This chapter surveys a few of the central questions about philosophical perspectives on the ethics of belief, focusing especially on (1) questions about whether doxastic involuntarism is consistent with the normative approach to epistemology characteristic of any ethics of belief; (2) the status and interpretation of William Clifford's famous injunction against belief on "insufficient" evidence, and broader questions about the role of negative versus positive doxastic norms; (3) whether norms governing belief are distinctively epistemic norms, or are instead moral or (...) practical ones; and (4) how moral and political questions about belief bear on epistemic norms, including a discussion of doxastic wronging, racist beliefs, skepticism and rape culture, and epistemic partiality—whether, for instance, friendship requires beliefs that violate epistemic norms. (shrink)

Most of us are partial to our friends and loved ones: we treat them with special care, and we feel justified in doing so. In recent years, the idea that good friends are also epistemically partial to one another has been popular. Being a good friend, so-called epistemic partialists suggest, involves being positively biased towards one's friends – that is, involves thinking more highly of them than is warranted by the evidence. In this paper, I outline the concept of epistemic (...) partiality and its relation to non-epistemic partiality and explore some considerations that speak in favour of and against such partialism in friendships. I finish by suggesting some directions in which this debate could go next. (shrink)

This chapter asks two questions about the ethics of expectations: one about the nature of expectations, and one about the wrongs of expectations. On the first question, expectations involve a rich constellation of attitudes ranging from beliefs to also include imaginings, hopes, fears, and dreams. As a result, sometimes expectations act like predictions, like your expectation of rain tomorrow, sometimes prescriptions, like the expectation that your students will do the reading, sometimes like proleptic reasons like the hope that your mentee (...) will flourish, and sometimes expectations are peremptory in that they carry the force of moral law. Turning to the second question, given the multiple roles played by expectations it shouldn’t be surprising that there are also multiple ways expectations can be wrong to hold. Sometimes they wrong as beliefs do, e.g., doxastic wronging, and sometimes they result in alienation because of who holds that expectation of us. The upshot of this chapter is that getting clear on these potential ways expectations can wrong not only delivers an ethics of expectations that mirrors familiar discussions of the ethics of belief, but an ethics of expectations further opens the door for taking seriously an ethics of mental attitudes more generally. (shrink)

This book is a systematic treatment-perhaps the first-of “attitudes of the heart”-remorse (versus guilt), love, trust, gratitude, personal anger (versus righteous anger), jealousy, and others-and their role in mediating personal relationship, attachment, and connection. This is obviously interesting in its own right, but it also shows how heartfelt attitudes mirror more extensively studied “reactive attitudes” of guilt, resentment, and blame (“attitudes of the will”). Whereas the latter mediate moral relations of mutual respect and accountability, attitudes of the heart are the (...) currency of heartfelt connection and personal relationship. (shrink)

Defenders of two Rationality Views of love—the Qualities View and the Personhood View—have drawn on Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings to highlight a connection between love and a “realistic” perspective on the beloved. Murdoch does not inform the basic structure of these views—she is rather introduced as a supplement who shows that in love, we pay accurate, nuanced, unguarded, and unflinching attention to the other. In this paper, I contend that these authors have failed to see that Murdoch offers a distinct (...) view of love and is inappropriate to enlist as an ally. This is in large part because they have missed the full sense of what Murdoch means by connecting love and realism. I contend that for Murdoch, to love someone means seeing them in light of a realistic vision of what it means to be human; this includes an appreciation of the limits of freedom, the formative influence of personal history, and the nature and extent of our differences from one another. This helps us to see why Murdoch variously describes loving attention as realistic, compassionate, tolerant, and extremely difficult. It also sheds light on some important and familiar ways that we criticize one another's grounds for love. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is frequently billed as a remedy to the problems of deontological and consequentialist ethics that Bernard Williams identified in his critique of “the morality system.” But how far can virtue ethics be relied upon to avoid these problems? What does Williams’s critique of the morality system mean for virtue ethics? To answer this question, we offer a more principled characterisation of the defining features of the morality system in terms of its organising ambition—to shelter life against luck. This (...) reveals the system to be multiply realisable: the same function can be served by substantively different but functionally equivalent ideas. After identifying four requirements that ethical thought must meet to function as a morality system, we show that they can also be met by certain constellations of virtue-ethical ideas. We thereby demonstrate the possibility of virtue-ethical morality systems raising problems analogous to those besetting their deontological and consequentialist counterparts. This not only widens the scope of Williams’s critique and brings out the cautionary aspect of his legacy for virtue ethics. It also offers contemporary virtue ethicists a more principled understanding of the functional features that mark out morality systems and lie at the root of their problems, thereby helping them to avoid or overcome these problems. (shrink)

It seems like a problem to say that love can be merited—its value is located in its transcendence of comparative judgments. However, we commonly make judgments about who is and is not worth loving. We deem certain romantic partners, friends, and family members as worth or not worth our loving time, attention, and effort. In this paper, I argue that love can be merited, and it is merited because of a person’s intrinsic valuable qualities. However, it is not the fact (...) that such qualities can be compared that is relevant. What is relevant is the fact that such qualities are gradable, and what it means for someone to merit love is that their qualities meet a threshold or standard of value for love. Moreover, love requires some amount of practical wisdom in discerning these thresholds and when someone meets or fails to meet them. This is important to recognize since we are creatures of finite love. We do not have the capacity to love everyone who is both worthy and unworthy of love. Given our finite capacities, I argue that making wise and discerning judgments about whom to love should be kept in mind when philosophizing about love. (shrink)

In this paper, I challenge standard views of the moral badness of sentimentality defended by art critics and philosophers. Accounts based on untruthfulness and self-indulgence lack the resources to both explain the badness of bad sentimentality and to allow that there are benign instances. We are sometimes permitted to be sentimental even though it is self-serving. A non-moralistic account should allow for this. To provide such an account, I first outline a substantive view of the ideal of unsentimentality by turning (...) to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. Rilke celebrates the artist for his unsentimental love of his subjects and “untiring objective wakefulness” to them. I then turn to Iris Murdoch’s ethics of attention (itself influenced by Rilke) to explain why this ideal is so difficult to live up to in practice, the various ways that we fall short, and what our failures mean. What Murdoch contributes is both a sense that the lovingly attentive attitude that Rilke describes is morally—and not just artistically—important and a compassionate account of the human egocentrism that inhibits it. By thinking of sentimentality as a failure of moral attention, we can appreciate how particular instances differ from one another. Sentimentality can console us in difficult times or can gratify our egos; it can be a form of escapism or can rigidly enclose reality; and it can be harmlessly self-serving or a selfish failure to morally attend to the other when it counts. I conclude by outlining some ways that being seen with Cézanne-like moral attention can matter to us. (shrink)

Would you rather your friends, family, and partners envy you, or admire you, when you flourish? Many people would prefer to be admired, and so we often strive to tame our envy. Recently, however, Sara Protasi offered an intriguing defence of “emulative envy” which apparently improves us and our relationships, and is compatible with love. I find her account unconvincing, and defend loving admiration in this article. In Section 2, I summarize Protasi's nuanced account of envy. In Section 2, I (...) argue that irrespective of how we analyze emotions in general we can argue that it is preferable to prioritize the cultivation of some emotions over others. In Section 4, I challenge Protasi's assumptions about the affinity between love and envy. My core argument is in Section 5 where I examine envy's impact on the envier, the envied, and relationships. Envy impedes an authentic relationship to the goods and goals in the envier's life, alienates the envied, and stifles joint-action. From all perspectives admiration typically fares better. After briefly considering the objection that admiration may impede love in Section 6, I conclude, in section seven, that admiration should be preferred to emulative envy in our intimate relationships. (shrink)

This chapter assesses theories of the nature of personal love in Anglophone philosophy from the last two decades, sketching a case for pluralism. After rejecting arationalist views as failing to accommodate cases in which love is irrational, and contemporary quality views as giving love the wrong kind of reason, it argues that other theories only account for different subsets of what a complete theory of love should explain. It therefore concludes that while love always consists in valuing someone as a (...) particular individual, there are multiple ways of doing this, corresponding to multiple kinds of love. (shrink)

This paper begins by bringing love and hate into tension via the ideal that you ought to love your enemy. The trouble with loving your enemy is that they may seem to merit hate instead, especially in cases of serious injustice. I develop this simple thought into a challenge for loving your enemy: that you cannot be required to do what makes no sense to you. This challenge is not adequately met by extant explanations for why you ought to love (...) your enemy within the Christian tradition and its heirs, which tend to give reasons that are either insufficient or else instrumentalize love. The second half of the paper presents a solution with a very different shape to the challenge. I argue that love may still be fitting even when your enemy fails to merit love, notwithstanding the contemporary orthodoxy about fittingness. What makes it fitting to love your enemy depends on the fact (if it is one) that you yourself have received unmerited love. You may thereby have reason to exclude the issue of merit from consideration; what is more, you have reason to love out of gratitude for the unmerited love that you yourself received. (shrink)

Imagine that your lover or close friend has embraced a difficult long-term goal, such as advancing environmental justice, breaking a bad habit, or striving to become a better person. Which stance should you adopt towards their prospects for success? Does supporting our significant others in the pursuit of valuable goals require ignoring part of our evidence? I argue that we have special reasons––reasons grounded in friendship––to hope that our loved ones succeed in their difficult goals. I further propose that hope (...) is an attitude governed by distinctive norms of epistemic rationality. It has a unique impact on motivation and rational action and a special capacity to be met with uptake in hope. Owing to these features, hope is the central attitudinal dimension of truly amiable support based on ‘just vision’. (shrink)

Two doxastically significant demands of friendship have been discussed in recent literature, a demand to be epistemically partial and a demand to take our friends seriously. Though less discussed than epistemic partialism, I suggest that the demand to take our friends seriously is motivated by similar cases and considerations, and can avoid key objections to epistemic partialism that have been raised. I further suggest that it does justice to what we care about in friendship, and thus is to be preferred.

Iris Murdoch claims that “clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.” Our experience of the world can be blurred by egoism, inattentiveness, and other failings. I ask how we distinguish clear vision from distorted vision. Murdoch’s texts appeal to four factors: (A) attention; (B) unselfing; (C) a form of conceptual articulacy; and (D) love. I ask three questions about these standards: - Are these standards directed at the same goal? (For example, are they all geared toward (...) securing purely epistemic goals?) - Are these standards criterial for improvements in vision? (That is, does the presence of some combination of (A)-(D) constitute or guarantee better vision?) - Does Murdoch think that there’s a single best form of vision? (Such as the one attained by the person who manifests (A)-(D)?) In the secondary literature, the typical answers to these questions are: yes, yes, yes. But I give different answers: no, no, no. (shrink)

How can we rationally make peace with our past moral failings, while committing to avoid similar mistakes in the future? Is it because we cannot do anything about the past, while the future is still open? Or is it that regret for our past mistakes is psychologically harmful, and we need to forgive ourselves in order to be able to move on? Or is it because moral mistakes enable our moral growth? I argue that these and other answers do not (...) properly resolve the problem of temporal asymmetry in our attitudes toward moral imperfection, and I defend an alternative response, centered on our personal attachments and our biographical identity. (shrink)

Heidegger’s brief remarks on the theme of love enable us to reconstruct a view of it as a powerful feeling that both requires and amplifies a truthful recognition of oneself. The emphasis this places on the significance of love for the self and of the self for love, along with the kairological temporality Heidegger associates with love, means the account ends up “both sacralising and marginalising the other” (Tömmel, 2019, 242). I will suggest that this problem arises because Heidegger’s account (...) elevates love’s disruptive possibilities at the expense of its capacity to generate a shared world of everyday experience, and that his account of world-time offers underutilized resources for addressing this issue. This, in turn, generates a picture that resonates in illuminating ways with both Yao’s (2020) model of gracious attentive love, and De Jaegher’s (2021) enactivist account of the relationship between loving and knowing. (shrink)

Lovers often disagree. We may reject the specific goals our loved ones pursue or the broad values they hold. Some philosophers suggest that such evaluative conflict makes romantic love in its ideal form deficient. I argue that this is mistaken. On the contrary, our ideal of love holds that we can love people for ‘who they are’ (as we say), even as we profoundly disagree with them. My argument draws on intuitive cases from screwball comedy about love amid conflict, love (...) across political party lines, as well as ‘forbidden’ love across religions and cultures. At a deeper level, I sketch an ideal of love I call intimate independence and argue that this ideal is (i) fully compatible with any evaluative conflict, (ii) embedded in our ordinary attitudes towards mature love between equals, and (iii) an ideal worth achieving. As long as intimate independence is a compelling ideal, deep conflict will not seem like an obstacle to true love. The ideal reminds us that love can bring together people with radically different points of view, and that to insist on shared ends or values is thus to miss a part of the meaning and power of love. (shrink)

I draw on work in social epistemology, feminist philosophy, trans philosophy, queer theory, and ethics to rethink what hermeneutical injustices are, who suffers them, and what can be done to prevent them. I identify several problems with Miranda Fricker’s original account of what hermeneutical injustices are and how they arise, and argue for a number of revisions and clarifications in order to solve these problems. One upshot of these revisions is that more people suffer hermeneutical injustices than Fricker’s account acknowledges. (...) I then outline a novel, more materialist sort of strategy for preventing hermeneutical injustices, and argue that the provision of gender-affirming healthcare is one context in which such a strategy ought to be pursued. Finally, I criticize the hermeneutical injustice literature for what I call its implicit commitment to transparency politics. By this I mean its implicit commitment to the view that when it comes to the hermeneutical dimension of people’s lives, the satisfaction of their interests in things about themselves being intelligible is all that matters. I argue that this view is mistaken, not least because it ignores the existence of two other important sorts of distinctly hermeneutical interest. (shrink)