Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed (...) moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications. (shrink)

This paper concerns a controversy between two compelling and popular claims in the theory of ability. One is the claim that ability requires control. The other is the claim that success entails ability, that is, that φ-ing entails that you are able to φ. Since actually φ-ing obviously does not entail that φ is in your control, these two claims cannot both be true. I introduce a new form of evidence to help adjudicate this controversy: judgments about the possibility and (...) probability of ability ascriptions. I argue that these judgments provide evidence in favor of the thesis that success entails ability, and against the thesis that ability requires control. Moreover, I argue that these judgments support an analysis of ability in terms of conditionals. (shrink)

One of the central criteria for free will is “Could I have done otherwise?” But because of a temporal asymmetry in human choice, the question makes no sense. The question is backward-looking, while human choices are forward-looking. At the time when any choice is actually made, there is as of yet no action to do otherwise. Expectation is the only thing to contradict (do other than). So the ability to do something not expected by the ultimate expecter, Laplace’s demon, is (...) a better criterion for free will. If human action is fundamentally unpredictable, then we have free will. Scientists have studied a form of fundamental unpredictability, known as undecidability. The features that make a system capable of undecidable dynamics have been identified: program-data duality; potential to access an infinite computational medium; and the ability to implement negation. Humans have all three of these features, so we very likely are fundamentally unpredictable, so we have free will. (shrink)

The simple knowledge norm of assertion holds that one may assert that p only if one knows that p. Turri :37–45, 2011) and Williamson both argue that more is required for epistemically permissible assertion. In particular, they both think that the asserter must assert on the basis of her knowledge. Turri calls this the express knowledge norm of assertion. I defend SKNA and argue against EKNA. First, I argue that EKNA faces counterexamples. Second, I argue that EKNA assumes an implausible (...) view of permissibility on which an assertion is epistemically permissible only if it is made for a right reason, i.e., a reason that contributes to making it the case that it is epistemically permissible to make that assertion. However, the analogous view in other normative domains is both controversial and implausible. This is because it doesn’t make it possible for one to act or react rightly for the wrong reason. I suggest that proponents of EKNA have conflated requirements for φ-ing rightly with requirements for φ-ing well. Finally, I argue that proponents of SKNA can explain the intuitive defectiveness of asserting on the basis of an epistemically bad reason, even when the asserters know the content of their assertion, by arguing that the asserters are epistemically blameworthy. (shrink)

This paper exposits and makes steps towards solving a puzzle about epistemic value. The puzzle is that several principles about the epistemic value of true beliefs and epistemic disvalue of false beliefs are, individually, plausible but, collectively, contradictory. My solution claims that sometimes false beliefs are epistemically valuable. I nonetheless show how my solution is not in deep tension with the Jamesian idea that true beliefs are epistemically valuable and false beliefs are epistemically disvaluable. I conclude by indicating how the (...) results here are relevant to formulating and defending Veritism. (shrink)

According to ethical objectivism, what a person should do depends on the facts, as opposed to their perspective on the facts. A long-standing challenge to this view is that it fails to accommodate the role that norms play in guiding a person’s action. Roughly, if the facts that determine what a person should do lie beyond their ken, they cannot inform a person’s deliberations. This paper explores two recent developments of this line of thought. Both focus on the epistemic counterpart (...) to ethical objectivism, according to which what a person should believe depends on the facts, as opposed to their perspective on the facts. The suggestion in each case is that epistemic objectivism faces a distinctive problem in accommodating guidance. Insofar as objectivism concerning the epistemic domain stands or falls with objectivism concerning the ethical domain, this is a problem for objectivism more generally. In this paper, I show that those arguments are not successful. The upshot is that the objectivist – whether ethical or epistemic – need not reject the idea that norms serve a guiding function. (shrink)

Sometimes you make a choice. Whether or not you made it was up to you. The choice was free. But how can this be? A scientific view of the world may leave no room for free choice. Free will literature continually explodes. Yet experts still focus on control or on a power to do otherwise. Sadly, they neglect another intuitive feature of free will: being an underived source or ultimate originator. When acting freely, one is a self-determined, self-directed, sole author (...) of change. Surprisingly, though the literature is replete with this pre-theoretic feature of free will, virtually no one makes rigorous use of it when constructing arguments. Equipped with fresh research, this book contends that agent-causation—currently an unpopular theory—deserves serious reconsideration. Only agent-causation accounts for ultimate origination, and popular objections fail under rigorous scrutiny. This book is tightly argued. It challenges and deepens recent advances in free will scholarship made by Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Carl Ginet, Randy Clarke, Stewart Goetz, Tim O’Connor, and others. (shrink)

In this article I describe the theoretical underpinnings of 20th-century British philosopher W. D. Ross's approach to linking deontological and teleological decision making. I attempt to fill in what Ross left on the whole unanswered, that is, how to use his duties to resolve dilemmas. A case study in journalism demonstrates how to apply the theory. I conclude with an analysis of what I take to be the strengths and weaknesses in Ross's theory.

This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called 'Discourse Contextualism' (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. (...) Though the semantics is descriptivist, it avoids Dworkin’s influential criticism of so-called “semantic theories of law,” and elucidates the nature of “theoretical disagreements” about the criteria of legal validity. The account sheds light on the social, interpersonal function of normative uses of language in legal discourse. It also gives precise expression to Hart’s and Raz’s intuitive distinctions among types of legal claims (internal/external, committed/detached), while giving them a uniform type of analysis. The proposed semantics and pragmatics of legal claims provides a fruitful framework for further theorizing about the nature and metaphysics of law, the relation between law and morality, and the apparent practical character of legal language and judgment. Discourse Contextualism provides a solid linguistic basis for a broader account of legal discourse and practice. (shrink)

In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argued that a more sophisticated understanding of the dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’ could bolster philosophical resistance to the tempting view that the human mind is possessed of metaphysically ‘occult’ powers and properties. This temptation is powerful in the context of accounting for the special qualities of responsible agency. Incompatibilists indulge the temptation; compatibilists resist it, using a variety of strategies. One recent strategy, reminiscent of Ryle’s, is to exploit a more sophisticated understanding (...) of dispositional properties to account for these qualities. But ‘new dispositionalists’ run up against a ‘hard problem’ that threatens the approach. This paper argues that the threat may be averted by embracing a yet more radical ‘Rylean’ view of the distinctive dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’. (shrink)

In defending the view that justice is the advantage of the stronger, Thrasymachus puzzlingly claims that rulers never err and that any practitioner of a skill or expertise (τέχνη) is infallible. In what follows, Socrates offers a number of arguments directed against Thrasymachus’ views concerning the nature of skill, ruling, and justice. Commentators typically take a dim view of both Thrasymachus’ claims about skill (which are dismissed as an ungrounded and purely ad hoc response to Socrates’ initial criticisms) and Socrates’ (...) latter arguments (which are deemed extremely weak). In this paper, I clarify Thrasymachus’ views (and those of several other ancients) concerning qua locutions and the nature of skill and ability and I reconstruct Socrates’ arguments against Thrasymachus’ views concerning skill and justice. I argue that Thrasymachus’ views are not ungrounded or ad hoc and that Socrates’ arguments are rather different (and significantly stronger) than often supposed. (shrink)

Summary Ordinary language philosophers frequently draw on the fact that an appropriately selected sentential combination of the form p but not q can, or cannot, be uttered without absurdity; however, they do so without sufficient reflection on the methodology of such combination tests, which results in considerable shortcomings even in practical application. To improve things, I shall discuss two criteria for distinguishing ‘pragmatic’ from ‘non-pragmatic’ implications and for separating the latter into ‘linguistic’ (‘semantic’ and ‘syntactical’) and ‘non-linguistic’ ones (2–3); consider (...) the bearing of the principle of ‘sense-constancy‘ on the applicability of combination tests (4); and call attention to the important, though merely heuristic, function of investigating pragmatic, as opposed to semantic, implications (5.1–5.2). Finally, I shall hint at a striking analogy between the linguistic (yet non-empirical) method of combination tests, the phenomenological method of ‘fictional variation’, and the empirical method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (5.3). (shrink)

Many moral theories incorporate the idea that when an action is wrong, it is wrong because that there was something else that the agent could and should have done instead. Most notable among these are consequentialist theories. According to consequentialism an action A is wrong if and only if there was another action B that the agent could have performed such that, if the agent had performed B instead of A, the consequences would have been better. Relatively little attention has (...) been given to the question of how to understand the meaning of ‘could have’ in this specific context. However, without an answer to this question, consequentialist theories fail to yield determinate verdicts about the deontic status of actions in real scenarios. It is here argued that the following conditional analysis provides the required answer and gives us the most plausible version of consequentialism: the agent could have done B instead of A if and only if, there is a decision such that had the agent made this decision, then she would have done B, and not A. Such a conditional analysis has been universally rejected as an analysis of the general meaning of ‘could have’, but we show that in the specific context of specifying the meaning of ‘could have’ in a consequentialist criterion of right and wrong action, all the standard objections to it fail. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...) consider ways of implementing that approach. Our results suggest that there are principled disanalogies between abilities and disposition which prevent any dispositional account of abilities from succeeding. (shrink)

Kiesewetter defends the normativity of rationality by presenting a new solution to the problems that arise from the common assumption that we ought to be rational. He provides a defence of a reason-response conception of rationality, an evidence-relative account of reason, and an explanation of structural irrationality in relation to these accounts.

According to perspectivism about moral obligation, our obligations are affected by our epistemic circumstances. But how exactly should this claim be understood? On Zimmerman’s “Prospective View”, perspectivism is spelled out as the thesis that an option is obligatory if and only if it maximizes what Zimmerman calls “prospective value”, which is in turn determined by the agent’s present evidence. In this article, I raise two objections to this approach. Firstly, I argue that spelling out the difference between perspectivism and anti-perspectivism (...) in terms of value creates a number of problems that can be avoided by an account that proceeds in terms of reasons. Secondly, I argue that Zimmerman focuses on the wrong body of evidence, and that this commits him to an implausible solution to the problem that perspectivists face with regard to advice from better-informed sources. (shrink)

According to a widely held principle—the poss-ability principle—an agent, S, is able to only if it is metaphysically possible for S to. I argue against the poss-ability principle by developing a novel class of counterexamples. I then argue that the consequences of rejecting the poss-ability principle are interesting and far-reaching.

This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is such that if John tries to do it, he swims across (...) the river. The essay argues that the act conditional analysis avoids the problems faced by existing accounts of agentive modality and shows how the act conditional analysis can be extended to an account of generic agentive modal claims. The upshot is a new vantage point on the role of agentive modal ascriptions in practical discourse: ability ascriptions serve as a kind of hypothetical guarantee, and compulsion ascriptions as a kind of nonhypothetical guarantee. (shrink)

G.E. Moore said that rightness was obviously a matter of maximising plain goodness. Peter Geach and Judith Thomson disagree. They have both argued that ‘good’ is not a predicative adjective, but only ever an attributive adjective: just like ‘big.’ And just as there is no such thing as plain bigness but only ever big for or as a so-and-so, there is also no such thing as plain goodness. They conclude that Moore’s goodness is thus a nonsense. However attention has been (...) drawn to a weakness in their arguments. Mahrad Almotahari and Adam Hosein have sought to plug that weakness. If their plug holds, then there is no goodness. Doing most of their work is the following premise: adjective φ is predicative only if it can be used predicatively in ‘x is a φ K’ otherwise it is attributive. In this paper I argue that this premise is false, that their plug does not hold and that if one is to reject plain goodness it will have to be for other reasons. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a theory of how claims about an agent’s normative reasons are sensitive to the epistemic circumstances of this agent, which preserves the plausible ideas that reasons are facts and that reasons can be discovered in deliberation and disclosed in advice. I argue that a plausible theory of this kind must take into account the difference between synchronic and diachronic reasons, i.e. reasons for acting immediately and reasons for acting at some later point in time. I (...) provide a general account of the relation between synchronic and diachronic reasons, demonstrate its implications for the evidence-sensitivity of reasons and finally present and defend an argument for my view. (shrink)

We propose a new analysis of ability modals. After briefly criticizing extant approaches, we turn our attention to the venerable but vexed conditional analysis of ability ascriptions. We give an account that builds on the conditional analysis, but avoids its weaknesses by incorporating a layer of quantification over a contextually supplied set of actions.

In this chapter I critically discuss the dismissal of the philosophical significance of facts about human evolution and historical development in the work of W. D Ross. I address Ross’s views about the philosophical significance of the emerging human sciences of his time in two of his main works, namely The Right and the Good and The Foundations of Ethics. I argue that the debate between Ross and his chosen interlocutors (Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim and Lucien Levy-Bruhl) shows striking similarities (...) with parallel debates in contemporary moral philosophy. (shrink)

The Free Will Theorem of Conway \& Kochen on the one hand follows from uncontroversial parts of modern physics and elementary mathematical and logical reasoning, but on the other hand seems predicated on an undefined notion of free will. Although Conway and Kochen informally claim that their theorem supports indeterminism and, in its wake, a libertarian agenda for free will, inferring the former from the Free Will Theorem is a \emph{petitio principii}. Of course, this also considerably weakens the case for (...) the latter. A recent reformulation of the Free Will Theorem due to Cator and the author uses a mathematically precise formulation of the idea that experimentalists freely choose their settings even in a deterministic world, and thence construes the theorem as providing constraints on determinism. In the present paper we argue that the concept of free will used in this version of the theorem is essentially the one proposed by Lewis, also known as `local miracle compatibilism'. To do so, we give a mathematical reformulation of this idea, which we believe to be well within its spirit and which may be of independent interest. On this double reformulation the Free Will Theorem shows that local miracle compatibilism contradicts the parts of modern physics used in its assumptions. Therefore, although the intention of Conway and Kochen was to support free will through their theorem, what they actually achieved is the opposite: a well-known, philosophically viable version of free will now turns out to be incompatible with physics! (shrink)

W. D. Ross is commonly considered to be a generalist about prima facie duty but a particularist about absolute duty. That is, many philosophers hold that Ross accepts that there are true moral principles involving prima facie duty but denies that there are any true moral principles involving absolute duty. I agree with the former claim: Ross surely accepts prima facie moral principles. However, in this paper, I challenge the latter claim. Ross, I argue, is no more a particularist about (...) absolute duty than a utilitarian or a Kantian is. While this conclusion is interesting in its own right, it is also important, I argue, because it prevents us from overlooking Ross's criterion of moral obligation and because it may have implications on the broader debate between particularists and generalists. (shrink)

Are we free? What does "freedom" mean here? In the following, I shall only focus with freedom of action. My main thesis is that there is not just one basic type of free action but more. Philosophers, however, tend to assume that there is just one way to act freely. Hence, a more detailed analysis of free action is being called for. I will distinguish between different kinds of free action and discuss the relations between them. The analysis of different (...) types of coercion will lead to a different view on freedom – a view which stresses the many faces of free action. (shrink)

Many philosophers think not only that we are free to act otherwise than we do, but also that we experience being free in this way. Terry Horgan argues that such experience is compatibilist: it is accurate even if determinism is true. According to Horgan, when people judge their experience as incompatibilist, they misinterpret it. While Horgan's position is attractive, it incurs significant theoretical costs. I sketch an alternative way to be a compatibilist about experiences of free agency that avoids these (...) costs. In brief, I assume that experiences of freedom have a sort of phenomenal content that is inaccurate if determinism is true, just as many incompatibilists claim. Still, I argue that these experiences also have another sort of phenomenal content that is normally accurate, even assuming determinism. (shrink)

In his book "Freedom of the Will: A Conditional Analysis", Ferenc Huoranszki tries to defend improved and amended version of the conditional analysis of free will. In my critical review, taking chapters 2 and 4 of his book as the most crucial for his theory, I try to show that incompatibilism is still more persuasive and that amended conditional analysis is not compatible with determinism. Despite my criticism, I consider this book as a significant contribution to the free will debate.

The concept of “moral responsibility” has almost always been defined in relation to a certain idea of metaphysical freedom and to a conception of the physical world. So, classically, for indeterminist thinkers, human beings are free and therefore responsible, if their choices are not defined by a previous state of the world but derive from an autonomous selection among a set of alternatives. Differently, for the majority of determinist philosophers , the only form of freedom we need has to be (...) identified with freedom of the conduct, considered as opposite to any form of coercion. Some argue that, given the truth of determinism and the related suppression of concepts such as “guilt” and “praise”, or “merit” and “demerit”, morality could survive just as a utilitarian tool, even though this seems to be in conflict with our deepest feelings and practices. Considering some revisionist approaches of moral responsibility in connection with classical positions , I will reconstruct some of the attempts to release responsibility from the thematisation of freedom, exploring the possibility of redefining it as an independent concept. My conclusion is that the focus on the choice-action process and on the characteristics of the “self”, avoiding reference to alternative scenarios, could be a good starting point for elaborating a conception of what really counts for our moral life – even though, in the end, this could entail the abandonment of the traditional concept of responsibility itself. (shrink)

The most valuable player (MVP) of an athletic league is the single best individual player in the league. The MVP award is the institutional recognition of this person, and it is the highest annual award that a player can receive. Despite its widespread consideration and importance, we argue that the concept of the MVP is a fundamentally vague concept. In the context of professional sports, however, such a vague category is valuable in that it promotes the active discussion of different (...) types of excellence found within a specific sport and the weight to be assigned these types, thus leading to a gain for the discussants. (shrink)

Starting from John MacFarlane's recent survey of answers to the question ‘What is assertion?’, I defend an account of assertion that draws on elements of MacFarlane's and Robert Brandom's commitment accounts, Timothy Williamson's knowledge norm account, and my own previous work on the normative status of logic. I defend the knowledge norm from recent attacks. Indicative conditionals, however, pose a problem when read along the lines of Ernest Adams' account, an account supported by much work in the psychology of reasoning. (...) Furthermore, there seems to be no place for degrees of belief in the accounts of belief and assertion given here. Degrees of belief do have a role in decision‐making, but, again, there is much evidence that the orthodox theory of subjective utility maximization is not a good description of what we do in decision‐making and, arguably, neither is it a good normative guide to how we ought to make decisions. (shrink)

Can we understand being valuable for in terms of being valuable? Three different kinds of puzzle cases suggest that the answer is negative. In what follows, I articulate a positive answer to this question, carefully present the three puzzle cases, and then explain how a friend of the positive answer can successfully respond to them. This response requires us to distinguish different kinds of value bearers, rather than different kinds of value, and to hold that among the value bearers are (...) totality states of affairs. The final section of the article discusses the possibility of organic unification without organic unities. (shrink)

Consequentialism is a general approach to understanding the nature of morality that seems to entail a certain view of the world in time. This entailment raises specific problems for the approach. The first seems to lead to the conclusion that every actual act is right – an unacceptable result for any moral theory. The second calls into question the idea that consequentialism is an approach to morality, for it leads to the conclusion that this approach produces a theory whose truth (...) does not depend in any way on the nature of rational beings or value. (shrink)

Contrastivism about reasons is the view that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. This is in opposition to a more traditional theory on which reasons are reasons for things simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism provides a solution to a puzzle involving reason claims that explicitly employ ‘rather than’. Contrastivism solves the puzzle by allowing that some fact might be a reason for an action out of one set of alternatives without being a reason (...) for that action out of a different set of alternatives. (shrink)

Fitch showed that not every true proposition can be known in due time; in other words, that not every proposition is knowable. Moore showed that certain propositions cannot be consistently believed. A more recent dynamic phrasing of Moore-sentences is that not all propositions are known after their announcement, i.e., not every proposition is successful. Fitch's and Moore's results are related, as they equally apply to standard notions of knowledge and belief (S 5 and KD45, respectively). If we interpret ‘successful’ as (...) ‘known after its announcement’ and ‘knowable’ as ‘known after some announcement’, successful implies knowable. Knowable does not imply successful: there is a proposition ϕ that is not known after its announcement but there is another announcement after which ϕ is known. We show that all propositions are knowable in the more general sense that for each proposition, it can become known or its negation can become known. We can get to know whether it is true: ◊(Kϕ ∨ K¬ϕ). This result comes at a price. We cannot get to know whether the proposition was true. This restricts the philosophical relevance of interpreting ‘knowable’ as ‘known after an announcement’. (shrink)

Frank Jackson has put forward a famous thought experiment of a physician who has to decide on the correct treatment for her patient. Subjective consequentialism tells the physician to do what intuitively seems to be the right action, whereas objective consequentialism fails to guide the physician’s action. I suppose that objective consequentialists want to supplement their theory so that it guides the physician’s action towards what intuitively seems to be the right treatment. Since this treatment is wrong according to objective (...) consequentialism, objective consequentialists have to license it without calling it right. I consider eight strategies to spell out the idea of licensing the intuitively right treatment and argue that objective consequentialism is on the horns of what I call the licensing dilemma : Either the physician’s action is not guided towards the intuitively right treatment. Or the guidance towards the intuitively right treatment is ad hoc in some respect or the other. (shrink)

Twentieth century philosophers introduced the distinction between “objective rightness” and “subjective rightness” to achieve two primary goals. The first goal is to reduce the paradoxical tension between our judgments of (i) what is best for an agent to do in light of the actual circumstances in which she acts and (ii) what is wisest for her to do in light of her mistaken or uncertain beliefs about her circumstances. The second goal is to provide moral guidance to an agent who (...) may be uncertain about the circumstances in which she acts, and hence is unable to use her standard moral principle directly in deciding what to do. This paper distinguishes two important senses of “moral guidance”; proposes criteria of adequacy for accounts of subjective rightness; canvasses existing definitions for “subjective rightness”; finds them all deficient; and proposes a new and more successful account. It argues that each comprehensive moral theory must include multiple principles of subjective rightness to address the epistemic situations of the full range of moral decision-makers, and shows that accounts of subjective rightness formulated in terms of what it would reasonable for the agent to believe cannot provide that guidance. -/- . (shrink)

In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of giving up the belief that we are morally responsible are not quite this dramatic. Giving up the belief that (...) we are morally responsible undermines many, and perhaps most, of the desert claims we are pretheoretically inclined to accept. But it does not undermine desert claims based on the sheer fact of personhood. Even in the absence of belief in moral responsibility, personhood-based desert claims require us to respect persons and their rights. So personhood-based desert claims can provide a substantial role for desert in free will skeptics' ethical theories. (shrink)

John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.

Philosophers traditionally have been concerned both to explain intentional behavior and to evaluate it from a moral point of view. Some have maintained that whether actions (and their consequences) properly count as intended sometimes hinges on moral considerations - specifically, considerations of moral responsibility. The same claim has been made about an action's properly counting as having been done intentionally. These contentions will be made more precise in subsequent sections, where influential proponents are identified. Our aim in this paper is (...) to show that familiar defenses of these more precise claims are unpersuasive and that the claims do not merit acceptance. Our concern, more broadly, is to illuminate the place occupied by intention and intentional action in a conceptual scheme suited both to explanatory needs in the philosophy of mind to evaluative needs in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Most libertarians think that some version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) is true. A number of libertarians, which I call ‘Frankfurt-libertarians,’ think that they need not embrace any version of PAP. In this paper, I examine the writings of one such Frankfurt-libertarian, Eleonore Stump, for her evaluation of the impact of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP. I show how, contrary to her own claims, Stump does need a PAP-like principle for her account of free action. I briefly argue (...) that this discussion also goes some distance to showing that any Frankfurt-libertarian is in a similar position regarding the need for some PAP-like principle. If I am correct, then Frankfurt-libertarians must either renounce their incompatibilism or concede that FSCs fail to show all PAP-like principles to be false. (shrink)

Using the mathematical frameworks of economic preference ranking, subjective probability, and rational learning through empirical evidence, the epistemological implications of teleological ethical intuitionism are pointed out to the extent to which the latter is based on cognitivist and objectivist concepts of value. The notions of objective value and objective norm are critically analysed with reference to epistemological criteria of intersubjectively shared valuative experience. It is concluded that one cannot meaningfully postulate general material theories of morality that could be tested, confirmed (...) or refuted by intersubjective empirical evidence of preferences and values, however loosely the empirical evidence of values may be interpreted. This situation is explained with reference to the ways in which preceived values become systematically influenced by the concomitants of individual valuative experience, but which have nothing to do with contingent subjective interests. (shrink)

_If you were free in doing something and morally responsible for it, you could have done otherwise. That_ _has seemed a pretty firm proposition among the old, new, clear, unclear and other propositions in the_ _philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism. If you were free in what you did, there was an_ _alternative. It is also at least natural to think that if determinism is true, you can never do otherwise than_ _you do. G. E. Moore, that Cambridge reasoner in (...) whose shadow Wittgenstein ought to be standing,_ _considered the matter. He pointed out that even if determinism is true, there remains a sense in which you_ _can still do otherwise than you do: you will do otherwise if you so choose. That, on reflection, is consistent_ _with determinism. The doctrine of the compatibility of freedom and determinism is saved. Joseph Keim_ _Campbell, strong philosopher at Washington State University, provides the latest thinking on this seemingly_ _unavoidable dispute. You do not have to agree that either compatibilism or incompatibilism must be true in_ _order to appreciate the carefulness of his reasoning in this piece of ongoing American philosophy. It_ _requires and repays attention._. (shrink)

I defend these claims: (1) 'Pleasure' has exactly one English antonym: 'unpleasure.' (2) Pleasure is the most convincing example of an organic unity. (3) The hedonic calculus is a joke. (4) An important type of pleasure is background pleasure. (5) Pleasures in bad company are still good. (6) Higher pleasures aren't pleasures (and if they were, they wouldn't be higher). Thesis (1) merely concerns terminology, but theses (2)-(6) are substantive, evaluative claims.

In this essay, I develop the concept of episodic value, which describes a form of value connected to a particular object or individual expressed and delivered through a narrative. Narrative can bestow special kinds of value on objects, as exemplified by auction articles or museum collections. To clarify the nature of episodic value, I show how the notion of episodic value fundamentally differs from the traditional axiological picture. I extend my discussion of episodic value to argue that the notion of (...) episodic value readily incorporates the role of narratives into the construction of identity in personal and social contexts. My main contentions are twofold. First, events or experiences from our personal narratives are episodically valuable insofar as they contribute to shaping our narrative identities. Second, when engaged in a collective action, we write a joint narrative with other participants that confers special meanings on the actions of each participant. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack (...) of capacity back to an earlier culpable wrongdoing will often fail, due to there being no point at which these perpetrators knowingly chose to develop their prejudices. Attempts to ground culpability under Talbert’s (2008) Attributionist account of moral responsibility will also fail. This is because perpetrators’ lack of awareness of what they are doing makes it the case that they are not expressing objectionable evaluative judgments in the way required for blameworthiness. Finally, I argue that our temptation to blame agents who commit testimonial injustice is not completely unfounded. Appealing to Watson’s (1996) attributability/accountability distinction allows us to make sense of how some responses to the jurors are appropriate, despite their being excused. (shrink)