In this paper, we explore how a conversational theory of moral responsibility can provide illuminating resources for building a theory about the nature and norms of moral forgiveness.

The philosophical debate about free will and responsibility has been of great importance throughout the history of philosophy. In modern times this debate has received an enormous resurgence of interest and the contribution in 1962 by P.F. Strawson with the publication of his essay "Freedom and Resentment" has generated a wide range of discussion and criticism in the philosophical community and beyond. The debate is of central importance to recent developments in the free will literature and has shaped the way (...) contemporary philosophers now approach the problem. This volume brings together a focused selection of the major contributions and reactions to the free will and responsibility debate inspired by Strawson's contribution. McKenna and Russell also provide a comprehensive overview of the debate. (shrink)

In this review I present the main claims of McKenna's book Conversation and Responsibility. There McKenna develops a theory of moral responsibility inspired by an analogy with the relationship people bear to each other as part of a conversational exchange. The first half of the book develops the conversational account and considers objections to it. In the second half of the book, McKenna turns to an examination of the kind of normative claim being made when we say (...) that being morally responsible is to be understood in terms of appropriately holding someone morally responsible. I discuss the main themes of the book, how McKenna advances the literature on moral responsibility, and some challenges/limits of the view. (shrink)

Contextualism is the view that knowledge ascriptions – utterances of sentences containing the word “knows” - express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. But what features of context determine the propositions expressed by knowledge ascriptions? According to a version of contextualism I call conversational contextualism, the conversational dynamics or kinematics determine the propositions expressed by knowledge ascriptions. In this paper I argue that the most sophisticated version of conversational contextualism, which is the view defended by Michael Blome-Tillmann (2009; (...) 2014), faces serious problems. My (very) tentative conclusion will be that conversational contextualism should be abandoned because of these problems. (shrink)

Michael McKenna’s Conversation and Responsibility is an ambitious and impressive statement of a new theory of moral responsibility. McKenna’s approach builds upon the strategy advanced in P.F. Strawson’s enormously influential “Freedom and Resentment” (which was published in 1962). The account advanced aims to provide Strawson’s theory with the sort of detail that is required to fill significant gaps and respond to a wide range of criticisms and objections that have been directed against it. ....Conversation and Responsibility belongs (...) on the top shelf of any set of readings devoted to the contemporary discussion of moral responsibility. All readers, whatever their philosophical orientation may be, will find it both challenging and rewarding. Whether in the end one endorses the conversational model or not, there can be no doubt that this is a contribution that significantly advances our overall understanding of these important and complex matters. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen's Direct Argument (DA) purports to establish the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility, without appealing to the notion of avoidability, a notion on whose analysis compatibilists and incompatibilists disagree. Van Inwagen intended DA to refute compatibilism, or at least to shift the burden of proof onto the compatibilist. In this paper, we offer a critical assessment of DA. We examine a variety of objections to DA due to John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Ishtiyaque Haji, Seth Shabo, (...) class='Hi'>Michael McKenna, and David Widerker. We divide these objections into those based on dialectical considerations (section 1), and objections in the form of counterexamples to a central principle which the Direct Argument employs (sec 2). The conclusion we reach is that the proponent of DA can deal plausibly with these objections, thus establishing DA as a powerful argument in favor of incompatibilism. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a challenge for Michael McKenna’s conversational theory of moral responsibility. On his view, to be a responsible agent is to be able to engage in a type of moral conversation. I argue that individuals with autism spectrum disorder present a considerable problem for the conversational theory because empirical evidence on the disorder seems to suggest that there are individuals in the world who meet all of the conditions for responsible agency that the theory (...) lays out but who are nevertheless not responsible agents. Attending to the moral psychology of such individuals will, I think, help shed light on an important gap in the conversational theory. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen's Direct Argument (DA) for incompatibilism purports to establish incompatibilism with respect to moral responsibility and determinism without appealing to assumptions that compatibilists usually consider controversial. Recently, Michael McKenna has presented a novel critique of DA. McKenna's critique raises important issues about philosophical dialectics. In this article, we address those issues and contend that his argument does not succeed.

Epistemic contextualism—the view that the content of the predicate ‘know’ can change with the context of utterance—has fallen into considerable disrepute recently. Many theorists have raised doubts as to whether ‘know’ is context-sensitive, typically basing their arguments on data suggesting that ‘know’ behaves semantically and syntactically in a way quite different from recognised indexicals such as ‘I’ and ‘here’ or ‘flat’ and ‘empty’. This paper takes a closer look at three pertinent objections of this kind, viz. at what I call (...) the Error-Theory Objection, the Gradability Objection and the Clarification-Technique Objection. The paper concludes that none of these objections can provide decisive evidence against contextualism. (shrink)

Should we regret the fact that we are often more emotionally resilient in response to the deaths of our loved ones than we might expect -- that the suffering associated with grief often dissipates more quickly and more fully than we anticipate? Dan Moller ("Love and Death") argues that we should, because this resilience epistemically severs us from our loved ones and thereby "deprives us of insight into our own condition." I argue that Moller's conclusion is correct despite resting on (...) a mistaken picture of the nature and significance of grief. Unlike Moller, I contend that grief is a composite emotional process, rather than a single mental state; that grief is a species of emotional attention rather than perception; and that grief is a form of activity directed at placing our relationships with the deceased on new terms. It is precisely because grief has these three features that it facilitates the scrutiny of our practical identities and thus fosters self-knowledge and self-understanding. (shrink)

We identify several ongoing debates related to implicit measures, surveying prominent views and considerations in each debate. First, we summarize the debate regarding whether performance on implicit measures is explained by conscious or unconscious representations. Second, we discuss the cognitive structure of the operative constructs: are they associatively or propositionally structured? Third, we review debates whether performance on implicit measures reflects traits or states. Fourth, we discuss the question of whether a person’s performance on an implicit measure reflects characteristics of (...) the person who is taking the test or characteristics of the situation in which the person is taking the test. Finally, we survey the debate about the relationship between implicit measures and (other kinds of) behavior. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have proposed a variety of accounts of the nature of harm. In this paper, I consider several of these accounts and argue that they are unsuccessful. I then make a modest case for a different view.

This paper is about the so-called meta-grounding question, i.e. the question of what grounds grounding facts of the sort ‘φ is grounded in Γ ’. An answer to this question is pressing since some plausible assumptions about grounding and fundamentality entail that grounding facts must be grounded. There are three different accounts on the market which each answer the meta-grounding question differently: Bennett’s and deRosset’s “Straight Forward Account” (SFA), Litland’s “Zero-Grounding Account” (ZGA), and “Grounding Essentialism” (GE). I argue that if (...) grounding is to be regarded as metaphysical explanation (i.e. if unionism is true), (GE) is to be preferred over (ZGA) and (SFA) as only (GE) is compatible with a crucial consequence of the thought that grounding is metaphysical explanation. In this manner the paper contributes not only to discussions about the ground of ground but also to the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between ground, essence, and explanation. (shrink)

This paper asks whether there is a moral virtue of hope, and if so, what it is. The enterprise is motivated by a historical asymmetry, namely that while Christian thinkers have long classed hope as a theological virtue, it has not traditionally been classed as a moral one. But this is puzzling, for hoping well is not confined to the sphere of religion; and consequently we might expect that if the theological virtue is structurally sound, there will be a secular, (...) moral analogue. This paper proposes that there is such an analogue, and that it is closely linked to the everyday notion of “having your priorities straight,” a phenomenon which is naturally understood in terms of the attitude of hope. It turns out that the priorities model provides an abstract way of characterizing a central but underexplored virtue, one which can be developed in secular or theological ways. (shrink)

The social world contains institutions, groups, objects, and more. This essay explores a puzzle about the essences of social items. There is widespread consensus against social essences because of problematic presuppositions often made about them. But it is argued that essence can be freed from these presuppositions and their problems. Even so, a puzzle still arises. In a Platonic spirit, essences in general seem detached from the world. In an Aristotelian spirit, social essences in particular seem embedded in the world. (...) The puzzle is that these inclinations are individually plausible but jointly incompatible. The essay has four aims: to clarify and refine the puzzle; to explore the puzzle's implications for essence in general and for social essences in particular; to illustrate the fruitfulness of the general distinction between detached and embedded; and to develop this distinction to sketch a novel solution to the puzzle. (shrink)

John Bell proposed an ontology for the GRW modification of quantum mechanics in terms of flashes occurring at space- time points. This article spells out the motivation for this ontology, inquires into the status of the wave function in it, critically examines the claim of its being Lorentz invariant, and considers whether it is a parsimonious but nevertheless physically adequate ontology.

Evaluative claims and assumptions are ubiquitous in positive psychology. Some will deny this. But such disavowals are belied by the literature. Some will consider the presence of evaluative claims a problem and hope to root them out. But this is a mistake. If positive psychology is to live up to its raison d’être – to be the scientific study of the psychological components of human flourishing or well-being – it must make evaluative claims. Well-being consists in those things that are (...) good for us, that make life go well. Thus, one cannot investigate this topic without making claims about what is good for people and what they have reason to do. It’s time, therefore, to embrace the fact that positive psychology is value-laden. Doing so would benefit the field by allowing for more rigorous theorizing, and – perhaps counterintuitively – increasing the field’s objectivity. (shrink)

The essay argues that while there is no general agreement on whether moral realism is true, there is general agreement on at least some of the moral obligations that we have if moral realism is true. Given that moral realism might be true, and given that we know some of the things we ought to do if it is true, we have a reason to do those things. Furthermore, this reason is itself an objective moral reason. Thus, if moral realism (...) might be true, then it is true. (shrink)

Solidarity is a widespread but under-explored phenomenon. In this paper, I give a philosophical account of solidarity, answering three salient questions: What motivates acts of solidarity? What unifies different acts into tokens of a single type of act, one of solidarity? And what values do acts of solidarity exhibit? The answer to all three, I argue, involves a certain way of relating to others: identifying with them on the basis of shared features, and identifying with the larger group that one (...) and the others both belong to. (shrink)

Editors' introduction to 3rd thematic issue on philosophy of medicine.

The main question addressed in this paper is whether some false sentences can constitute evidence for the truth of other propositions. In this paper it is argued that there are good reasons to suspect that at least some false propositions can constitute evidence for the truth of certain other contingent propositions. The paper also introduces a novel condition concerning propositions that constitute evidence that explains a ubiquitous evidential practice and it contains a defense of a particular condition concerning the possession (...) of evidence. The core position adopted here then is that false propositions that are approximately true reports of measurements can constitute evidence for the truth of other propositions. So, it will be argued that evidence is only quasi-factive in this very specific sense. (shrink)

It is hard to see why the head and other brain-containing parts of a person are not themselves persons, or at least thinking, conscious beings. Some theorists have sought to reconcile us to the existence of thinking person-parts. Others have sought to avoid them but have relied on radical theories at odds with the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. This paper offers a novel, conservative solution, one on which the heads and other brain-containing parts of persons do exist (...) but are neither persons, thinkers, nor conscious beings. A much briefer statement of the solution is found in section 5 of Burke 2004. (shrink)

If updating with E has the same result across all epistemically possible worlds, then the agent has no uncertainty as to the behavior of the update, and we may call it a transparent update. If an agent is uncertain about the behavior of an update, we may call it opaque. In order to model the uncertainty an agent has about the result of an update, the same update must behave differently across different possible worlds. In this paper, I study opaque (...) updates using a simple system of dynamic epistemic logic suitably modified for that purpose. The paper highlights the connection between opaque updates and the dynamic-epistemic principles Perfect-Recall and No-Miracles. I argue that opaque updates are central to contemporary discussions in epistemology, in particular to externalist theories of knowledge and to the related problem of epistemic bootstrapping, or easy knowledge. Opaque updates allow us to explicitly investigate a dynamic form of uncertainty, using simple and precise logical tools. (shrink)

Most advanced industrial societies are ‘work-centered,’ according high value and prestige to work. Indeed, belief in an interpersonal moral duty to work is encoded in both popular attitudes toward work and in policies such as ‘workfare’. Here I argue that despite the intuitive appeal of reciprocity or fair play as the moral basis for a duty to work, the vast majority of individuals in advanced industrialized societies have no such duty to work. For current economic conditions, labor markets, and government (...) policies entail that the conditions for a reciprocity-based argument to apply to most workers are not usually met. More specifically, many workers fail to provide valuable goods through working or their working does not result in net social benefit. Concurrently, many workers do not receive adequate benefits from working in that they neither have their basic needs met or do not even enjoy an improvement in welfare thanks to working. Hence, workers neither provide nor receive the benefits needed for a reciprocity-based duty to work to apply to them. Furthermore, these conditions are conditions over which workers themselves have very little control. Most workers therefore could not fulfill their ostensible duty to work even if they made conscientious efforts to do so. In most cases, a person who fails to work morally wrongs no one, and in the case of any particular individual or worker, the defeasible presumption ought to be that she has no duty to work. (shrink)

The Growing Block Theory of time says that the metaphysical openness of the future should be understood in terms of there not being any future objects or events. But in a series of works, Ross Cameron, Elizabeth Barnes, and Robbie Williams have developed a competing view that understands metaphysical openness in terms of it being indeterminate whether there exist future objects or events. I argue that the three reasons they give for preferring their account are not compelling. And since the (...) notion of “indeterminate existence” suffers conceptual problems, the Growing Block is the preferable view. (shrink)

Passion is a hidden issue behind or at the heart of, contemporary theoretical debates about nationalism, identity politics and religious fundamentalism. It is not that reason and passion cannot be conceptually distinguished. They are, however, always entangled in practice - and this entanglement itself requires a conceptual account. So it is my ambition to blur the line between reason and passion: to rationalize (some of) the passions and to impassion reason. Passionate intensity has a legitimate place in the social world. (...) This extension of rational legitimacy to the political passions seems to me a useful revision of liberal theory which has been too pre-occupied in recent years with the construction of dispassionate deliberative procedures. It opens the way for better accounts of social connection and conflict and for more explicit and self-conscious answers to the unavoidable political questions: which side are you on? Key Words: conviction • interest • liberalism • passion • politics • Yeats. (shrink)

In his article “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual, conscious reasoning system more than our automatic, emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral (...) problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene’s argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling, and thus should be abandoned. (shrink)

How can people function appropriately and respond normatively in social contexts even if they are not aware of rules governing these contexts? John Searle has rightly criticized a popular way out of this problem by simply asserting that they follow them unconsciously. His alternative explanation is based on his notion of a preintentional, nonrepresentational background. In this paper I criticize this explanation and the underlying account of the background and suggest an alternative explanation of the normativity of elementary social practices (...) and of the background itself. I propose to think of the background as being intentional, but nonconceptual, and of the basic normativity or proto-normativity as being instituted through common sensory-motor-emotional schemata established in the joint interactions of groups. The paper concludes with some reflections on what role this level of collective intentionality and the notion of the background can play in a layered account of the social mind and the ontology of the social world. (shrink)

When future historians chronicle the twentieth century, they will see phenomenology as one of the preeminent social and ethical philosophies of its age. The phenomenological movement not only produced systematic reflection on common moral concerns such as distinguishing right from wrong and explaining the status of values; it also called on philosophy to renew European societies facing crisis, an aim that inspired thinkers in interwar Europe as well as later communist bloc dissidents. Despite this legacy, phenomenology continues to be largely (...) discounted as esoteric and solipsistic, the last gasp of a Cartesian dream to base knowledge on the isolated rational mind. Intellectual histories tend to cite Husserl's epistemological influence on philosophies like existentialism and deconstruction without considering his social or ethical imprint. And while a few recent scholars have begun to note phenomenology's wider ethical resonance, especially in French social thought, its image as stubbornly academic continues to hold sway. _The Far Reaches_ challenges that image by tracing the first history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe, from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patocka, Karol Wojtyla, and Václav Havel. (shrink)

While evil has always fascinated philosophers, it is only in modern times that the existence of evil has been seen as a serious challenge to belief in the existence of a powerful and benevolent God. In order to demonstrate this, the following chapter traces the historical emergence of what philosophers today call “the problem of evil” through an analysis of the writings of Plato, Epicurus, Sextus Empiricus, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Descartes, Bayle, and Hume.

Jaegwon Kim’s influential exclusion argument attempts to demonstrate the inconsistency of nonreductive materialism in the philosophy of mind. Kim’s argument begins by showing that the three main theses of nonreductive materialism, plus two additional considerations, lead to a specific and familiar picture of mental causation. The exclusion argument can succeed only if, as Kim claims, this picture is not one of genuine causal overdetermination. Accordingly, one can resist Kim’s conclusion by denying this claim, maintaining instead that the effects of the (...) mental are always causally overdetermined. I call this strategy the ‘ overdetermination challenge’. One of the main aims of this paper is to show that the overdetermination challenge is the most appropriate response to Kim’s exclusion argument, at least in its latest form. I argue that Kim fails to adequately respond to the overdetermination challenge, thus failing to prevent his opponents from reasonably maintaining that the effects of the mental are always causally overdetermined. Interestingly, this discussion reveals a curious dialectical feature of Kim’s latest response to the overdetermination challenge: if it succeeds, then a new, simpler and more compact version of the exclusion argument is available. While I argue against the consequent of this conditional, thereby also rejecting the antecedent, this dialectical feature should be of interest to philosophers on either side of this debate. (shrink)

I argue that taxation for redistributive purposes is a property rights violation, responding to arguments (due to Nagel, Murphy, Sunstein, and Holmes) claiming that individuals lack ownership of their pretax incomes.

Empirical evidence from developmental psychology and anthropology points out that the human mind is predisposed to conceptualize the world in particular, species-specific ways. These cognitive predispositions lead to universal human commonsense views, often referred to as folk theories. Nevertheless, humans can transgress these views – i.e. they can contradict them with alternative descriptions, they perceive as more accurate – as exemplified in modern sciences. In this paper, I enquire about the cognitive faculties underlying such transgressions. I claim that there are (...) three faculties enabling us to part with these universal commonsense views of the world imposed by our nature. The first is our ability to represent representations – i.e. to form metarepresentations. The second is our ability to produce alternative representations both by explaining a familiar subject matter in terms of the principles governing different conceptual domains than the one that we are predisposed to apply to the subject matter and by directing our mind to new subject matters (for which we have no predisposed conceptual grasp), understanding them in terms of familiar domains. The third, finally, is our ability to give these representations an epistemic orientation. Key words: Human cognition, Domain-specific knowledge systems, Cognitive predispositions, Folk theories, Cognitive flexibility, Human – nonhuman distinction. (shrink)

I defend my pure social account of global autonomy from Steven Weimer's recent criticisms. In particular, I argue that it does not implicitly rely upon the very kind of nonsocial conception of autonomy that it hopes to replace.

Nick Trakakis and Yujin Nagasawa criticise the argument in Almeida and Oppy . According to Trakakis and Nagasawa, we are mistaken in our claim that the sceptical theist response to evidential arguments from evil is unacceptable because it would undermine ordinary moral reasoning. In their view, there is no good reason to think that sceptical theism leads to an objectionable form of moral scepticism. We disagree. In this paper, we explain why we think that the argument of Nagasawa and Trakakis (...) fails to overthrow our objection to sceptical theism. (shrink)

Foundations of Relational Realism presents an intuitive interpretation of quantum mechanics, based on a revised decoherent histories interpretation, structured within a category theoretic topological formalism. -/- If there is a central conceptual framework that has reliably borne the weight of modern physics as it ascends into the twenty-first century, it is the framework of quantum mechanics. Because of its enduring stability in experimental application, physics has today reached heights that not only inspire wonder, but arguably exceed the limits of intuitive (...) vision, if not intuitive comprehension. For many physicists and philosophers, however, the currently fashionable tendency toward exotic interpretation of the theoretical formalism is recognized not as a mark of ascent for the tower of physics, but rather an indicator of sway—one that must be dampened rather than encouraged if practical progress is to continue. -/- In this unique two-part volume, designed to be comprehensible to both specialists and non-specialists, the authors chart out a pathway forward by identifying the central deficiency in most interpretations of quantum mechanics: That in its conventional, metrical depiction of extension, inherited from the Enlightenment, objects are characterized as fundamental to relations—i.e., such that relations presuppose objects but objects do not presuppose relations. The authors, by contrast, argue that quantum mechanics exemplifies the fact that physical extensiveness is fundamentally topological rather than metrical, with its proper logico-mathematical framework being category theoretic rather than set theoretic. -/- By this thesis, extensiveness fundamentally entails not only relations of objects, but also relations of relations. Thus, the fundamental quanta of quantum physics are properly defined as units of logico-physical relation rather than merely units of physical relata as is the current convention. Objects are always understood as relata, and likewise relations are always understood objectively. In this way, objects and relations are coherently defined as mutually implicative. The conventional notion of a history as “a story about fundamental objects” is thereby reversed, such that the classical “objects” become the story by which we understand physical systems that are fundamentally histories of quantum events. -/- These are just a few of the novel critical claims explored in this volume—claims whose exemplification in quantum mechanics will, the authors argue, serve more broadly as foundational principles for the philosophy of nature as it evolves through the twenty-first century and beyond. (shrink)

This chapter explores an unappreciated psychological dimension of intellectual humility. In particular, I argue there is a plausible connection between intellectual humility and epistemic egocentrism. Epistemic egocentrism is a well-known cognitive bias – often called ‘the curse of knowledge’ – whereby an agent attributes his or her own mental states to other people. I hypothesize that an individual who exhibits this bias is more likely to possess a variety of traits that are characteristic of intellectual humility. This is surprising because (...) intellectual humility is often regarded as an antidote to cognitive biases, whereas I claim that a particular cognitive bias (namely, the curse of knowledge) may help foster an intellectual virtue. (shrink)

Social epistemology is autonomous: When applied to the same evidential situations, the principles of social rationality and the principles of individual rationality sometimes recommend inconsistent beliefs. If we stipulate that reasoning rationally from justified beliefs to a true belief is normally sufficient for knowledge, the autonomy thesis implies that some knowledge is essentially social. When the principles of social and individual rationality are applied to justified evidence and recommend inconsistent beliefs and the belief endorsed by social rationality is true, then (...) that true belief would be an instance of social knowledge but not individual knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a novel approach to investigating the nature of well-being and a new theory about wellbeing. The approach is integrative and naturalistic. It holds that a theory of well-being should account for two different classes of evidence—our commonsense judgments about well-being and the science of well-being (i.e., positive psychology). The network theory holds that a person is in the state of well-being if she instantiates a homeostatically clustered network of feelings, emotions, attitudes, behaviors, traits, and interactions (...) with the world that tends to have a relatively high number of states that feel good, that lead to states that feel good, or that are valued by the agent or her culture. (shrink)

The paper proposes a new interpretation of Timon's attack on Arcesilaus in fr. 806 SH.

Utilitarians are supposed to have difficulty accounting for our obligation to keep promises. But utilitarians also face difficulties concerning our obligation to make promises. Consider any situation in which the options available to me are acts A, B, C… n, and A is utility maximizing. Call A+ the course of action consisting of A plus my promising to perform A. Since there appear to be a wide range of instances in which A+ has greater net utility then A, utilitarianism obligates (...) us to make far more promises than even the most expansive views concerning our obligations to make promises would acknowledge. (shrink)

A common way of testing the inner sense theory of introspection exploits the possibility of damage to inner sense. Such damage is expected to lead to first-personal deficits/impairments of one kind or another. I raise various problems for this way of testing the theory. The main difficulty, I argue, stems from the existence of the method subserving confabulation.

In "Evil and the Justice of God", N.T. Wright presses the point that attempting to solve the philosophical problem of evil is an immature response to the existence of evil--a response that belittles the real problem of evil, which is just the fact that evil is bad and needs to be dealt with. As you might expect, I am not inclined to endorse this sort of sweeping indictment of the entire field of research on the philosophical problem of evil. (I (...) sort of doubt that Wright really meant to either.) But I do think that there is a kernel of truth in what I take to be Wright's fundamental objection to attempts to solve the philosophical problem of evil. In the first section of what follows, I will try briefly to explain why. I will then go on to argue that, despite this fact, certain efforts at solving the problem of evil avoid Wright's objection. Indeed, drawing on recent work by Elenore Stump, I will argue that one perfectly legitimate way to try to solve the philosophical problem of evil is to follow precisely what seems to be the main piece of advice in "Evil and the Justice of God": namely, to look more seriously than we have at the attitudes taken toward evil by human authors of and characters in the Bible, and to attend more carefully to what the Bible says about how God deals with evil. (shrink)

Considering the importance of possible-world semantics for modal logic and for current debates in the philosophy of modality, a phenomenologist may want to ask whether it makes sense to speak of “possible worlds” in phenomenology. The answer will depend on how "possible worlds" are to be interpreted. As that latter question is the subject of the debate about possibilism and actualism in contemporary modal metaphysics, my aim in this paper is to get a better grip on the former question by (...) exploring a Husserlian stance towards this debate. I will argue that the phenomenologist’s way to deal with the problem of intentional reference to mere possibilia is analogous to the actualist’s idea of how “possible worlds” are to be interpreted. Nevertheless, I will be pointing to a decisive difference in the metaphilosophical preconditions of what I call "phenomenological actualism" and analytical versions of actualism. (shrink)

In this chapter, I develop a pragmatic defense of critical patriotism, one that recognizes the many personal and social benefits of patriotic sentiment yet which is also infused with a passion for justice. Though the argument is pragmatic given the ubiquity of patriotic sentiment, I argue that critical patriotism is able to reconcile a love of one’s country with an ardent determination to reform and improve it.

This paper argues for incoherence in Nicholas of Cusa’s account of the hypostatic union in Christ, in light of his elevation of human nature to (nearly) divine status. It claims that this elevation destabilizes the individual’s place in the cosmos, and that Cusa extends ignorance too far. By seeking to avoid one paradox—the epistemological paradox of knowing objects whose being is derived from a fundamentally unknowable God—he creates another, elevating human nature beyond reasonable limits and destroying any possibility for a (...) coherent account of personal sin and individual redemption. (shrink)

Distributive Justice Theories of distributive justice seek to specify what is meant by a just distribution of goods among members of society. All liberal theories (in the sense specified below) may be seen as expressions of laissez-faire with compensations for factors that they consider to be morally arbitrary. More specifically, such theories may be interpreted […].

_ Source: _Volume 95, Issue 3, pp 368 - 413 Frege famously maintained that concepts are not objects. A key argument of Frege’s for this view is, in outline, as follows: if we are to account for the unity of thought, concepts must be deemed _unsaturated_; since objects are, by contrast, saturated entities, concepts cannot be objects. The author investigates what can be made of this argument and, in particular, of the unsaturated/saturated distinction it invokes. Systematically exploring a range of (...) reconstructions suggested by Frege’s writings, and drawing on contemporary work, the author illustrates that no plausible reconstruction is forthcoming. In essence, it is altogether unclear how to simultaneously substantiate, on the one hand, the claim that unsaturated entities must be recognized in order to account for unity and, on the other, the claim that unsaturatedness is incompatible with objecthood. (shrink)

When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.