than epistemic states like belief and justification. So-called “knowledge first” theorists find support for this thought in identifying central theoretical roles for knowledge. I argue that a similar methodology supports a privileged role for more specific category of basic knowledge. Some of the roles that knowledge first theorists have posited for knowledge generally are better suited for basic knowledge.

This chapter will consider three themes relating to the significance of intuitions in contemporary philosophy. In §1, I’ll review and explore the relationship between philosophical use of words like ‘intuitively’ and any kinds of mental states that might be called ‘intuitions’. In §2, I’ll consider the widely-discussed analogy between intuitive experience and perceptual experience, drawing out some interesting similarities and differences. Finally, in §3, I’ll introduce the recent movement of ‘experimental philosophy’, and consider to what extent its projects are tied (...) up with questions about the role of intuitions in philosophy. My primary aim will be to survey and explain; I will make no effort, however, to hide the fact that I’m a philosopher and a partisan to some of these debates. So there will be some arguments for controversial points of view, too—hopefully these will be easily perceptible, and my opponents fairly represented. Limitations of space demand a rather superficial treatment of most of our topics; endnotes will direct the reader to more comprehensive discussions. (shrink)

Introduces contextualism about knowledge ascriptions, and provides a brief summary of the contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism.

In recent years, some defenders of traditional philosophical methodology have argued that certain critiques of armchair methods are mistaken in assuming that intuitions play central evidential roles in traditional philosophical methods. According to this kind of response, experimental philosophers attack a straw man; it doesn’t matter whether intuitions are reliable, because philosophers don’t use intuitions in the way assumed. Deutsch (2010), Williamson (2007), and Cappelen (2012) all defend traditional methods in something like this way. I also endorsed something like this (...) line in Ichikawa (2014a). -/- In this contribution, I will follow up on this sort of defence of traditional philosophical methods in three ways. In §1, I will rehearse and extend some of my reasons for challenging the idea that traditional methods depend on intuitions in an evidential role. (My reasons are very different from those discussed in (Cappelen, 2012).) I will also engage with some recent more sophisticated attempts to establish the idea that intuitions play evidential roles in philosophy, such as that of Chudnoff (2013). In §2, I will consider and argue against a dismissive response to such positions from experimental philosophers, who consider the question of philosophical reliance on intuitions to be irrelevant to the experimentalist critique. But in §3, I will argue that it would also be a mistake to conclude (as Herman Cappelen does) that the critique is rendered totally irrelevant by the denial of the evidential role of intuitions; I defend a more moderate view on which the bearing of experimental studies of philosophical intuitions is relevant for philosophical methodology, but only in a relatively limited way. (shrink)

Book review of Hallie Liberto's Green Light Ethics.

This chapter has four central aims. First, in §1, I distinguish two ideas within epistemology that sometimes travel under the name ‘contextualism’ — the ‘situational contextualist’ idea that an individual’s context, especially their social context, can make for a difference in what they know, and the ‘linguistic contextualist’ idea that discourse using the word ‘knows’ and its cognates is context-sensitive, expressing dif- ferent contents in different conversational contexts. -/- Second, in §2, I situate contextualism with respect to several influential ideas (...) in feminist epistemology. These ideas are thoroughgoingly contextualist in the situational sense; I’ll explore the prospects for linguistic contextualist analogues or implementations of them. Simple connections between these feminist ideas and linguistic contextualism will prove elusive, but more subtle ones are possible, and sometimes attractive. -/- §3 considers the degree to which contextual epistemic parameters are determined interpersonally, as opposed to individualistically. Should contextualists hold that speakers can individually determine the contextual parameters that influence the truth- conditions of their utterances? Or are they fixed at a broader social level? I’ll rehearse some influential reasons to opt for the latter, more social, form of contextualism. -/- In §4 I discuss the practical and moral significance of speakers’ choices of epistemic parameters, given contextualism. For example, I’ll consider how standards-raising can be used to discredit evidential sources, with an eye towards the social and moral consequences of such moves. (shrink)

We argue that stereotypes associated with concepts like he-said–she-said, conspiracy theory, sexual harassment, and those expressed by paradigmatic slurs provide “normative inference tickets”: conceptual permissions to automatic, largely unreflective normative conclusions. These “mental shortcuts” are underwritten by associated stereotypes. Because stereotypes admit of exceptions, normative inference tickets are highly flexible and productive, but also liable to create serious epistemic and moral harms. Epistemically, many are unreliable, yielding false beliefs which resist counterexample; morally, many perpetuate bigotry and oppression. Still, some normative (...) inference tickets, like some activated by sexual harassment, constitute genuine moral and hermeneutical advances. For example, our framework helps explain Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical lacunae”: what early victims of “sexual harassment” — as well as their harassers — lacked before the term was coined was a communal normative inference ticket — one that could take us, collectively, from “this is happening” to “this is wrong.”. (shrink)

This chapter considers Ernest Sosa’s contributions to philosophical methodology. In Section 1, Sosa’s approach to the role of intuitions in the epistemology of philosophy is considered and related to his broader virtue-theoretic epistemological framework. Of particular focus is the question whether false or unjustified intuitions may justify. Section 2 considers Sosa’s response to sceptical challenges about intuitions, especially those deriving from experimental philosophy. I argue that Sosa’s attempt to attribute apparent disagreement in survey data to difference in meaning fails, but (...) that some of his other, more general, responses to experimentalist sceptics succeed. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

Jennifer Windt’s Dreaming is an enormously rich and thorough book, developing illuminating connections between dreaming, the methodology of psychology, and various philosophical subfields. I’ll focus on two epistemological threads that run through the book. The first has to do with the status of certain assumptions about dreams. Windt argues that the assumptions that dreams involve experiences, and that dream reports are reliable — are methodologically necessary default assumptions, akin to Wittgensteinian hinge propositions. I’ll suggest that Windt is quietly pre-supposing some (...) sceptical assumptions, and that recent literature in epistemic externalism may bear in important ways on her arguments. The second thread involves the perennial sceptical worry that dreaming threatens ordinary knowledge. I’ll suggest again that Windt makes tacit sceptical assumptions one may wish to resist. (shrink)

Criticism can sometimes provoke defensive reactions, particularly when it implicates identities people hold dear. For instance, feminists told they are upholding rape culture might become angry or upset, since the criticism conflicts with an identity that is important to them. These kinds of defensive reactions are a primary focus of this paper. What is it to be defensive in this way, and why do some kinds of criticism, or implied criticism, tend to provoke this kind of response? What are the (...) connections between defensiveness, identity, and active ignorance? What are the social, political, and epistemic consequences of the tendency to defensiveness? Are there ways to improve the situation? (shrink)

Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like (...) white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints. (shrink)

Consent, on a standard theoretical framework, is a way of giving permission or waiving a right. Dougherty’s book is about the ‘scope’ of consent: which acts are permitted by a given act of consent? Along the way, Dougherty offers a view about what consent consists in and why it does its morally transformative work. The book is an exemplar of careful analytic philosophy. Philosophers working on consent in that tradition will find it essential reading. Following are more specific reactions that (...) will, I hope, convey a more specific sense of the book, and also engage and critique it and the tradition it exemplifies. (shrink)

This is an open-access introductory logic textbook, prepared by Jonathan Ichikawa, based on P.D. Magnus's forallx. This (v2.0, July 2020) is intended as a stable, ready-for-teaching edition.

Review of Duncan Pritchard's Epistemological Disjunctivism.

The practice of thought experimentation plays a central role in contemporary philosophical methodology. Many philosophers rely on thought experimentation as their primary and even sole procedure for testing theories about the natures of properties and relations. This test procedure involves entertaining hypothetical cases in imaginative thought and then undergoing intuitions about the distribution of properties and relations in them. A theory’s comporting with an intuition is treated as evidence in favour of it; but a clash is treated as evidence against (...) the theory and may even be regarded as falsifying it. -/- The epistemic power of thought experimentation is mysterious. How can experiments carried out within the mind enable us to discover truths about the natures of properties and relations like knowledge, causation, personal identity, reference, meaning, consciousness, beauty, justice, morality, and free will? This epistemological challenge is urgent, but a model of philosophical thought experimentation would seem to be a necessary propaedeutic to any serious discussion of it. An adequate model would make the relevant test procedure explicit, thereby assisting in the identification of points of potential epistemic vulnerability. -/- In this monograph I advance the propaedeutical model-building work already done by Timothy Williamson, Anna-Sara Malmgren, and Jonathan Ichikawa and Benjamin Jarvis. Following the lead of these philosophers, I focus on a single Gettier-style thought experiment and the problem of identifying the real content of the Gettier intuition. My first contribution is to establish the inadequacy of all of the existing models. Each of them, I argue, fails to solve the content problem. It emerges from my discussion, however, that Ichikawa and Jarvis’s truth in fiction approach holds out the prospect of a solution. -/- My second contribution is to develop and defend a new way of implementing the general idea behind the truth in fiction approach. The model I put forward does a better overall job of modelling Gettier-style thought experiments than any of the existing models. It has none of the defects which render those models inadequate and Iam unable to find any major defects peculiar to it. This should make us feel confident that my model is adequate. Moreover, since the Gettier-style thought experiment I focus on is paradigmatic, we should also feel confident that my model will generalise naturally to other philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)

Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa has presented a series of examples that are meant to spell trouble for Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism. In this short article I aim to establish two things. First, I argue that even if Ichikawa’s examples were viable counterexamples to PEC, they would not threaten the key ideas underlying the account in my 2009 article ‘Knowledge and Presuppositions’. The philosophically interesting work that is done in that article remains unaffected by Ichikawa’s alleged counterexamples. In the (...) second part of the paper, I argue that the examples are not in fact successful counterexamples to PEC. The data emerging from Ichikawa’s examples can be accounted for within the framework of PEC. (shrink)

In his review of Chris Daly’s book Philosophical Methods, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa debates with Daly over the value of using the word “tension,” which Daly describes as a weasel word. Ichikawa disagrees. I raise a worry that Ichikawa’s response will not convince Daly and try to help Ichikawa out. Then I outline a traditional empiricist objection to Daly.

In an attempt to place Kashiwagi historically, this article traces the formation of his thinking. Despite having inherited his father’s Shin Buddhist temple, Kashiwagi chose to work as a Christian pastor. Later in life he turned his attention to specifically Christian philosophy, but his early exposure to Buddhism as well as a primary education in Confucianism were decisive in shaping his ideas. In this sense, Kashiwagi represents one prototype of Meiji Japan’s adoption of Christianity: having grown up with the writings (...) of Shinran and the Chinese classics, he remained grounded in his own multi-religious and intercultural background without sliding into simple syncretism. From this standpoint he took part in the prevailing controversy over the emperor system. Without compromising his commitments to universal Christian orthodoxy on the one hand, and critical thinking on the other, Kashiwagi argued for the special significance of the emperor, as these pages will document. (shrink)

This paper looks at Gregory of Nyssa's so-called "bundle theory" sensible individuals and matter (as recently argued by Gerd Van Riel and Thomas Wauters in a 2020 article) amidst the broader context of Gregory's view of created beings and his reception of Neoplatonist, Stoic, and Aristotelian conceptions of particulars and matter. I argue that Gregory's position is closer to an Aristotelian position, despite the parallels to Plotinus and other contemporaneous bundle theory positions: in arguing against prime matter, and insofar as (...) he emphasizes the identity of each kind of created being with its material substrate—understood as a "bundle" of properties—Gregory inadvertently upholds a reading of Aristotle that refutes an ontological notion of prime matter. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to clarify the nature of the shift in Feyerabend’s philosophical thinking in the 1970s, focusing on issues of realism, relativism, and pluralism. Contra-Preston, I argue that realism-relativism is a misleading variable for characterizing Feyerabend’s shift in the 1970s. Rather, I characterize this shift as Feyerabend’s expansion of pluralism and suggest that this shift appears in Feyerabend’s publications starting in the late-1960s (e.g., Feyerabend 1968b, 1969b, 1970a, 1970c). Adopting the terminology of Brown and Kidd (2016), (...) this shift is characterized by a move from arguments for pluralism within science to broader arguments for pluralism in society. I argue that this shift was largely due to: (1) Feyerabend’s rejection of an empiricist demarcation criterion for science in the mid-1960s, and (2) Feyerabend’s incorporation of Mill’s arguments for pluralism into his own publications starting in 1970. This shift can be characterized as a broadening or expanding the scope of Feyerabend’s arguments for pluralism from contexts of scientific knowledge to the broader context of social or cultural (including ethical) knowledge. I articulate this argument with reference to the framework for classifying Feyerabend’s works formulated by Brown and Kidd (2016). Against Brown and Kidd (and Preston), I argue that realism-relativism is a red-herring as a variable for distinguishing Feyerabend’s early and middle works. Brown and Kidd’s distinction between pluralism within science and pluralism in society is a more useful variable for characterizing Feyerabend’s shift in thinking in the 1970s. Whereas Preston (1997) and Brown and Kidd (2016) identify the beginning of Feyerabend’s pluralism in society phase in 1978 with the publication of Science in a Free Society (Feyerabend 1978), I suggest that the relevant shift occurs much earlier, and it appears in Feyerabend’s publications starting in 1970 (Feyerabend 1970a, 1970b). On this understanding, Feyerabend’s philosophical shift (c. 1970) should be viewed as an expansion (or broadening) of the scope of application of his pluralist arguments, inspired by Mill’s ethical arguments for pluralism in society (Mill 1859/1977). (shrink)

Recently, more attention has been paid to the nature and value of the intellectual virtue of epistemic autonomy. One underexplored issue concerns how epistemic autonomy is related to other intellectual virtues. Plausibly, epistemic autonomy is closely related to a number of intellectual virtues like curiosity, inquisitiveness, intellectual perseverance, and intellectual courage to name just a few. Here, however, I will examine the relation between epistemic autonomy and intellectual humility. I will argue that epistemic autonomy and intellectual humility bear an interesting (...) relationship to one another in that they are interconnected and mutually supporting intellectual virtues. In sections 2 and 3 I will provide a brief overview of the predominant accounts of intellectual humility (section 2) and epistemic autonomy (section 3) in the literature. With an understanding of these intellectual virtues in hand, we will examine their relationship of mutual support in section 4. Section 5 will explore a challenge to this relationship coming from the epistemology of disagreement, and section 6 concludes. (shrink)

This paper focuses on an underexplored challenge in infinite ethics. On realistic assumptions, if our universe is infinite, every nomologically possible history is actual and nothing we ever do makes a difference to the moral quality of the world as a whole. Call this thought Every History. This paper unpacks Every History and explores some of its ethical implications. Specifically, I argue that if Every History is true and the universe turns out to be infinite (1) our lives are globally (...) insignificant, (2) moral principles enjoining the promotion of value need to be given an appropriately scope-restricted interpretation, and (3) impersonal consequentialism faces a serious challenge. (shrink)

What makes fast, cumulative cultural evolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis: cultural evolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents began to spread because (...) bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (or Cultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom). Explicit learning biases enabled (4) the high-fidelity, exclusive copying required for fast cultural accumulation of knowledge and skills by a process we call CS2 (or Cultural Selection 2), and (5) the emergence of cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading and metacognition – ‘cognitive gadgets’ specialised for cultural learning. This self-assembly hypothesis is consistent with archaeological evidence that the stone tools used by early hominins were not dependent on fast, cumulative cultural evolution, and suggests new priorities for research on ‘animal culture’. (shrink)

Conciliationism is the family of views that rationality requires agents to reduce confidence or suspend belief in p when acknowledged epistemic peers (i.e. agents who are (approximately) equally well-informed and intellectually capable) disagree about p. While Conciliationism is prima facie plausible, some have argued that Conciliationism is not an adequate theory of peer disagreement because it is self-undermining. Responses to this challenge can be put into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups: the Solution Responses which deny Conciliationism is self-undermining and (...) attempt to provide arguments which demonstrate this; and the Skeptical Responses which accept that Conciliationism is self-undermining but attempt to mitigate this result by arguing this is either impermanent and/or not very worrisome. I argue that, by Conciliationism’s own lights, both kinds of responses (almost certainly) fail to save Conciliationism from being self-undermining. Thus, Conciliationism is (almost certainly) permanently self-undermining. This result is significant because it demonstrates that Conciliationism is likely hopeless: there is likely nothing that can save Conciliationism from this challenge. I further argue that Conciliationism, like any view, should be abandoned if it is (almost certainly) hopeless. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is increasingly criticised as out of touch with the realities of partisan politics. This paper considers the rise of fake and hyperpartisan news as one source of this scepticism. While popular accounts often blame such content on citizens’ political biases and motivated reasoning, I survey the empirical evidence and argue that it does not support strong claims about the inability of citizens to live up to deliberative ideals. Instead, much of this research is shown to support the deliberative (...) capacities of citizens and points to their potential in helping to reduce the spread of false and misleading content. (shrink)

Self-interest voting is irrational when it has even a small cost, but it can be rational for those who care about others; its expected utility (EU) may exceed its cost. For cosmopolitan voters (those who care about outsiders), the EU of voting increases with the number of affected others. The EU of voting for the good of the world now and in the future can thus be large. In some cases, the EU of parochial voting (e.g., considering only one's nation) (...) may not cross the cost threshold, but cosmopolitan voting can cross it. I apply these principles to various kinds of voting. And I compare voting to charity. Voting has the advantage of enlisting the coercive power of the state, but charity can be more focused on effective policies. I discuss campaign contributions, and I conclude with a discussion of the existence of utilitarian voters. (shrink)

In this paper I examine a recent incarnation of common objection to evidentialism. According to this common objection, evidentialism gives the wrong verdicts in cases where the subject has been irresponsible in inquiry. Sandy Goldberg (2021) has argued that a particularly vivid instance of this problem occurs when an individual violates normative expectations that have been placed on them in their inquiry. Having laid out Goldberg’s case, I argue that the desirable verdicts can be better attained by endorsing evidentialism and (...) supplementing it with an account of robust justification that I have defended elsewhere. (shrink)

The recent news of a 13-year-old Singaporean prodigy graduating from an Australian university has sparked discussion about Singapore’s approach to nurturing exceptional young talents, especially after it was revealed that the boy had been previously rejected by a local university because of his young age. Some have called for an increased flexibility to allow such young people to skip levels in Singapore - parents of intellectually advanced children often cite concerns that their children are disengaged and bored at school. The (...) fear is real - keeping these students at the same level as their peers could potentially squander their potential and impede their growth. Yet, on the flip side, accelerating their academic journey could potentially jeopardise their social and emotional development, which could negatively impact their ability to connect and work well with their peers in their adulthood. Nonetheless, this debate brings to light the need for more effective strategies to meaningfully engage students with diverse abilities and learning paces. (shrink)

For several decades scientists and philosophers studying how the mind works have debated the issue of modularity. Their main disagreements concern the massive modularity hypothesis, according to which all (or most) of our cognitive mechanisms are modular in nature. Pietraszewski and Wertz (2022) have recently suggested that the modularity debate is based on a confusion about the levels of analysis at which the mind can be explained. This article argues that their position suffers from three major problems: (1) the argument (...) is unsound, with untrue premises; (2) it glosses over important empirical issues; and (3) the guidelines it offers are not sufficient for avoiding future confusions. As these criticisms are developed, this article will provide a way of making sense of the modularity debate—with an eye for what really is at stake both conceptually and empirically—and, by identifying a false assumption often shared by proponents and opponents of the massive modularity hypothesis alike, it will sketch out some guidelines for moving the debate forward. (shrink)

Reeder’s article offers a new and intriguing approach to the study of people’s ordinary understanding of freedom and constraint. On this approach, people use information about freedom and constraint as part of a quasi-scientific effort to make accurate inferences about an agent’s motives. Their beliefs about the agent’s motives then affect a wide variety of further psychological processes, including the process whereby they arrive at moral judgments. In illustrating this new approach, Reeder cites an elegant study he conducted a number (...) of years ago (Reeder & Spores, 1983). All subjects were given a vignette about a man who goes with his date to a pizza parlor and happens to come across a box that has been designated for charitable donations. In one condition, the man’s date then requests that he make a donation; in the other, she requests that he steal the money that is already in the box. In both conditions, the man chooses to comply with this request. The key question is how subjects will use his behavior to make inferences about whether he is a morally good or morally bad person. The results revealed a marked difference between conditions. When the man donated to charity, subjects were generally disinclined to conclude that he must have been a morally good person. It is as though they were thinking: ‘He didn’t just do this out of the goodness of his heart. (shrink)

According to an intriguing though somewhat enigmatic line of thought first proposed by Jonathan Bennett, if humanity went extinct any time soon this would be unfortunate because important business would be left unfinished. This line of thought remains largely unexplored. I offer an interpretation of the idea that captures its intuitive appeal, is consistent with plausible constraints, and makes it non-redundant to other views in the literature. The resulting view contrasts with a welfare-promotion perspective, according to which extinction would (...) be bad because it would come at a massive opportunity cost in terms of feasibly achievable welfare over the lifetime of our species. (shrink)