This paper defends the epistemic account of the normativity of requests. The epistemic account says that a request does not create any reasons and thus does not have any special normative power. Rather, a request gives reasons by revealing information which is normatively relevant. I argue that compared to competing accounts of request normativity, especially those of David Enoch and James H.P. Lewis, the epistemic account gives better answers to cases of insincere requests, is simpler, and does a better job (...) incorporating the importance of relationships. I also defend the epistemic account from three objections: that requests are important because they constitute consent, that requests and wishes must be normatively different, and that some requests do not provide any new information. (shrink)

Supporters of open borders sometimes argue that the state has no pro tanto right to restrict immigration, because such a right would also entail a right to exclude existing citizens for whatever reasons justify excluding immigrants. These arguments can be defeated by suggesting that people have a right to stay put. I present a new form of the exclusion argument against closed borders which escapes this “right to stay put” reply. I do this by describing a kind of exclusion that (...) has not been discussed in depth, which I call “territorial exclusion.” Territorial exclusion is the process according to which the group that wishes to exclude current citizens secedes from the territory in which those citizens reside. I argue that the wrongness of territorial exclusion explains why there is no pro tanto right for a state to exclude immigrants, because otherwise there would be a pro tanto right for the state to kick people out by seceding from the territory they inhabit. Because kicking people out like this is typically wrong, borders cannot be closed. (shrink)

I defend the cosmopolitan instrumentalist theory of secession, according to which a group has a right to secede only if this would promote cosmopolitan justice. I argue that the theory is preferable to other theories of secession because it is an entailment of cosmopolitanism, which is independently attractive, and because, unlike other theories of secession, it allows us to give the answers we want to give in cases like secession of the rich or secession that would make things worse for (...) minorities. I defend the view against the objections that it allows for colonialism and annexation, that it is not a distinct theory, and that it is impractical. (shrink)

Piero Moraro argues that people who engage in civil disobedience do not have a pro tanto reason to accept punishment for breaking the law, although they do have a duty to undergo prosecution. This is because they have a duty to answer for their actions, and the state serves as an agent of the people by calling the lawbreaker to answer via prosecution. I argue that Moraro does not go far enough. Someone who engages in civil disobedience does not even (...) have to show up for the trial, provided that they answer for their actions adequately via some other means. This is because sometimes states are not agents of the people who can call lawbreakers to account, and even those states which are agents cannot demand that lawbreakers answer for their crimes in the form of a trial. (shrink)

We should conceive of illegal covert animal rescue as acts of “subrevolution” rather than as civil disobedience. Subrevolutions are revolutions that aim to overthrow some part of the government rather than the entire government. This framework better captures the relevant values than the opposing suggestion that we treat illegal covert animal rescue as civil disobedience. If animals have rights like the right not to be unjustly imprisoned and mistreated, then it does not make sense that an instance of animal rescue (...) will be justifiable only if it meets criteria for justified civil disobedience, e.g., the requirement that the civil disobedient not rescue more animals than would be necessary to communicate their message. Thus, the framework of subrevolution is a more apt way to analyze animal rescue. (shrink)

In ‘Colonialism, territory and pre-existing obligations,’ Cara Nine argues that Lea Ypi’s account of the wrongness of colonialism has a hole in it: Ypi leaves open the possibility of justified settler colonialism. Nine suggests that we can patch this hole by attaching value to existing political associations. But Nine’s solution has its own hole. Many political associations exist due to settler colonialism, and thus if we endorse the value of these associations we seem to endorse colonialism. In response, we could (...) say that past colonial injustices have been remediated or superseded. Or, we could leave the hole open: colonialism is sometimes justified. I argue that, surprisingly, the second option is likely preferable, because it does not require us to say that the injustices of colonialism are gone, and because it points towards a better theory of colonialism’s wrongness than Ypi’s: cosmopolitan instrumentalism, according to which colonialism is wrong only when it is unjust according to one’s overall theory of cosmopolitan justice. (shrink)

Gender eliminativism, also known as gender abolitionism, is the view that we should get rid of gender. I defend gender eliminativism by suggesting that many arguments that ostensibly call for rejecting it are in fact just arguments for delaying it. Although it may be true that presently gender eliminativism should not occur because of the role gender plays in people's identities, because of the need for gender to remedy oppression, because elimination is not pragmatic, because elimination is utopian, and because (...) we should have more rather than fewer genders, these are all reasons to delay, rather than deny, gender eliminativism. (shrink)

Massimo Renzo has recently argued in this journal that Allen Buchanan’s account of the ethics of intervention is too permissive. Renzo claims that a proper understanding of political self-determination shows that it is often impermissible to intervene in order to establish a regime that leads to more self-determination for a group of people if that group was or would be opposed to the intervention. Renzo’s argument rests on an analogy between individual self-determination and group self-determination, and once we see that (...) there are differences between the two kinds of self-determination, his argument against Buchanan fails, and thus there are more cases of permissible intervention than Renzo countenances. However, understanding these differences also reveals that Buchanan’s account is also not permissive enough. There are cases of justified intervention beyond even what Buchanan compasses. (shrink)

Tony Milligan argues that some forms of covert non-human animal rescue, wherein activists anonymously and illegally free non-human animals from confinement, should be understood as acts of civil disobedience. However, most traditional understandings of civil disobedience require that the civil disobedient act publicly rather than covertly. Thus Milligan’s proposal is that we revise our understanding of civil disobedience to allow for covert in addition to public disobedience. I argue we should not. Milligan cannot justify using paradigm cases to expand the (...) scope of civil disobedience without justifying similar reasons to limit the scope, and he does nto give convincing reasons for discarding the communication requirement, according to which an action cannot count as civil disobedience unless it is communicative. The immediate conclusion is that animal rescue is not civil disobedience, while the broader conclusion is one about civil disobedience more broadly: an act must be public to count as civil disobedience. (shrink)

Can a liberal state exclude illiberal immigrants in order to preserve its liberal status? Hrishikesh Joshi has argued that liberalism cannot require a commitment to open borders because this would entail that liberalism is committed to its own demise in circumstances in which many illiberal immigrants aim to immigrate into a liberal society. I argue that liberalism is committed to its own demise in certain circumstances, but that this is not as bad as it may appear. Liberalism’s commitment to its (...) own demise is merely a reflection of the fact that it must take into account the rights of outsiders, not just the rights of existing citizens, and of the fact that circumstances of injustice can sometimes leave liberal societies with no correct choice. (shrink)

Melis Erdur has argued that there is something morally wrong with moral realism. Moral realism promotes morally objectionable lethargy by recommending that we accept moral knowledge that could be acquired effortlessly. This is morally objectionable, because morality requires us to be reflective about moral truths. I argue that the moral realist need not be worried, because if reflection about morality is a genuine value, the realist can accept this: moral realism entails no prescriptions about how one morally ought to acquire (...) moral knowledge. It is merely a metaphysical thesis about the ontological status of moral truthmakers. If we ought to be reflective, moral realism can accept this. Moreover, Erdur’s argument generalizes to moral anti-realism, so the moral realist in particular has nothing to worry about. (shrink)

Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a (...) life depends solely on the prudential value of each moment of that life. This is a general account of momentary well-being that can capture different features of well-being that standard atomistic accounts fail to capture, thus allowing for the possibility of an atomism that is compatible with a variety of well-being theories. Contrary to many criticisms leveled against momentary well-being, this well-being atomism captures all of the important features of well-being. (shrink)

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...) a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse. (shrink)

It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus on (...) what makes standards like etiquette ‘not really normative’. I defend a fictionalist theory on which etiquette is ‘not really normative’ in roughly the same way that Sherlock is ‘not really a detective’, and show that fictionalism about some normative standards helps us explain the possibility of normative authority. (shrink)

Conversational exculpature is a pragmatic process whereby information is subtracted from, rather than added to, what the speaker literally says. This pragmatic content subtraction explains why we can say “Rob is six feet tall” without implying that Rob is between 5'0.99" and 6'0.01" tall, and why we can say “Ellen has a hat like the one Sherlock Holmes always wears” without implying Holmes exists or has a hat. This article presents a simple formalism for understanding this pragmatic mechanism, specifying how, (...) in context, the result of such subtractions is determined. And it shows how the resulting theory of conversational exculpature accounts for a varied range of linguistic phenomena. A distinctive feature of the approach is the crucial role played by the question under discussion in determining the result of a given exculpature. (shrink)

This paper explores a special kind of loop of grounding: cosmic loops. A cosmic loop is a loop that intuitively requires us to go "around" the entire universe to come back to the original ground. After describing several kinds of cosmic loop scenarios, I will discuss what we can learn from these scenarios about constraints on grounding; the conceivability of cosmic loops; the possibility of cosmic loops; and the prospects for salvaging local reflexivity, asymmetry and transitivity of grounding in a (...) world containing a cosmic loop of ground. The considerations raised in this paper also bear on what we should think about relations that are meant to support grounding relations: in particular, revisions to theories of the part-whole relation are discussed. (shrink)

Take “legal reality” to be the part of reality that actual legal thought and talk is dis- tinctively about, such as legal institutions, legal obligations, and legal norms. Our goal is to explore whether legal reality is disunified. To illustrate the issue, consider the possibility that an important metaphysical thesis such as positivism is true of one part of legal reality (legal institutions), but not another (legal norms). We offer two arguments that suggest that legal reality is disunified: one concerns (...) the heteroge- neity of different entities that are part of legal reality; the other concerns variation within legal thought and talk. We then show that taking the possibility of the disunity of legal reality seriously has important upshots for how we think about the positivist and antipositivist traditions, the debate between them, and their relation to other parts of legal theory, such as critical legal theory and legal realism. (shrink)

This paper argues for several related theses. First, the epistemological position that knowledge requires safe belief can be motivated by views in the philosophy of science, according to which good explanations show that their explananda are robust. This motivation goes via the idea—recently defended on both conceptual and empirical grounds—that knowledge attributions play a crucial role in explaining successful action. Second, motivating the safety requirement in this way creates a choice point—depending on how we understand robustness, we'll end up with (...) different conceptions of safety in epistemology. Lastly, and most controversially, there's an attractive choice at this point that will not vindicate some of the most influential applications of the safety-theoretic framework in epistemology, e.g., Williamson's arguments against the KK principle, and luminosity. (shrink)

This paper is a response to two sets of published criticisms of the 'Reasons as Evidence’ thesis concerning normative reasons, proposed and defended in earlier papers. According to this thesis, a fact is a normative reason for an agent to Φ just in case this fact is evidence that this agent ought to Φ. John Broome and John Brunero have presented a number of challenging criticisms of this thesis which focus, for the most part, on problems that it appears to (...) confront when it comes to the topic of the weighing of reasons. Our paper responds to all of the criticisms that these critics have provided, shedding fresh light on this interesting topic in the process. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that a serious right to life is grounded only in actual, relatively advanced psychological capacities a being has acquired. The moral permissibility of abortion is frequently argued for on these grounds. Increasingly it is being argued that such accounts also entail the permissibility of infanticide, with several proponents of these theories accepting this consequence. We show, however, that these accounts imply the permissibility of even more unpalatable acts than infanticide performed on infants: organ harvesting, live experimentation, (...) sexual interference, and discriminatory killing. The stronger intuitions against the permissibility of these ‘pre-personal acts’ allow us to re-establish a comprehensive and persuasive reductio against psychological accounts of persons. (shrink)

Well-being measurements are frequently used to support conclusions about a range of philosophically important issues. This is a problem, because we know too little about the intervals of the relevant scales. I argue that it is plausible that well-being measurements are non-linear, and that common beliefs that they are linear are not truth-tracking, so we are not justified in believing that well-being scales are linear. I then argue that this undermines common appeals to both hypothetical and actual well-being measurements; I (...) first focus on the philosophical literature on prioritarianism and then discuss Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule as a systematic bias. Finally, I discuss general implications for research on well-being, and suggest a better way of representing scales. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to a fundamental problem for a version of the tracing strategy defended by a number of theorists in the current literature (Rosen 2004, Fischer and Tognazzini 2009). I argue that versions of the tracing strategy that require reasonable foreseeability are in tension with the view that blameless ignorance excuses. A stronger version of the tracing strategy is consistent with the view that blameless ignorance excuses and is therefore preferable for those tracing theorists who wish to continue (...) maintaining that it does. (shrink)

The U.S. election in November 2016 raised and amplified doubts about first-past-the-post (“plurality rule”) electoral systems. Arguments against plurality rule and for alternatives like preferential voting tend to be consequentialist: it is argued that systems like preferential voting produce different, better outcomes. After briefly noting why the consequentialist case against plurality rule is more complex and contentious than it first appears, I offer an expressive alternative: plurality rule produces actual or apparent dilemmas for voters in ways that are morally objectionable, (...) and avoidable under preferential voting systems. This expressive case against plurality rule is both simpler and more ecumenical than its consequentialist counterpart, and it provides strong reasons to prefer alternatives to plurality rule. Moreover, it suggests a distinct way of evaluating different alternatives like preferential voting. (shrink)

I argue that existing objectivist accounts of subjective reasons face systematic problems with cases involving probability and possibility. I then offer a diagnosis of why objectivists face these problems, and recommend that objectivists seek to provide indirect analyses of subjective reasons.

English translation of Kant's Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (Königsberg in Prussia, 30 September 1784).

Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these “stakeholders' desiderata”) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainability (...) of artificial systems and reviews their desiderata. We provide a model that explicitly spells out the main concepts and relations necessary to consider and investigate when evaluating, adjusting, choosing, and developing explainability approaches that aim to satisfy stakeholders' desiderata. This model can serve researchers from the variety of different disciplines involved in XAI as a common ground. It emphasizes where there is interdisciplinary potential in the evaluation and the development of explainability approaches. (shrink)

What do normative terms like “obligation” mean in legal contexts? On one view, which H.L.A. Hart may have endorsed, “obligation” is ambiguous in moral and legal contexts. On another, which is dominant in jurisprudence, “obligation” has a distinctively moralized meaning in legal contexts. On a third view, which is often endorsed in philosophy of language, “obligation” has a generic meaning in moral and legal con- texts. After making the nature of and disagreements between these views precise, I show how linguistic (...) data militates against both rivals to the generic meaning view, and argue that this has significant implications for jurisprudence. (shrink)

This book is conceived as an introductory text into the theory of syntactic and semantic information, and information flow.

The fact that our asking God to do something can make a difference to what he does underwrites the point of petitionary prayer. Here, however, a puzzle arises: Either doing what we ask is the best God can do or it is not. If it is, then our asking won’t make any difference to whether he does it. If it is not, then our asking won’t make any difference to whether he does it. So, our asking won’t make any difference (...) to whether God does it. Our asking is therefore pointless. In this paper, we try to solve this puzzle without denying either that God must do the best he can or that petitioning God can make a difference to what he does. (shrink)

A principle endorsed by many theories of objective chance, and practically forced on us by the standard interpretation of the Kolmogorov semantics for chance, is the principle that when a proposition P has a chance, any proposition Q that is necessarily equivalent to P will have the same chance as P. Call this principle SUB (for the substitution of necessary equivalents into chance ascriptions). I will present some problems for a theory of chance, and will argue that the best way (...) to resolve these problems is to reject SUB, and similar principles e.g. for the chances of outcomes or the chances of events. Objective chance, it turns out, carves things more finely than necessary equivalence does. (shrink)

This essay introduces the transcription and translation of Paul Feyerabend's "Der Begriff der Verständlichkeit in der modernen Physik" [The concept of intelligibility in modern physics] (1948), which is an early essay written by Paul Feyerabend in 1948 on the topic of intelligibility (Verständlichkeit) and visualizability (Anschaulichkeit) of physical theories. The existence of such essay was likely. It is listed in his bibliography as his first publication. Yet the content of the essay was unknown, as no original or copy is extant (...) in Feyerabend's Nachlass and no known published version was available to the community—until now. The essay has both historical and philosophical interest: it is, as far as our current knowledge goes, Feyerabend's earliest extant publication. It documents Feyerabend's philosophical interest as a physicist-to-be, in what he himself called his “positivist” phase; and it gives a rare if fragmentary insight into the early discussions of the ‘Third Vienna Circle’ and, more generally, the philosophical culture of discussion in Vienna. (shrink)

Reprinted in Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, Oxford, 2009, eds Michael Rea and Thomas McCall. In this essay, I assess a certain version of ’social Trinitarianism’ put forward by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, ’trinity monotheism’. I first show how their response to a familiar anti-Trinitarian argument arguably implies polytheism. I then show how they invoke three tenets central to their trinity monotheism in order to avoid that implication. After displaying these tenets more fully, I argue (...) that Trinitarians would do well to hold Moreland’s and Craig’s trinity monotheism at arms length. (shrink)

Are there any deep or systematic connections between paternalism and people's rights? Perhaps the connection is definitional: part of what makes an action or policy paternalistic is that it violates a right. Or perhaps the connection is normative: paternalism is (always? often? only sometimes?) morally problematic because it violates people's rights (even if we don't define "paternalism" in terms of a rights violation). My main goal in this paper is to argue for the normative connection. Part of the task will (...) be to explain exactly what the normative connection is. That will involve answering the questions embedded in the claim as well as offering an account of the right(s) that is (are) connected to paternalism's normative status. (shrink)

Sarah McGrath argues that moral perception has an advantage over its rivals in its ability to explain ordinary moral knowledge. I disagree. After clarifying what the moral perceptualist is and is not committed to, I argue that rival views are both more numerous and more plausible than McGrath suggests: specifically, I argue that inferentialism can be defended against McGrath’s objections; if her arguments against inferentialism succeed, we should accept a different rival that she neglects, intuitionism; and, reductive epistemologists can appeal (...) to non-naturalist commitments to avoid McGrath’s counterexamples. (shrink)

Mandatory minimum sentencing provisions have been a feature of the U.S. justice system since 1790. But they have expanded considerably under the war on drugs, and their use has expanded considerably under the Trump Administration; some states are also poised to expand drug-related mandatory minimums further in efforts to fight the current opioid epidemic. In this paper I outline and evaluate three prominent arguments for and against the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs—they appeal, respectively, to proportionality, (...) consistency, and efficiency. I ultimately defend the view that the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs is unjust. -/- . (shrink)

One hundred and ninety participants (95 undergraduates and 95 employees) responded to a factorial survey in which a number of case-based organizational allocation tasks were described. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as employees in fictitious organizations and chose among three allocations of employee development schemes invested by the manager in different work groups. The allocations regarded how such investments should be allocated between two parties. Participants chose twice, once picking the fairest and once the best allocation. One between-subjects factor (...) varied whether the parties represented social (i.e., choosing among allocations between two different work groups) or temporal comparisons (i.e., choosing among allocations between the present and the following year). Another between-subjects factor varied whether participants’ in-group was represented by the parties or not. One allocation maximized the outcome to one party, another maximized the joint outcome received by both parties, and a third provided both parties with equal but lower outcomes. It was predicted that equality, although always deficient to both parties, would be the preferred allocation when parties represented social comparisons and when choices were based on fairness. When parties represented temporal comparisons, and when choices were based on preference, maximizing the joint outcome was hypothesized to be the preferred allocation. Results supported these hypotheses. Against what was predicted, whether the in-group was represented by the parties or not did not moderate the results, indicating that participants’ allocation preferences were not affected by self-interest. The main message is that people make sensible distinctions between what they prefer and what they regard as fair. The results were the same for participating students who imagined themselves as being employees and participants who were true employees, suggesting that no serious threats to external validity are committed when university students are used as participants. (shrink)

It is traditional to ascribe to Locke the view that every person who acquires natural property rights by labouring on resources is obligated to leave sufficient resources for everyone else. But during the last several decades, a number of authors have contributed to a compelling textual case against this reading. Nevertheless, Locke clearly indicates that there is something wrong with distributions in which some suffer while others thrive. But if he does not endorse the traditional proviso, what exactly is the (...) problem? In this paper, I offer a solution to this puzzle. I argue that according to Locke, once people use their natural rights to acquire large properties, many individuals are unable to enjoy the material and moral wellbeing, or “preservation,” that is the end of natural law. For even if such large properties pose no problem for material preservation, they foster arbitrary power that offends against moral preservation. (shrink)

Race is one of the most common variables in the social sciences, used to draw correlations between racial groups and numerous other important variables such as education, healthcare outcomes, aptitude tests, wealth, employment and so forth. But where concern with race once reflected the view that races were biologically real, many, if not most, contemporary social scientists have abandoned the idea that racial categories demarcate substantial, intrinsic biological differences between people. This, in turn, raises an important question about the significance (...) of race in those social sciences: if there is no biological basis of race, why are racial categories useful to social scientists? More specifically, in virtue of what are racial categories a successful basis of informative, important social scientific generalizations? 2 We’ll call this social science’s race puzzle. (shrink)

The Alcibiades I concludes with an arresting image of an eye that sees itself by looking into another eye. Using the dialogue as a whole, I offer a detailed interpretation of this image and I discuss its implications for the question of self-knowledge. The Alcibiades I reveals both what self-knowledge is (knowledge of soul in its particularity and its universality) and how we are to seek it (by way of philosophical dialogue). This makes the pursuit of self-knowledge an inescapably social (...) pursuit. Yet as Socrates cautions us, our ability to gain self-knowledge—and indeed his very account of what it is—are limited. The dialogue is thus challenging us to take the inquiry further, thereby displaying the very matter being discussed. (shrink)

Perhaps more than any other philosopher of mind, Ned Block synthesizes philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind; he is unique in moving back and forth across this divide, doing so with creativity and intensity. Over the course of his career, Block has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of intelligence, representation, and consciousness. Blockheads! (the title refers to Block's imaginary counterexample to the Turing test—and to the Block-enthusiast contributors) offers eighteen new essays on Block's work along with substantive and (...) wide-ranging replies by Block. (shrink)

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and philosophical issues involved in (...) providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic. (shrink)

Knows-knows principles in epistemology say that if you know some proposition, then you are in a position to know that you know it. This paper examines the viability of analogous principles in ethics, which I call ought-ought principles. Several epistemologists have recently offered new defences of KK principles and of other related principles, and there has recently been an increased interest in examining analogies between ethics and epistemology, and so it seems natural to examine whether defences of KK and related (...) principles carry over to OO principles. In this paper, I introduce two OO principles, and I show how some arguments in favour of KK carry over to them. Then I show how these OO principles can be used to shed light on a much-discussed case in ethics, that of Professor Procrastinate. (shrink)

Methodological naturalism arises as a topic in metaethics in two ways. One is the issue of whether we should be methodological naturalists when doing our moral theorising, and another is whether we should take a naturalistic approach to metaethics itself. Interestingly, these can come apart, and some naturalist programs in metaethics justify a non-scientific approach to our moral theorising. This paper discusses the range of approaches that fall under the general umbrella of methodological naturalism, and how naturalists view the role (...) of science in ethics and metaethics. It discusses how naturalism interacts with the use of intuitions, using conceptual analysis, and reflective equilibrium methods. Finally, it discusses some ways using scientific investigation can make distinctive contributions to ethics and metaethics. (shrink)