Many philosophers accept a response constraint on normative reasons: that p is a reason for you to φ only if you are able to φ for the reason that p. This constraint offers a natural way to cash out the familiar and intuitive thought that reasons must be able to guide us, and has been put to work as a premise in a range of influential arguments in ethics and epistemology. However, the constraint requires interpretation and faces putative counter-examples due (...) to Julia Markovits, Mark Schroeder, and others. This paper develops and motivates an interpretation of the response constraint that avoids the putative counter-examples. (shrink)

A number of philosophical projects require a proper understanding of the modal aspects of agency, or of what I call ‘the agentive modalities.’ I propose a general account of the agentive modalities, one which takes as its primitive the decision-theoretic notion of an option. I relate this account to the standard semantics for ‘can’ and to the viability of some positions in the free will debates.

Perspectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by your perspective, that is, your epistemic position. Objectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by the facts irrespective of your perspective. This paper explores an influential argument for perspectivism which appeals to the thought that the normative is action guiding. The crucial premise of the argument is that you ought to φ only if you are able to φ for the reasons which determine that you ought (...) to φ. We show that this premise can be understood in different ways. On one reading, it provides no support for perspectivism. On another reading, the premise lacks support. So, the argument fails. An important upshot of the paper is that the objectivist can embrace the thought about guidance. (shrink)

Decision-making capacity (DMC) plays an important role in clinical practice—determining, on the basis of a patient’s decisional abilities, whether they are entitled to make their own medical decisions or whether a surrogate must be secured to participate in decisions on their behalf. As a result, it’s critical that we get things right—that our conceptual framework be well-suited to the task of helping practitioners systematically sort through the relevant ethical considerations in a way that reliably and transparently delivers correct verdicts about (...) who should and should not have the authority to make their own medical decisions. Unfortunately, however, the standard approach to DMC does not get things right. It is of virtually no help in identifying and clarifying the relevant ethical considerations. And, embedded in the prevailing anti-paternalist paradigm, DMC assessments obfuscate and distort the underlying ethical justification for granting or withholding decisional authority. Here, we describe the core commitments of the standard approach to DMC and then highlight three problems with it. We then argue that these problems are significant enough that they call for more than merely tinkering and fine tuning—variations of the standard approach cannot adequately address them. Instead, we should ditch DMC. (shrink)

Is knowledge-how, or “practical” knowledge, a species of knowledge-that, or “theoretical” knowledge? There is no comfortable position to take in the debate around this question. On the one hand, there are counterexamples against the anti-intellectualist thesis that practical knowledge is best analysed as an ability. They show that having an ability to ϕ is not necessary for knowing how to ϕ. On the other hand, the intellectualist analysis of practical knowledge as a subspecies of theoretical knowledge is threatened by its (...) own set of counterexamples, which convincingly establish that practical knowledge lacks many of the typical characteristics of theoretical knowledge. Most strikingly it does not even appear to require a belief. In this paper, I develop an account of practical knowledge that avoids these counterexamples. It also manages to preserve both the status of such knowledge as a cognitive achievement and its apparently close conceptual relation to abilities. I start with the counterexamples against the necessity of abilities for practical knowledge and show that they fail because they underestimate the cognitive demands of attempts. I then make use of the logic of dispositions to bridge the gap that counterexamples against the necessity of abilities for practical knowledge open. It is argued that, instead of the ability to ϕ, it is a specific disposition to have the ability to ϕ that constitutes practical knowledge about ϕ. The resulting theory is an anti-intellectualist position that preserves essential intellectualist motivations and thus should be satisfactory for proponents of both views. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are different ways that an agent may be able to do otherwise and that therefore, when free will is understood as requiring that an agent be able to do otherwise, we face the following question: which way of being able to do otherwise is most relevant to free will? I answer this question by first discussing the nature of intrinsic dispositions and abilities, arguing that for each action type there is a spectrum of (...) intrinsic abilities. I suggest that recognising this allows us to articulate two ways in which an intrinsic ability is general (such that there are two kinds of non-general ability). And I argue that the abilities most relevant to free will need to be non-general in both of the ways identified. Along the way I show why these points threaten to undermine Vihvelin’s dispositionalist account of free will. (shrink)

This compilation of references includes all references for the knowledge-how chapters included in Bengson & Moffett's edited volume. The volume and the compilation of references may serve as a good starting point for people who are unfamiliar with the philosophical literature on knowledge-how.

Mental acts are conspicuously absent from philosophical debates over the nature of action. A typical protagonist of a typical scenario is far more likely to raise her arm or open the window than she is to perform a calculation in her head or talk to herself silently. One possible explanation for this omission is that the standard ‘causalist’ account of action, on which acts are analyzed in terms of mental states causing bodily movements, faces difficulties in accommodating some paradigmatic cases (...) of mental action – or so I argue. After drawing out these objections to causalism, I outline a more promising approach. Building on previous work, I show how the approach I favour, on which the attempt to analyze action is dispensed with, provides a unified account of both mental and physical action. (shrink)

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to (...) belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. (shrink)

Talents often play a significant role in our personal and social lives. For example, our talents may shape the choices we make and the goods that we value, making them central to the creation of a meaningful life. Differences in the level of talents also affect how social institutions are structured, and how social goods and resources are distributed. Despite their normative importance, it is surprising that talents have not yet received substantial philosophical analysis in their own right. As a (...) result, the current literature is rife with conceptual ambiguity: a talent is referred to as all of a skill, potential, ability, capacity, endowment, and a natural gift. In response to this confusion, in this paper I develop an account of what a talent is, based on the debate concerning the metaphysics of ability and dispositions. I argue for a position that I call ‘talent dispositionalism’: S has a talent for skill A in circumstances C iff S has the general disposition to excellently develop and maintain A when, in circumstances C, she tries to excellently develop and maintain A. On this account, a talent is not the skill itself, but a general iterated ability for the excellent development and up-keep of a particular skill, constituted by an agent’s dispositional properties. I defend the account against four objections usually levelled against traditional dispositionalist theories of ability, and highlight some ways the account may influence debates in other areas of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Are there cases in which agents ought to give up on satisfying an obligation, so that they can avoid a temptation which will lead them to freely commit an even more significant wrong? Actualists say yes. Possibilists say no. Both positions have absurd consequences. This paper argues that common-sense morality is committed to an inconsistent triad of principles. This inconsistency becomes acute when we consider the cases that motivate the possibilism–actualism debate. Thus, the absurd consequences of both solutions are unsurprising: (...) any proposed solution will have consequences incompatible with common moral practice. Arguments for denying one of the principles are considered and rejected. The paper then suggests that the inconsistent moral commitments originate in an inconsistent picture of human agency. Revisionary pictures of human agency are considered. It is argued that a quasi-Platonic picture of agency, similar to that advocated by Gary Watson 1977, is the most promising. (shrink)

According to the New Dispositionalist’s response to the Frankfurt Cases, Jones can do otherwise because Black merely masks (or finks), but does not deprive Jones of the relevant ability. This reasoning stands in the tradition of a line of thought according to which an informed view of the truth conditions of ability attributions allows for a compatibilist stance. The promise is that once we understand how abilities work, it turns out that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with determinism, (...) or with Black standing ready to intervene, or indeed both, as the New Dispositionalists hold. In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. Understanding how abilities work gives us no reason to think that the ability to do otherwise relevant for free will is compatible with either Black’s presence or determinism. (shrink)

What I shall do in this paper is to propose an analysis of ‘Agent P tries to A’ in terms of a subjunctive conditional, that avoids some of the problems that beset most alternative accounts of trying, which I call ‘referential views’. They are so-named because on these alternative accounts, ‘P tries to A’ entails that there is a trying to A by P, and therefore the expression ‘P’s trying to A’ can occur in the subject of a sentence and (...) be used to refer to a particular, namely an act or event of trying. A conditional account such as mine avoids having to answer questions about those alleged particulars, for example their location and their causal relation to physical actions, or alternatively their identity to physical actions. In brief, the analysis I propose eschews any need to quantify over any sort of trying particulars. I both clarify the proposal and deal with five possible objections to it: metaphysically impossible actions: cases of finking and reverse-cycle finking; the empirical emptiness of preventers and blockers; proximate intentions and trying; and alleged explanatory loss. (shrink)

In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and moral blameworthiness.

What sort of property did Locke take colors to be? He is sometimes portrayed as holding that colors are wholly subjective. More often he is thought to identify colors with dispositions—powers that bodies have to produce certain ideas in us. Many interpreters find two or more incompatible strands in his account of color, and so are led to distinguish an “official,” prevailing view from the conflicting remarks into which he occasionally lapses. Many who see him as officially holding that colors (...) are dispositions concede that some of his remarks imply that colors are in us rather than in objects. After raising some difficulties for these readings, I offer an alternative. I will argue that Locke takes colors to be relational, but not dispositional, properties of the objects around us. On his view, an object is red if and only if it is actually causing a certain sensation in some observer. (shrink)

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Sosa, in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to belief, my objective is (...) to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. (shrink)

The importance of education and its profound effect on people's life make it a central issue in discussions of distributive justice. However, promoting distributive justice in education comes at a price: prioritising the education of some, as is often entailed by the principles of justice, inevitably has negative effects on the education of others. As a result, all theories of distributive justice in education face the challenge of balancing their requirements with conflicting interests. This article aims to contribute to developing (...) an account of conflicting interests by identifying a category of conflicting interests—non-positional conflicting interests—the realisation of which does not necessarily disrupt distributive justice. Non-positional conflicting interests include, for example, the interest in realising one's full potential and parents’ interest in familial relations. The article argues that the core dimensions of non-positional conflicting interests can usually be realised without upsetting distributive justice, and that actions that do upset distributive justice tend to be peripheral to these interests. Either way, there is no severe friction between distributive justice and non-positional conflicting interests: in the former cases, both are realised simultaneously. In the latter, tension exists; however, because the infringement on the conflicting interest is of relatively little weight, it is often justified, all things considered, in order to promote distributive justice. The conclusion is that while there are indeed cases in which distributive justice must retreat in the face of other interests, the friction between distributive justice and other interests is actually weaker than meets the eye. (shrink)

I distinguish two ways an ability might be general: (i) an ability might be general in that its possession doesn't entail the possession of an opportunity; (ii) an ability might be general in virtue of pertaining to a wide range of circumstances. I argue that these two types of generality – I refer to them with the terms ‘general’ and ‘generic’, respectively – produce two orthogonal distinctions among abilities. I show that the two types of generality are sometimes run together (...) by those writing on free will and argue that both types of generality are relevant to understanding the modality of abilities. (shrink)

Could you have taken precautions against a risk you were unaware of? This question lies at the heart of debates in ethics and legal philosophy concerning whether it's justifiable to blame or punish those who cause harm inadvertently or out of ignorance. But the question is crucially ambiguous, depending on what is understood to be inside or outside the scope of the ‘could’. And this ambiguity undermines a number of arguments purporting to show that inadvertent wrongdoers cannot justifiably be blamed (...) or punished. While not all opposition to blaming or punishing inadvertent wrongdoers rests on this ambiguity, some certainly does. And getting clear on this ambiguity is important if we're to sort good arguments against blaming and punishing inadvertent wrongdoers—if there are any—from bad ones. (shrink)

This paper offers a new argument in favour of experiential pluralism about visual experience – the view that the nature of successful visual experience is different from the nature of unsuccessful visual experience. The argument appeals to the role of experience in explaining possession of ordinary abilities. In addition, the paper makes a methodological point about philosophical debates concerning the nature of perceptual experience: whether a given view about the nature of experience amounts to an interesting and substantive thesis about (...) our own minds depends on the significance of the psychological or mental kind claim made by it. This means that an adequate defence of a given view of the nature of experience must include articulation of the latter's significance qua psychological or mental kind. The argument advanced provides the material to meet this demand. In turn, this constitutes further support for the argument itself. (shrink)

Although the topic of basic act is controversial, theorists of agency normally agree that complex performances are based on comparatively simple ones. To the extent that we can attribute powers to agents over various tasks, it is also plausible to suppose that our powers over complex tasks are based on powers over the simple. Chisholm once formulated this idea in terms of the principle of the diffusiveness of power. In the present paper, however, we shall argue that the principle which (...) articulates this intuitive idea is incompatible with the assumption that we can sometimes do otherwise. (shrink)

Austin's lecture on this topic contributes little to the problem of freedom of the will, and so in my discussion of his ideas I shall stop short of the difficult part of that problem. His most important positive suggestion is that hypotheticals should be divided into two classes, conditionals and pseudo-conditionals. He claims that neglect of this distinction has been the cause of mistakes in certain forms of the dispositional analysis of the statement that an agent could have acted otherwise, (...) and he then goes on to criticise all forms of that analysis using arguments which do not depend on the difference between the two kinds of hypothetical.This discussion will be in two parts. In the first I shall take up Austin's distinction between conditionals and pseudos and criticise it and develop it at length, because it seems to me to be the most important thing in his lecture. Since I shall not have space for comment on fortuitous errors made by defenders of the dispositional analysis of the claim that an agent could have acted otherwise, I shall concentrate on the essential features of that analysis. (shrink)

The philosophy of time travel is a sub-field of metaphysics – the study of what there is and what things are like – that considers questions about the possibility of time travel and what a world in which time travel is possible looks like. These questions range from whether time travel is actually possible, to how time travellers can act in the past or future. This thesis delves into a particularly interesting, yet historically undertreated theme: the abilities of time travellers (...) and relatedly their freedom as well. The abilities and freedom of time travellers has been the source of a lot of recent discussion with some polarising views. The minority (which includes Lewis (1976), but also Ted Sider (2002)) argue for the affirmative – that time travellers are free and have the same (or perhaps more) abilities as non-time travellers. The majority (which includes Kadri Vihvelin (1996), Michael Rea (2005), Stephanie Rennick (2015), Alison Fernandes (2020), amongst others) argue for the negative, that time travellers do not have exactly the same freedoms and abilities as non-time travellers. I think that it is a mistake to be so pessimistic about the abilities and freedom of time travellers. I treat concerns about the freedom of time travellers and concerns about the abilities of time travellers as two sides of the same coin. Therefore, in what follows, I argue for two related conclusions. First, I argue that time travellers have all sorts of abilities. Second, I argue that time travellers are just as free as non-time travellers. In arguing for these conclusions, I first produce a novel analysis of ability which reveals important details about how abilities track inputs rather than outputs. Second, I use this new analysis of ability to present a new compatibilist account of free will. If I am right in arguing positively for the abilities and freedoms of time travellers, then this has large implications for both the current time travel discourse and the general debate surrounding freedom. Significantly, I am arguing against some prominent views about time travel and in suggesting that these views are mistaken, I am presenting new ideas about ability and freedom: specifically, that time travellers have the ability and are free to do impossible things. (shrink)

From an indeterminist's perspective, I support and defined the following argument for deontic incompatibilism: If determinism is true, then no one ever can do otherwise than he does. If no one ever can do otherwise than he does, then nothing anyone does is ever right, wrong, or obligatory. Therefore, if determinism is true, then nothing anyone does is ever right, wrong, or obligatory. ;They sense of 'can' I use in this argument is what I call "the power-'can' of ordinary language." (...) The power-'can' has two time indexes; one applies to the power itself, the other to the relevant doing. I argue that the power-'can' is a sense of 'can' with which the "ought implies can" principle holds true. ;I review and respond to various accounts of 'can' proposed by compatibilists Bruce Aune, Keith Lehrer, David Lewis, G. E. Moore and others. Elsewhere I discuss writings by Peter van Inwagen and J. L. Austin. ;To support , I utilize, argue for, and show the advantages of the Temporal Physical Possibility Requirements: If an agent, S, can at time T do A at time T$\sp\prime$, then S's doing A at $T\sp\prime$ is jointly possible with the conjunction of the state of the world at T and the laws of nature. When arguing for these requirements, I focus on how most people use the power-'can' and how they would use it in various situations. I present and respond to objections to my arguments. Most of the objections are based on certain strong forms of contextualism. ;I argue for and defend my premises against various objections. One objection is based on a form of utilitarianism advocated by Fred Feldman. Other objections are based on an example by Harry Frankfurt concerning moral responsibility. ;Two arguments against are presented and I respond. They are developed from a suggestion by John Martin Fischer that people would continue making deontic claims if a consortium of scientists were to find strong evidence of determinism. (shrink)