This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. -/- Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of (...) change. When he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reexamination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Aristotle argues that time depends on soul to count it, but adds that motion, which makes time what it is, may be independent of soul. The claim that time depends on soul or mind implies that there is at least one measurable property of natural beings that exists because of the mind’s activity. This paper argues that for Aristotle time depends partly on soul, but more importantly on motion, which defines a continuum. This argument offers a robust metaphysics of time. (...) In contrast to modern philosophy of physics, for Aristotle the continuum of motion is prior in being to time, while time is a hybrid of the real continuum of motion and the activity of mind. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the relationship between the now, motion, and number in Aristotle to clarify the nature of the now, and, thereby, the relationship between motion and time. Although it is clear that for Aristotle motion, and, more generally, change, are prior to time, the nature of this priority is not clear. But if time is the number of motion, then the priority of motion can be grasped by examining his theory of number. This paper aims to show that, just (...) as numbers are generated by the soul, time is not presupposed by motion, but emerges through the soul’s articulation of motion. Time is co-constituted by the soul and motion. The now is the key to understanding both the contribution of motion and soul to the being of time. The now is part of the soul’s articulation of motion, and sets the stage for an act that distinguishes a unit from its underlying motion. The now, then, sets up an abstraction by which the soul generates the temporal number from motion. Reconstructing this account of abstraction allows us to formulate more strongly Aristotle’s claim to the ontological dependence of time on motion. The paper then gives a systematic overview of the relationships between the now and number in order to address the question of whether the now might be extended. It closes with an examination of the possibility that motion depends on time, and how universal time is possible. (shrink)

The belief that Aristotle opposes potency (dunamis) to actuality (energeia or entelecheia) has gone untested. This essay defines and distinguishes forms of the Opposition Hypothesis—the Actualization, Privation, and Modal—examining the texts and arguments adduced to support them. Using Aristotle’s own account of opposition, the texts appear instead to show that potency and actuality are compatible, while arguments for their opposition produce intractable problems. Notably, Aristotle’s refutation of the Megarian Identity Hypothesis applies with equal or greater force to the Opposition Hypothesis. (...) For Aristotle, then, potency and actuality are compatible. (shrink)

Of Aristotle’s core terms, potency (dunamis) and actuality (energeia) are among the most important. But when we attempt to understand what they mean, we face the following problem: their primary meaning is movement, as a source (dunamis) or as movement itself (energeia). We therefore have to understand movement in order to understand them. But the structure of movement is itself articulated using these terms: it is the activity of a potential being, as potent. This paper examines this hermeneutic circle, and (...) works out a strategy for reading Aristotle based on his conception of our epistemological predicament. This hermeneutic approach helps us gain access to the phenomena of movement and its sources (potency, and energeia). The paper closes with a review of the conceptual resources we deploy to think about movement: homogeneity, space and time, impulse, relativity, the blend of sameness and difference, and being and non-being. Showing that Aristotle uses none of these clears the landscape for a fresh inquiry into his account of movement. (shrink)

The ethical neutrality of technology has been widely questioned, for example, in the case of the creation and continued existence of weapons. At stake is whether technology changes the ethical character of our experience: compare the experience of seeing a beating to videotaping it. Interpreting and elaborating on the work of George Grant and Marshall McLuhan, this paper consists of three arguments: 1) the existence of technologies determines the structures of civilization that are imposed on the world, 2) technologies shape (...) what we do and determine how we do it, and 3) technology, unlike any other kind of thing, seems not to make moral demands of us: it is morally neutral. This means that they offer us the freedom of imposing on something that does not impose back. The introduction of this experience of freedom changes the way we experience the world in general by introducing a new way of relating to the good, namely by introducing the act of subjective valuation. Each of these points implies that technology structurally changes or interferes with our ethical relationship with things, with the result that through subjective valuation the experience of the obligation to act can be suspended. (shrink)

Burgess (1997), building on Quine (1953), convincingly argued that claims in quantified modal logic cannot be understood as synonymous with or logically equivalent to claims about the analyticity of certain sentences. According to modal normativism, metaphysically necessary claims instead express or convey our actual semantic rules. In this paper, I show how the normativist can use Sidelle’s (1992a, 1995) neglected work on rigidity to account for two important phenomena in quantified modal logic: the necessity of identity and the substitutivity of (...) identicals into modal contexts. (shrink)

Expressivists have a problem with negation. The problem is that they have not, to date, been able to explain why ‘murdering is wrong’ and ‘murdering is not wrong’ are inconsistent sentences. In this paper, I explain the nature of the problem, and why the best efforts of Gibbard, Dreier, and Horgan and Timmons don’t solve it. Then I show how to diagnose where the problem comes from, and consequently how it is possible for expressivists to solve it. Expressivists should accept (...) this solution, I argue, because it is demonstrably the only way of avoiding the problem, and because it generalizes. Once we see how to solve the negation problem, I show, it becomes easy to state a constructive, compositional expressivist semantics for a purely normative language with the expressive power of propositional logic, in which we can for the first time give explanatory, formally adequate expressivist accounts of logical inconsistency, logical entailment, and logical validity. As a corollary, I give what I take to be the first real expressivist explanation of why Geach’s original moral modus ponens argument is genuinely logically valid. This proves that the problem with expressivism cannot be that it can’t account for the logical properties of complex normative sentences. But it does not show that the same solution can work for a language with both normative and descriptive predicates, let alone that expressivists are able to deal with more complex linguistic constructions like tense, modals, or even quantifiers. In the final section, I show what kind of constraints the solution offered here would place expressivists under, in answering these further questions. (shrink)

Philosophers have come to distinguish between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of reasons for belief, intention, and other attitudes. Several theories about the nature of this distinction have been offered, by far the most prevalent of which is the idea that it is, at bottom, the distinction between what are known as ‘object-given’ and ‘state-given’ reasons. This paper argues that the object-given/state-given theory vastly overgeneralizes on a small set of data points, and in particular that any adequate account of the distinction (...) between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of reason must allow state-given reasons to be of the right kind. The paper has three main goals, corresponding to its three main parts. In part 1 I set up the problem by introducing the right-kind/wrong-kind distinction, the object-given/state-given distinction, and the object-given/state-given theory, according to which the former distinction simply amounts to the latter. Part 2 presents the main argument of the paper: I argue against the object-given/state-given theory by showing that all of the earmarks of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of reason apply to reasons not to intend and not to believe, but that these cases can’t be captured by the object-given/state-given theory. Finally, in part 3 I use these arguments to motivate and explore a more general hypothesis about the rightkind/wrong-kind distinction, and explore some of the consequences of rejecting the object-given/stategiven theory. (shrink)

The best writing of Mark Pettinelli, about cognitive psychology, cognitive science, etc.

Introduction -/- 1 Précis -/- 2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Core constructs 2.3 Operationalizing the constructs 2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source 2.5 Cleaning the data 2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis 2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus 2.6.2 Book visualizations 2.7 Summary -/- Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Framework -/- 3 From instincts and drives to types 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The state of the art on drives, instincts, and types 3.2.1 Drives 3.2.2 Instincts 3.2.3 Types 3.3 (...) The semantic neighborhood of drive, instinct, and type 3.4 A theory of (the relations among) instincts, drives, and types 3.4.1 Drives are act-directed rather than outcome-directed dispositions 3.4.2 The reflexive turn in Nietzsche’s drive psychology 3.4.3 Triggers of drive-displacement 3.4.4 Instincts are innate drives 3.4.5 Types are constellations of instincts and other drives 3.4.6 To what extent are types, instincts, and drives fixed? 3.5 Summary -/- 4 From types to virtues 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The state of the art on virtues and values 4.2.1 Virtues 4.2.2 Values 4.3 The semantic neighborhood of virtue and value 4.4 On (the relations among) instincts, drives, types, values, virtues, and values 4.4.1 Virtues are well-calibrated drives 4.4.2 Nietzsche’s type-relative unity of virtue thesis 4.4.3 The type of the criminal 4.4.4 Nietzschean exemplarism and his ad hominem attacks 4.5 Summary -/- 5 Socializing Nietzschean virtues 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Higher-order types 5.2.1 Social character construction 5.2.2 Reflexive character construction 5.3 Eponymous trait terms and Nietzschean summoning 5.3.1 Eponymous trait terms 5.3.2 Nietzschean summoning 5.4 Summary -/- Nietzschean virtues -/- 6 Curiosity 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Curiosity in virtue epistemology 6.3 Curiosity and its affiliated emotions 6.4 Curiosity, perspectivism, and inquiry 6.5 Curiosity as a virtue 6.5.1 A preliminary characterization 6.5.2 Curiosity in the middle through late works 6.6 Summary -/- 7 Courage 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Intellectual courage in contemporary virtue epistemology 7.3 Courage as a virtue 7.3.1 A preliminary characterization 7.3.2 Courage in the middle through late works 7.4 Summary -/- 8 Pathos of distance 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Contempt and disgust in contemporary moral psychology 8.3 The semantic neighborhood of contempt, disgust, and the pathos of distance 8.4 Nietzsche on contempt 8.4.1 Spernere mundum 8.4.2 Spernere neminem 8.4.3 Spernere se ipsum 8.4.4 Spernere se sperni 8.4.5 Nietzsche aims to induce what he considers fitting contempt in receptive readers 8.5 Nietzsche on disgust 8.5.1 The use of disgust: detaching from an ideal 8.5.2 The danger of disgust 8.6 The pathos of distance 8.7 Prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos 8.8 Summary -/- 9 Sense of humor 9.1 Introduction 9.2 The semantic neighborhood of laughter, humor, and comedy 9.3 The Nietzschean sense of humor and its functions 9.3.1 From episodic laughter to the sense of humor 9.3.2 Affirmation and inquiry 9.3.3 Negation and inquiry 9.3.4 Affiliation with like-minded inquirers 9.4 Summary -/- 10 Solitude 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Solitude in virtue theory and Nietzsche scholarship 10.3 The semantic neighborhood of solitude 10.4 An account of Nietzschean solitude 10.5 Summary -/- Conclusion -/- 11 Conscience & integrity 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology and Nietzsche scholarship 11.2.1 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology 11.2.2 Conscience and integrity in Nietzsche commentary 11.3 The semantic neighborhood of conscience and integrity 11.4 Distinguishing conscience, good conscience, bad conscience, and intellectual conscience 11.4.1 Conscience 11.4.2 Good conscience 11.4.3 Bad conscience 11.4.4 Intellectual conscience and integrity 11.5 Summary -/- 12 Prospectus 12.1 Future directions in moral psychology 12.2 Future directions in Nietzsche scholarship 12.3 Future directions in digital humanities and the history of philosophy . (shrink)

An archive of Mark Sharlow's two blogs, "The Unfinishable Scroll" and "Religion: the Next Version." Covers Sharlow's views on metaphysics, epistemology, mind, science, religion, and politics. Includes topics and ideas not found in his papers.

Provides an overview of Mark Sharlow's philosophical work with summaries of his positions. Includes references and links to his writings.

The debate over the meanings of indexical expressions has relied heavily on the method of counterexamples. This paper challenges that method by showing that purported counterexamples can often be explained away by appeal to perspective shifts. For these counterexamples to establish anything about indexical reference, we must identify the conditions under which theorists can legitimately appeal to perspective shifts. Some tests for semantic content are considered and it is argued that none of them can tell us when appeal to perspective (...) shift is admissible. The paper then considers how we should proceed if we become convinced that there is no way to identify the content of indexical expressions, offering reasons in favour of a nihilist conception of character over an epistemicist or pluralist conception. (shrink)

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We (...) Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

During multiple testing, researchers often adjust their alpha level to control the familywise error rate for a statistical inference about a joint union alternative hypothesis (e.g., “H1,1 or H1,2”). However, in some cases, they do not make this inference. Instead, they make separate inferences about each of the individual hypotheses that comprise the joint hypothesis (e.g., H1,1 and H1,2). For example, a researcher might use a Bonferroni correction to adjust their alpha level from the conventional level of 0.050 to 0.025 (...) when testing H1,1 and H1,2, find a significant result for H1,1 (p < 0.025) and not for H1,2 (p > .0.025), and so claim support for H1,1 and not for H1,2. However, these separate individual inferences do not require an alpha adjustment. Only a statistical inference about the union alternative hypothesis “H1,1 or H1,2” requires an alpha adjustment because it is based on “at least one” significant result among the two tests, and so it refers to the familywise error rate. Hence, an inconsistent correction occurs when a researcher corrects their alpha level during multiple testing but does not make an inference about a union alternative hypothesis. In the present article, I discuss this inconsistent correction problem, including its reduction in statistical power for tests of individual hypotheses and its potential causes vis-à-vis error rate confusions and the alpha adjustment ritual. I also provide three illustrations of inconsistent corrections from recent psychology studies. I conclude that inconsistent corrections represent a symptom of statisticism, and I call for a more nuanced inference-based approach to multiple testing corrections. (shrink)

The basic idea of expressivism is that for some sentences ‘P’, believing that P is not just a matter of having an ordinary descriptive belief. This is a way of capturing the idea that the meaning of some sentences either exceeds their factual/descriptive content or doesn’t consist in any particular factual/descriptive content at all, even in context. The paradigmatic application for expressivism is within metaethics, and holds that believing that stealing is wrong involves having some kind of desire-like attitude, with (...) world-tomind direction of fit, either in place of, or in addition to, being in a representational state of mind with mind-to-world direction of fit. Because expressivists refer to the state of believing that P as the state of mind ‘expressed’ by ‘P’, this view can also be described as the view that ‘stealing is wrong’ expresses a state of mind that involves a desire-like attitude instead of, or in addition to, a representational state of mind. According to some expressivists - unrestrained expressivists, as I’ll call them - there need be no special relationship among the different kinds of state of mind that can be expressed by sentences. Pick your favorite state of mind, the unrestrained expressivist allows, and there could, at least in principle, be a sentence that expressed it. Expressivists who seem to have been unrestrained plausibly include Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, and Simon Blackburn in many of his writings, including his [1984], [1993], and.. (shrink)

I have argued elsewhere that the psychological aspects of Nietzsche’s later works are best understood from a psychodynamic point of view. Nietzsche holds a view I dubbed the tenacity of the intentional (T): when an intentional state loses its object, a new object replaces the original; the state does not disappear entirely. In this essay I amend and clarify (T) to (T``): When an intentional state with a sub-propositional object loses its object, the affective component of the state persists without (...) a corresponding object, and that affect will generally be redeployed in a state with a distinct object. I then trace the development of the tenacity thesis through Nietzsche’s early and middle works. Along the way, I discuss a number of related topics, including the scope of the tenacity thesis (does it apply to all intentional states?), the reflexive turn one often finds in Nietzsche’s examples (why does he so often say the new object is oneself?), and the relations among will to power, drives, and the tenacity of the intentional. (shrink)

What is it to have a reason? According to one common idea, the "Factoring Account", you have a reason to do A when there is a reason for you to do A which you have--which is somehow in your possession or grasp. In this paper, I argue that this common idea is false. But though my arguments are based on the practical case, the implications of this are likely to be greatest in epistemology: for the pitfalls we fall into when (...) trying to defend the Factoring Account reflect very well the major developments in empiricist epistemology during the 20th century. I conjecture that this is because epistemologists have been--wrongly--wedded to the Factoring Account about evidence, which I conjecture is a certain kind of reason to believe. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 73-89, June 2022.

Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes a (...) specific proposition? Doxastic voluntarists hold that, at least in some circumstances—such as when the evidence is ambiguous—we can. Doxastic involuntarists, in contrast, maintain that we cannot. Some involuntarists hold that the concept of belief itself precludes the possibility of believing voluntarily. Others hold that the impossibility of voluntary belief is a contingent psychological fact. Historically, the issue of doxastic voluntarism has been connected to how many think about religious commitment: a prominent view of faith is that it is a voluntary decision to believe. Furthermore, the issue of voluntarism has also been viewed as having bearing on fundamental questions in epistemology. For example, are epistemic norms duties to believe in certain ways? Are there practical or moral reasons to believe? If the answer to either question is “yes,” it seems some measure of voluntary doxastic control is required. -/- In section 1, we expand on the definition of doxastic voluntarism, and survey various kinds of control (e.g. direct, indirect, long-range) and the doxastic attitudes we might control (e.g. outright belief, withholding, credences). In section 2, we discuss a number of historical views on doxastic voluntarism. In section 3, we survey motivations for rejecting doxastic voluntarism. There are two general strategies: arguments that appeal to psychological considerations, and conceptual arguments regarding the nature of belief. In section 4, we survey five approaches to defending voluntarism: those that appeal to epistemic permissivism, doxastic compatibilism, skepticism, one-off considerations, and non-standard views of belief. In section 5, we cover empirical work on doxastic voluntarism. The last two sections discuss two implications of voluntarism. In section 6, we discuss voluntarism’s implications for the ethics of belief, and in section 7, we discuss issues at the intersection of voluntarism and religious faith. (shrink)

Most philosophers find it puzzling how beliefs could wrong, and this leads them to conclude that they do not. So there is much philosophical work to be done in sorting out whether I am right to say that they do, as well as how this could be so. But in this paper I will take for granted that beliefs can wrong, and ask instead when beliefs wrong. My answer will be that beliefs wrong when they falsely diminish. This answer has (...) three parts: that beliefs wrong only when they are false, that beliefs wrong only when they diminish, and that false diminishment is sufficient for wronging. I will seek to elaborate on and defend all three of these claims, but it is the first to which I will give the most attention. (shrink)

Nietzsche scholars have developed an interest in his use of “thick” moral psychological concepts such as virtues and emotions. This development coincides with a renewed interest among both philosophers and social scientists in virtues, the emotions, and moral psychology more generally. Contemporary work in empirical moral psychology posits contempt and disgust as both basic emotions and moral foundations of normative codes. While virtues can be individuated in various ways, one attractive principle of individuation is to index them to characteristic emotions (...) and the patterns of behavior those emotions motivate. Despite the surge in attention to Nietzsche’s use of emotions, the literature has tended to lump all emotional states together. In this paper, I argue that what Nietzsche calls the pathos of distance is best understood as the virtue associated with both contempt and disgust. I conclude with a discussion of the bleak prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos. (shrink)

Batterman and Rice ([2014]) argue that minimal models possess explanatory power that cannot be captured by what they call ‘common features’ approaches to explanation. Minimal models are explanatory, according to Batterman and Rice, not in virtue of accurately representing relevant features, but in virtue of answering three questions that provide a ‘story about why large classes of features are irrelevant to the explanandum phenomenon’ ([2014], p. 356). In this article, I argue, first, that a method (the renormalization group) they propose (...) to answer the three questions cannot answer them, at least not by itself. Second, I argue that answers to the three questions are unnecessary to account for the explanatoriness of their minimal models. Finally, I argue that a common features account, what I call the ‘generalized ontic conception of explanation’, can capture the explanatoriness of minimal models. (shrink)

This chapter has two main goals: to update philosophers on the state of the art in the scientific psychology of intelligence, and to explain and evaluate challenges to the measurement invariance of intelligence tests. First, we provide a brief history of the scientific psychology of intelligence. Next, we discuss the metaphysics of intelligence in light of scientific studies in psychology and neuroimaging. Finally, we turn to recent skeptical developments related to measurement invariance. These have largely focused on attributability: Where do (...) the mechanisms and dispositions that explain people’s performance on tests of intelligence inhere – in the agent, in the local testing environment, in the culture, or in the interactions among these? After explaining what measurement invariance is in the context of intelligence testing, we explore the phenomenon of stereotype threat as a challenge to measurement invariance, as well as more recent work on overcoming or buffering against stereotype threat. (shrink)

Nietzsche promises to “translate man back into nature,” but it remains unclear what he meant by this and to what extent he succeeded at it. To help come to grips with Nietzsche’s conceptions of drive (Trieb), instinct (Instinkt) and virtue (Tugend and/or Keuschheit), I develop novel digital humanities methods to systematically track his use of these terms, constructing a near-comprehensive catalogue of what he takes these dispositions to be and how he thinks they are related. Nietzsche individuate drives and instincts (...) by the type of actions they motivate. One way in which the “translation” of man back into nature might succeed is through naturalistic explanation and reduction of moral notions such as virtue in terms of amoral, naturalistic notions, such as drives and instincts. I go on to show that this is indeed Nietzsche’s project: for him, a virtue is a well-calibrated drive. Such calibration relates both to the rest of the agent’s psychic economy (her other drives) and to her social context (what’s considered praiseworthy and blameworthy in her community). (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and explore what I shall call the Common Subject Problem for ethics. The problem is that there seems to be no good answer to what property everyone who makes moral claims could be talking and thinking about. The Common Subject Problem is not a new problem; on the contrary, I will argue that it is one of the central animating concerns in the history of both metaethics and normative theory. But despite its (...) importance, the Common Subject Problem is essentially invisible on many contemporary ways of carving up the problems of metaethics and normative ethical theory. My aim, therefore, is to make progress – in part by naming the problem, but also by beginning to sketch out the contours of what gives the problem its force, by distinguishing between different paths of response to the problem and assessing some of their chief merits, and finally, by distinguishing the Common Subject Problem from another problem with which it has come to be conflated. This nearby problem is the Moral Twin Earth Problem. Whereas the Common Subject Problem is a problem about what property ‘wrong’ could refer to, the Moral Twin Earth Problem is a problem about how ‘wrong’ could refer to it. The upshot of the paper, therefore, is to rescue one of the historically significant problems in normative ethics and metaethics – a problem that is essentially about normative semantics – from the illusion that has persisted over the last twenty years that it is really, somehow, a problem about metasemantics. Once we have reclaimed this problem, we can see that it could still be a problem even if there are no distinctively metasemantic problems in metaethics at all, that it is a problem faced by a wider variety of views, and that the space of possible solutions is much wider and more interesting for normative theory, moral psychology, and moral epistemology. (shrink)

In this set of excerpts from an earlier book, I examine some philosophical issues surrounding the whole-part relationship. I present a series of thought experiments and other arguments designed to undermine the view that wholes are "nothing but" their parts.

Mark Murphy has argued that the relationship between a creator and their creatures is not a special relationship that generates new moral obligations for the creator. Murphy’s position is grounded, in part, on his claim that there are no good arguments to the contrary and that the creator-creature relationship is not a relationship between equals. I argue that there are good reasons to think that a creator and creature being equals is not required for such an obligation. I offer (...) an argument for such an obligation based on the moral significance of thrusting upon sentient or rational beings significant, unsought, and wholly new circumstances. More specifically, I argue that it is reasonable to conclude that a creator enters into a duty-generating special relationship with their creatures to promote their creatures’ well-being, when the creator is the voluntary source of the creatures’ wholly new and unconsented to circumstances from which to flourish or languish and it would cost the creator virtually nothing to promote the creatures’ welfare. (shrink)

Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...) commitments. For example, Fitting Attitudes accounts play a central role both in T.M. Scanlon’s [1998] case against teleology, and in Michael Smith [2003], [unpublished] and Doug Portmore’s [2007] cases for it. And of course they have a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

According to the Book of Common Prayer, we have sinned against God “in thought, word, and deed.” In this paper I’ll explore one way of understanding what it might mean to sin against God in thought—the idea that we can at least potentially wrong God by what we believe. I will be interested in the philosophical tenability of this idea, and particularly in its potential consequences for the epistemology of religious belief and the problem of evil.

Research notes of Mark Pettinelli about cognitive science, cognitive psychology.

This collection of articles is almost all of the psychological writings of Mark Pettinelli.

This chapter puts to rest for all of eternity the self-undermining charge against conciliationism.

In a recent paper published in this journal, Giubilini, Douglas and Savulescu argue that we have given insufficient weight to the moral importance of fairness in our account of the best policies for non-medical exemptions to childhood immunization requirements. They advocate for a type of policy they call Contribution, according to which parents must contribute to important public health goods before their children can receive NMEs to immunization requirements. In this response, we argue that Giubilini, Douglas and Savulescu give insufficient (...) weight to the moral importance parental liberty in ways that count against their preferred type of NMEs policy and threaten public support for mandatory vaccination laws and public health initiatives generally. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of recent ‘hybrid’ approaches to metaethics, according to which moral sentences, in some sense or other, express both beliefs and desires. I try to show what kinds of theoretical issues come up at the different choice points we encounter in developing such a view, to raise some problems and explain where they come from, and to begin to get a sense for what the payoff of such views can be, and what they will need to (...) do in order to earn that payoff. (shrink)

One of the most important ongoing debates in the philosophy of mind is the debate over the reality of the first-person character of consciousness.[1] Philosophers on one side of this debate hold that some features of experience are accessible only from a first-person standpoint. Some members of this camp, notably Frank Jackson, have maintained that epiphenomenal properties play roles in consciousness [2]; others, notably John R. Searle, have rejected dualism and regarded mental phenomena as entirely biological.[3] In the opposite camp (...) are philosophers who hold that all mental capacities are in some sense computational - or, more broadly, explainable in terms of features of information processing systems.[4] Consistent with this explanatory agenda, members of this camp normally deny that any aspect of mind is accessible solely from a first-person standpoint. This denial sometimes goes very far - even as far as Dennett's claim that the phenomenology of conscious experience does not really exist. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the feasibility of a realistic interpretation of the quantum mechanical path integral - that is, an interpretation according to which the particle actually follows the paths that contribute to the integral. I argue that an interpretation of this sort requires spacetime to have a branching structure similar to the structures of the branching spacetimes proposed by previous authors. I point out one possible way to construct branching spacetimes of the required sort, and I ask whether (...) the resulting interpretation of quantum mechanics is empirically testable. (shrink)

Virtues are dispositions that make their bearers admirable. Dispositions can be studied scientifically by systematically varying whether their alleged bearers are in (or take themselves to be in) the dispositions' eliciting conditions. In recent decades, empirically-minded philosophers looked to social and personality psychology to study the extent to which ordinary humans embody dispositions traditionally considered admirable in the Aristotelian tradition. This led some to conclude that virtues are not attainable ideals, and that we should focus our ethical reflection and efforts (...) more on jerry-rigging our environments than on improving our characters. Most virtue ethicists resisted this reorientation. However, much of the scientific evidence on which the controversy was based has failed to replicate, raising the question of how much faith we should place in methodologically suspect studies. In this paper, I assess the state of the debate and recommend best practices for a renewed interdisciplinary investigation of virtues and vices in which philosophical expertise related to conceptualization and theorizing is essentially intertwined with scientific expertise related to operationalization, measurement, and statistics. (shrink)

It doesn’t seem possible to be a realist about the traditional Christian God while claiming to be able to reduce God talk in naturalistically acceptable terms. Reduction, in this case, seems obviously eliminativist. Many philosophers seem to think that the same is true of the normative—that reductive “realists” about the normative are not really realists about the normative at all, or at least, only in some attenuated sense. This paper takes on the challenge of articulating what it is that makes (...) reductive theological realism look hopeless, with the aim of explaining why we should think that the normative is relevantly different. Although it follows from my diagnosis that reductivists have their work cut out for them, I find nothing which suggests that the prospects for a successful reductive realism about the normative are in any way diminished—particularly for reductive views about reasons. Even reductivists, I argue, can at least aspire to a realism that is robust. (shrink)

This paper will examine the nature of mechanisms and the distinction between the relevant and irrelevant parts involved in a mechanism’s operation. I first consider Craver’s account of this distinction in his book on the nature of mechanisms, and explain some problems. I then offer a novel account of the distinction that appeals to some resources from Mackie’s theory of causation. I end by explaining how this account enables us to better understand what mechanisms are and their various features.

There are many different kinds of libertarianism. The first is right libertarianism, which received its most powerful expression in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), a book that still sets the baseline for discussions of libertarianism today. The second, I will call faux libertarianism. For reasons I will explain in this paper, most ‘man-on-the-street’ libertarians and most politicians who claim to be libertarians are actually this kind of libertarian. And third, there is left libertarianism, which is what I shall (...) spend most of this paper explicating. But I will not simply be surveying the views of those who identify as left libertarians and put this forth as if I were engaged in an exegetical exercise. Instead, what I shall set forth is a kind of manifesto, a statement of why I consider myself a left libertarian, one that takes this approach to political morality well beyond where it was left around the end of the last century by the previous generation of left libertarians. My hope is to provide those who find certain left libertarian ideas attractive a guide by which they can explain and harmonise their own views, recognise left libertarianism as a distinct comprehensive political doctrine, and feel more open to identify themselves as left libertarian too. (shrink)

Intentions matter. They have some kind of normative impact on our agency. Something goes wrong when an agent intends some end and fails to carry out the means she believes to be necessary for it, and something goes right when, intending the end, she adopts the means she thinks are required. This has even been claimed to be one of the only uncontroversial truths in ethical theory. But not only is there widespread disagreement about why this is so, there is (...) widespread disagreement about in what sense it is so. In this paper I explore an underdeveloped answer to the question of in what sense it is so, and argue that resolving an apparent difficulty with this view leads to an attractive picture about why it is so. (shrink)