Many consequentialists argue that you ought to do your part in collective action problems like climate change mitigation and ending factory farming because (i) all such problems are triggering cases, in which there is a threshold number of people such that the outcome will be worse if at least that many people act in a given way than if fewer do, and (ii) doing your part in a triggering case maximises expected value. I show that both (i) and (ii) are (...) false: Some triggering cases cannot be solved by appeal to expected value, since they involve infinities, and some collective action problems are not triggering cases, since they involve parity. However, I argue that consequentialism can still generally prohibit failure to do your part in those collective action problems where we believe that so acting would be impermissible. (shrink)

A “fallacy” is something like the sense-datum fallacy, involving a logically invalid argument. A “conflation” is something like Block's conflation of the (alleged) raw feel of an experience with what it is like to have the experience. Trivially, a self is conscious of something only if it accesses it. Substantive issues concern the nature of the conscious self and the nature of access.

Standard objections to dualism focus on problems of individuation: what, in the absence of matter, serves to diversify immaterial items? and interaction: how can material and immaterial elements causally affect one another? Given certain ways of conceiving mental phenomena and causation, it is not obvious that one cannot reply to these objections. However, a different kind of difficulty comes into view when one considers the question of the origin of the mental. Here attention is directed upon the case of intentionality. (...) It might seem that the transition between non-intentional and intentional phenomena could be dealt with by adopting a version of Dennett's discharging strategy, but this is argued against. Several responses to the origination problem are identified, including a creationist one. (shrink)

The Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility is so christened because this argument allegedly circumvents any appeal to the principle of alternate possibilities – a person is morally responsible for doing something only if he could have avoided doing it – to secure incompatibilism. In this paper, I first summarize Peter van Inwagen’s version of the Direct Argument. I then comment on David Widerker’s recent responses to the argument. Finally, I cast doubt on the argument by (...) constructing counterexamples to a rule of inference it invokes. (shrink)

Famed so-called 'Frankfurt-type examples' have been invoked to cast doubt on the principle that a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise. Many who disagree that the examples are successful in this respect argue that these examples succumb to a deadly dilemma. I uncover and assess libertarian assumptions upon which the 'dilemma objection' is based. On exposing these assumptions, it becomes clear that various sorts of libertarian are no longer entitled to (...) one or the other horns of the dilemma. (shrink)

Key elements of Randolph Clarke's libertarian account of freedom that requires both agent-causation and non-deterministic event-causation in the production of free action is assessed with an eye toward determining whether agent-causal accounts can accommodate the truth of judgments of moral obligation.

Richard Rorty was an analytic philosopher, in the sense that his work is an important moment in the historical development that began with Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna circle; continued through Quine, Sellars, and Davidson. In his "Intellectual Autobiography" Rorty notes that his work depended particularly that of Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, and Brandom, who in turn required an understanding of the analytic philosophers they reacted against: Russell, Carnap, and Ayer. According to Rorty, twentieth‐century philosophy that emphasized rigor and scientificity accepted (...) this modern view of philosophy. This included phenomenology as practiced by Husserl and, especially, analytic philosophy. Rorty's clearest and most detailed presentation of his metaphilosophy, the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism. Rorty's response to both lines of realist criticism is that pragmatism does not hold any theory of truth and instead maintains that there is no useful purpose served by constructing such theories – as two millennia of philosophy amply illustrate. (shrink)

It has recently been proposed that the framework of semantic relativism be put to use to describe mental content, as deployed in some of the fundamental operations of the mind. This programme has inspired in particular a novel strategy of accounting for the essential egocentricity of first-personal or de se thoughts in relativist terms, with the advantage of dispensing with a notion of self-representation. This paper is a critical discussion of this strategy. While it is based on a plausible appeal (...) to cognitive economy, the relativist theory does not fully account for the epistemic profile that distinguishes de se thinking, as some of its proponents hope to do. A deeper worry concerns the reliance of the theory on a primitive notion of “centre” that hasn’t yet received enough critical attention, and is ambiguous between a thin and a rich reading. I argue that while the rich reading is required if the relativist analysis of the de se is to achieve its most ambitious aims, it also deprives the theory of much of its explanatory power. (shrink)