How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (shrink)

The core doctrine of ethical intuitionism is that some of our ethical knowledge is non-inferential. Against this, Sturgeon has recently objected that if ethical intuitionists accept a certain plausible rationale for the autonomy of ethics, then their foundationalism commits them to an implausible epistemology outside ethics. I show that irrespective of whether ethical intuitionists take non-inferential ethical knowledge to be a priori or a posteriori, their commitment to the autonomy of ethics and foundationalism does not entail any implausible non-inferential knowledge (...) in areas outside ethics (such as the past, the future, or the unobservable). However, each form of intuitionism does require a controversial stand on certain unresolved issues outside ethics. (shrink)

Evaluativism (Carruthers 2018) and reflexive imperativism (Barlassina and Hayward 2019) agree that valence—the (un)pleasantness of experiences—is a natural kind shared across all affective states. But they disagree about what valence is. For evaluativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of representing its worldly object as good/bad; for reflexive imperativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of commanding its subject to get more/less of itself. I argue that reflexive imperativism is superior to evaluativism according to Carruthers’s own standards. He maintains that (...) a theory of valence should account for its phenomenology and role in imagination-based decision-making. I show that it is reflexive imperativism, rather than evaluativism, that fits this explanatory bill. (shrink)

Animal-human interactions (specifically pet ownership) have positive and negative sides depending on the context and people’s mindsets. Owning a pet is like exposing oneself to information related to animals. If people perceive the benefits of such information (e.g., dog walking and pet play), they are more likely to acknowledge and receive the benefits brought by pets. Otherwise, they will likely feel uncomfortable and perceive being with a pet as costly (e.g., dirtiness, noise). Notably, studies about the effects of pet ownership (...) are mostly conducted in Western countries, where people generally have good impressions of pets. In some Asian cultures, pets are often stigmatized as unsanitary, so the positive effects of pets found in Western countries might not apply to other cultures. (shrink)

A perceptual realism that is naive in a good way must be naively realistic about world and mind. But contemporary self-described naive realists often have trouble acknowledging that both the good cases of successful perception and the bad cases of illusion and hallucination involve internal experiential states with intentional contents that present the world as being a certain way. They prefer to think about experience solely in relational terms because they worry that otherwise we won’t be able to escape from (...) radical skepticism. I argue that experiential relations to objects require that their subjects be in internal experiential states. But this does not mean that these states are our epistemological starting point which can be known independently of any knowledge of the external world. We do escape the epistemological predicament of radical skepticism because the good cases are primary over the bad ones. But this is not because the good cases alone provide reasons for belief, but because we do not need a reason to think we are in a good case, but do need a reason to think we are not, and such a reason must come from a good case. So bad cases can only be thought of as deviations from good cases. And we can only understand experiences as states with contents distinct from their objects and present in good and bad cases once we understand misrepresentation, that is, bad cases, and therefore only as we ascribe knowledge of the external world to ourselves. (shrink)

The assumption that coercion is largely responsible for our legal systems’ efficacy is a common one. I argue that this assumption is false. But I do so indirectly, by objecting to a thesis I call “(Compliance)”, which holds that most citizens comply with most legal mandates most of the time at least partly in virtue of being motivated by legal systems’ threats of sanctions and other unwelcome consequences. The relationship between (Compliance) and the efficacy of legal systems is explained in (...) section 1. There I also show that (Compliance) must be rejected for it relies on unsubstantiated empirical assumptions. In section 2, I claim that an alternative, and more refined, formulation of (Compliance) also lacks adequate support. I conclude with a few general remarks about the centrality of coercion in our thought and talk about legal systems. (shrink)

I follow the distinction of predicative versus attributive adjectives introduced by P.T. Geach in 1956 and discuss Atina Knowles' arguments contra the revisions of Geach's original conception.

The Rachels–Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions—e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn’t good, on pain of rejecting the good altogether. That (...) is impossible, so we must reject the spectrum arguments. (shrink)

Retractions: the good, the bad, and the ugly: What researchers stand to gain from taking more care to understand errors in the scientific record. (Nature | Nature Index, September 8, 2020).

Plato seems to countenance both positive and negative Forms, that is to say, both good and bad ones. He may not say so outright, but he invokes both and rejects neither. The apparent finality of this impression creates a lack of direct interest in the subject: Plato scholars do not give negative Forms much thought except as the prospect relates to something else they happen to be doing. Yet when they do give the matter any thought, typically for the sake (...) of a prior concern, they try either to support the textual evidence or to contradict it, indicating that the evidence does not stand on its own. The purpose of this paper is to determine why they tend to affirm or deny the obvious, how they try to confirm or dispute it, and what this says about Plato’s position. The strategic vehicle is a comparative case study. The confirmation comes from Debra Nails (2013), who needs to embrace negative Forms to demonstrate that the unhypothetical first principle of the all is not identical to the Form of the good, something she cannot do unless Plato recognizes negative Forms. The contradiction comes from Holger Thesleff (2013), who needs to reject negative (Ideal) Forms because the defining feature of his (Ideal) Forms is the possession of positive intrinsic value, which cannot be predicated of anything negative. Despite defending opposite views, or perhaps because of this, they jointly make up for any lack of interest in the scholarly community. I appreciate both yet side with Thesleff. (shrink)

Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent (...) to be the actual cause. Second, the impact of temporal location on causal selection is almost canceled out if the later agent did not violate a norm while the former did. We argue that this is due to the impact that judgments of norm violation have on causal selection—even if the violated norm has nothing to do with the obtaining effect. Third, moral judgments about the effect influence causal selection even in the case in which agents could not have foreseen the effect and did not intend to bring it about. We discuss our findings in connection to recent theories of the role of moral judgment in causal reasoning, on the one hand, and to probabilistic models of temporal location, on the other. (shrink)

This article explains Wittgenstein's distinction between good, bad, and vacuous modern music which he introduced in a diary entry from January 27, 1931. I situate Wittgenstein's discussion in the context of Oswald Spengler's ideas concerning the decline of Western culture, which informed Wittgenstein's philosophical progress during his middle period, and I argue that the music theory of Heinrich Schenker, and Wittgenstein's critique thereof, served as an immediate link between Spengler's cultural pessimism and Wittgenstein's threefold distinction. I conclude that Wittgenstein's distinction (...) between bad and vacuous modern music is analogous to Schenker's distinction between the compositional fallacies of the progressive and the reactionary composers of his time. Concomitantly, Wittgenstein's philosophically problematic notion of good modern music transcended the conceptual framework of both Schenker and Spengler. In this context, I examine Wittgenstein's remarks on Gustav Mahler as well as his remark on the music of the future as monophony, which, I conclude, should be understood ultimately as an ellipsis of his much later view of musical meaning and intelligibility. (shrink)

Retractions play an important role in research communication by highlighting and explaining how research projects have failed and thereby preventing these mistakes from being repeated. However, the process of retraction and the data it produces is often sparse or incomplete. Drawing on evidence from 2046 retraction records, Quan-Hoang Vuong discusses the emerging trends this data highlights and argues for the need to enforce reporting standards for retractions, as a means of de-stigmatising retraction and rewarding practising integrity in the scholarly record.

This chapter argues for an interpretation of Kant's psychology of moral evil that accommodates the so-called excluded middle cases and allows for variations in the magnitude of evil. The strategy involves distinguishing Kant's transcendental psychology from his empirical psychology and arguing that Kant's character rigorism is restricted to the transcendental level. The chapter also explains how Kant's theory of moral evil accommodates 'the badass'; someone who does evil for evil's sake.

This book explores how robotics and artificial intelligence can enhance human lives but also have unsettling “dark sides.” It examines expanding forms of negativity and anxiety about robots, AI, and autonomous vehicles as our human environments are reengineered for intelligent military and security systems and for optimal workplace and domestic operations. It focuses on the impacts of initiatives to make robot interactions more humanlike and less creepy. It analyzes the emerging resistances against these entities in the wake of omnipresent AI (...) applications. It unpacks efforts by developers to have ethical and social influences on robotics and AI, and confronts the AI hype that is designed to shield the entities from criticism. The book draws from science fiction, dramaturgical, ethical, and legal literatures as well as current research agendas of corporations. Engineers, implementers, and researchers have often encountered users' fears and aggressive actions against intelligent entities, especially in the wake of deaths of humans by robots and autonomous vehicles. The book is an invaluable resource for developers and researchers in the field, as well as curious readers who want to play proactive roles in shaping future technologies. (shrink)

A widespread intuition is that words, musical works, and flags are intentionally produced and that they’re abstract types that can have incorrect tokens. But some philosophers, notably Julian Dodd and Nicholas Wolterstorff, think intention-dependence isn’t necessary; tokens just need to have certain relevant intrinsic features to be tokens of a given type. I show how there’s an unappreciated puzzle that arises from these two views: if tokens aren’t intention-dependent and types can admit of correct and incorrect tokens, then some driftwood (...) that washes up and forms what seems like the word ‘cat’ may simultaneously be a misspelling of ‘act’ and innumerable other misspelt words. I consider various ways Dodd and Wolterstorff can respond to this counterintuitive result and argue that biting the bullet, as well as nearby views, are implausible. Thus, they need to give up one of the two commitments, and I argue that requiring the intention-dependence of tokens, rather than the mere possession of certain intrinsic properties, is the best option. (shrink)

In this article I reject the argument of Colin McGinn ("Must I Be Morally Perfect?", 1992) that ordinary morality requires that each of us be morally perfect. McGinn's definition of moral perfection –– according to which I am morally perfect if I never do anything that is supererogatory, but always do what is obligatory, and always avoid doing what is impermissible –– should be rejected, because it is open to the objection that I am morally perfect if I always do (...) what is optional but bad to do (what is suberogatory), in addition to always doing what is obligatory and always avoiding what is impermissible. Moral perfection may be defined as always doing what is obligatory, and always doing what is optional but good to do (supererogatory), and never doing what is impermissible, and never doing what is optional but bad to do [suberogatory]. Since ordinary morality does not require this, ordinary morality does not require moral perfection. (shrink)

One proposed way of preserving the link between criminal negligence and blameworthiness is to define criminal negligence in moral terms. On this view, a person can be held criminally responsible for a negligent act if her negligence reflects a deficit of moral concern. Some theorists are convinced that this definition restores the link between negligence and blameworthiness, while others insist that criminal negligence remains suspect. This article contributes to the discussion by applying the work of ethicist Nomy Arpaly to criminal (...) negligence. Although not interested in legal issues herself, Arpaly has a well-developed theory of moral agency that explains moral concern in terms of responsiveness to moral reasons. Introducing her work to the ongoing scholarly debate will be helpful for two reasons. First, while a definition of negligence in terms of moral concern is recognized as one proposed solution to the negligence–blameworthiness problem, authors promoting it have yet to give a systematic account of moral concern and its relation to blame. Borrowing Arpaly's account will help clarify the idea of moral concern so that both proponents and critics of a concern approach to negligence can have a better-defined debate. Second, her theory of blameworthiness is especially suited to defending the blameworthiness of negligent actions, because it does not have recourse to a special quality of choice or self-control that must be active to render conduct blameworthy. To make this second advantage clear, the article argues that reliance on choice or self-control problematizes blameworthiness for negligence. Those who wish to defend blameworthiness for negligent acts should base their work on an account of moral agency that does not rely on either choice or self-control to explain when an action is blameworthy. (shrink)

Even before we come to consider the influence of luck in terms of the results of our actions or the types of situations we come across, luck plays a decisive role in who we fundamentally are.

This introductory chapter presents the reader with various ways of approaching the topic ‘Wittgenstein and the creativity of language’. It is argued that any serious account of the questions arising from this joint consideration of, on the one hand, this great genius of philosophy and, on the other, the varieties of speech, text, action and beauty which go under the heading ‘the creativity of language’ will have to appreciate the potential of both, in terms of breadth as well as depth. (...) First, the chapter points out a way of understanding Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following in relation to meaning and normativity which, in virtue of respecting Wittgenstein’s own creativity as a writer, does not fall prey to a widespread source of misunderstanding. Next, Wittgenstein’s uses of language receive some additional attention (i.e. his use of analogies, metaphors, punctuation and other literary and rhetorical devices), before a glimpse is offered of an unravelling of the knot that is Wittgenstein and the creativity of language. The multiple interrelated threads here lead into areas of human concern ranging from the philosophy of language and logic through to ethics, aesthetics and politics. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of the contents of the book from the perspective of its editors. (shrink)

It seems like we care about at least two features of our credence function: gradational-accuracy and verisimilitude. Accuracy-first epistemology requires that we care about one feature of our credence function: gradational-accuracy. So if you want to be a verisimilitude-valuing accuracy-firster, you must be able to think of the value of verisimilitude as somehow built into the value of gradational-accuracy. Can this be done? In a recent article, Oddie has argued that it cannot, at least if we want the accuracy measure (...) to be proper. I argue that it can. 1Introduction2Some Nuts and Bolts3First Attempts4Oddie’s Constraint5The Good5.1Proximity over the disagreement metric 5.2Proximity over the magnitude metric 6The Bad and the Ugly 7Some More Good: The Role of Evenness of Distribution 8Some More Bad: Which Propositions to Privilege? 9Concluding Thoughts: Accuracy and Practical Value. (shrink)

While it seems obvious that withdrawing papers, which contain errors or misconduct, helps to keep the literature healthy, researchers want to avoid retractions at all costs.

This essay presents and defends a triage theory of grading: An item to be graded should get full credit if and only if it is clearly or substantially correct, minimal credit if and only if it is clearly or substantially incorrect, and partial credit if and only if it is neither of the above; no other (intermediate) grades should be given. Details on how to implement this are provided, and further issues in the philosophy of grading (reasons for and against (...) grading, grading on a curve, and the subjectivity of grading) are discussed. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 1.8, Aristotle seems to argue that certain external goods are needed for happiness because, in the first place, they are needed for virtuous activity. This has puzzled scholars. After all, it seems possible for a virtuous agent to exercise her virtuous character even under conditions of extreme hardship or deprivation. Indeed, it is natural to think these are precisely the conditions under which one's virtue shines through most clearly. Why then does Aristotle think that a wide range (...) of external goods is required for virtuous activity, and therefore, for happiness? -/- I argue that there is good sense to be made of Aristotle's stance on external goods. Specifically, I explain how, on this view, a range of external goods is required for the full exercise of virtue, and I show that it is only this full exercise that is constitutive of eudaimonia. Drawing on passages in Politics 7.13 and Nicomachean Ethics 3.1, I develop and defend a distinction between the "mere" exercise of virtue, and the full or complete exercise of virtue. I argue that, for Aristotle, the distinguishing feature of this distinction is the value of the virtuous action's ends. An action that fully expresses virtue aims at an end that is unqualifiedly good, while an action that merely exercises virtue does not. I argue that the external goods Aristotle mentions in NE 1.8 are necessary for performing actions with unqualifiedly good ends, and so necessary for the complete exercise of virtue. In addition to providing a more satisfactory account than existing proposals of the role of external goods in Aristotelian happiness, my interpretation has two additional upshots. First, it brings to light an under-appreciated and independently compelling feature of Aristotle's ethical thought: the value of virtuous actions depends in part on the value of the ends they aim to realize. Second, it finds in Aristotle a distinct and powerful way of thinking about the badness of certain kinds of misfortune and deprivation: they are bad in part because they prevent us from fully realizing our capacity for moral agency, from fully engaging with value in the world. (shrink)

Some experts have argued that patients facing certain types of choices should not be told whether their risk is above or below average, because this information may trigger a bias (Fagerlin et al. 2007). But careful consideration shows that the comparative risk heuristic can usefully guide decisions and improve their quality or rationality. Building on an earlier paper of mine (Schwartz 2009), I will argue here that doctors and decision aids should provide comparative risk information to patients, even while further (...) research is conducted. (shrink)

Even with Brexit, the European Union will remain a market of more than 450 million people and a prominent promoter of Western values shared by Australia. Given that the EU has been Australia’s largest investor and economic partner for the past 25 years, it is pertinent to reflect on what an EU without Britain might look like.

Kyle Fritz and Daniel Miller’s reply to my article helpfully clarifies their position and our main points of disagreement. Their view is that those who blame hypocritically lack the right to blame for a violation of some moral norm N in virtue of having an unfair disposition to blame others, but not themselves, for violations of N. This view raises two key questions. First, are there instances of hypocritical blame that do not involve an unfair differential blaming disposition? Second, if (...) the answer to the first question is Yes, do hypocritical blamers of this kind lack the right to blame? In this paper, I argue that the answer to the first question is Yes. Given this, Fritz and Miller’s account faces serious problems regardless of whether the answer to the second question is Yes or No. (shrink)

Several studies (e.g., Becklen & Cervone, 1983; Mack & Rock, 1998; Neisser & Becklen, 1975) have found that observers attending to a particular object or event often fail to report the presence of unexpected items. This has been interpreted as inattentional blindness (IB), a failure to see unattended items (Mack & Rock, 1998). Meanwhile, other studies (e.g., Pashler, 1988; Phillips, 1974; Rensink et al., 1997; Simons, 1996) have found that observers often fail to report the presence of large changes in (...) a display when these changes occur simultaneously with a transient such as an eye movement or flash of the display. This has been interpreted as change blindness (CB), a failure to see unattended changes (Rensink et al., 1997). In both cases there is a striking failure to report an object or event that would be quite visible under other circumstances. And in both cases there is a widespread (although not universal) belief that the underlying cause has to do with the absence of attention. The question then arises as to how these effects might be related. Is CB the same thing as IB? If not, what is the relation between them? And given that these phenomena deal with failures of subjective perception, what can they teach us about the nature of our visual experience? In particular, what can they teach us about the role played by visual attention? (shrink)

This paper considers why obtaining and sustaining a good sexual life tends to be so challenging and why the temptation to settle for a bad one can be so alluring. We engage these questions by cultivating ideas found in the traditions of feminist philosophy and the philosophy of sex and love in dialogue with the works of two unlikely, canonical bedfellows—Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. We propose that some sources of these challenges and temptations are patterned and manifold in that (...) they involve trying to transform, develop, integrate certain unruly emotional structures in oneself, including together with others. Other equally patterned and unruly sources track inherited oppressive or oppressed behaviors and feelings that make emotionally healthy, morally responsible realizations of sexual ways and being more difficult for all parties involved. In contrast to these patterned challenges, some difficulties that face us stem from the fact that humans are genuinely different from one another and evolving—individually, jointly, and collectively—in their sexual needs and wants. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-Nor-BadJ. Clerk ShawNaomi Reshotko. Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-Nor-Bad. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 204. Cloth, $68.00.In this engaging and provocative book, Naomi Reshotko advances a naturalistic interpretation of Socratic philosophy, i.e., of those views expressed by Plato’s Socrates that best comport with Aristotle’s descriptions of Socrates. She contrasts her reading with those that (...) project foreign commitments onto the text, including: (i) moralism, or the separation of ethics from empirical science; (ii) two-dimensional semantics, or theories of meaning that distinguish the semantic contribution to a psychological state made by its subject’s conception of its objects from that made by its actual objects; and (iii) privileged access, or psychological theories that grant human beings incorrigibility concerning some aspect of their own psyches.Part I reviews and synthesizes views that the author shares with Terry Penner: that all desire is for one’s own real (not apparent) good, so that an agent’s belief about what is overall best for her invariably guides her actions; that all human virtue is identical to wisdom; and that virtue, so understood, guarantees the greatest possible satisfaction of the desire for one’s own real good, and so makes one live as well as possible.Part II places the distinction among the good, the bad, and the neither-good-nor-bad (NGNB) at the center of Socratic ethics. On Reshotko’s reading, the only goods are virtue and happiness, and the only bads vice and misery. She does not adequately explain why all actions are NGNB (16, 173), even though actions are individuated by their actual consequences (34–36), so that every action is either good or bad (98). Virtue’s goodness is due to its stable nomological (not conceptual or logical) connection to happiness. This makes virtue the only unconditional, other-generated good, while happiness is the only unconditional, self-generated good—its goodness does not depend on any nomological relation it enters into.Part III provides more detail about virtue and happiness. First, Reshotko explains that virtue is wisdom because it is the science of human happiness, and that this science is identical to every other science. Strictly speaking, nobody knows anything without knowing everything, although some people do grasp “some parts of knowledge” (160). Reshotko advocates this view as a solution to the closing puzzles of the Charmides. Socrates and Critias cannot figure out how temperance benefits, first because they assume that it is knowledge [End Page 132] of all things except good and bad, and then because they assume that it is knowledge of good and bad in isolation from other sciences (173a–175a). But if Socratic wisdom is the structured grasp of everything, then their puzzle is resolved. Second, Reshotko claims that happiness is a life maximally composed of pleasures. While she is sympathetic with the view that happiness is composed of modal pleasures (see G. Rudebusch, Socrates, Pleasure, and Value, Oxford 1999), she concludes that sensate pleasures can also be parts of happiness (185n7).The book’s major flaw is its limited engagement with textual evidence that seems to tell against the author’s readings and its limited coverage of alternative interpretations from the secondary literature. I mention three striking examples here.First, Reshotko argues that harming others is inconsistent with self-benefit because of the likelihood of reciprocal harm (65–71). She then notes passages where Socrates speaks as though harming others harms one’s soul simply by making it more unjust, which makes vice sound like a self-generated bad. Gorgias 472c–481b is particularly problematic in this respect, since Socrates claims there that doing injustice is less painful (but worse) than suffering it. Reshotko tries to make such passages conform with her initial explanation: harming others tends to entrench false beliefs that harming others is consistent with self-benefit, which leads to more harm of others and so more reciprocal harm (71–72, 174). This may be workable, but absent more extensive argument, it seems like an ad hoc maneuver.Second, Reshotko wants to avoid giving... (shrink)

Many philosophers are skeptical about disjunctivism —a theory of perceptual experience which holds roughly that a situation in which I see a banana that is as it appears to me to be and one in which I have a hallucination as of a banana are mentally completely different. Often this skepticism is rooted in the suspicion that such a view cannot adequately account for the bad case—in particular, that such a view cannot explain why what it’s like to have a (...) hallucination can be exactly like what it’s like to have a veridical experience, that it cannot explain why the hallucination I have in the bad case is subjectively indistinguishable from the kind of experience I have in the good case, and that it cannot offer a viable account of the nature of hallucination. -/- In this paper, I argue that a proper formulation of disjunctivism can avoid these objections. Disjunctivism should be formulated as the weakest claim required to preserve its primary motivation, viz., Naïve Realism—the view that veridical experience fundamentally consists in the subject perceiving entities in her environment. And the weakest claim required to preserve Naïve Realism allows for many sorts of commonalities across the good and hallucinatory cases, commonalities that can be marshaled in responding to the objections. Most importantly, disjunctivism properly formulated is compatible with “positive” accounts of the nature of hallucination. (shrink)

Zuko’s plight illuminates the process of aspiration, including common challenges to the aspirant. As Agnes Callard understands it, aspiration typically involves a “deep change in how one sees and feels and thinks.” And this deep change is often intertwined with a change in what contemporary philosopher Christine Korsgaard calls practical identity, a “description under which you value yourself, . . . under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.” But as Zuko (...) shows, practical identities are complex, sometimes unwieldy, and changes in explicit self-conceptions can take work, time, and perhaps some luck to bring about the deep change one aspires to. Even after he explicitly disavows his past actions, Zuko finds himself reverting to past behaviors, doing things that (on some level) he wishes he would not. These actions frustrate him— “Why am I so bad at being good?”— but they are not mere lapses in judgment. They come naturally and express an identity that Zuko had long embraced and cultivated but is now trying to leave behind. The arc of Zuko’s transformation illustrates the interplay between two dimensions of practical identity. On the one hand, as Korsgaard’s account emphasizes, our explicit self-conceptions and values matter. They guide our actions and shape how we see the world. But Zuko’s struggles suggest that such self-conceptions and aspirations are only part of the story. According to Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, our practical identity depends more on our existential engagement with the world than on our explicit self-conceptions. And these different dimensions of practical identity do not always align. As William Blattner writes, “Some of the most challenging conflicts in our lives arise when who we are existentially engaged in being stands in tension with who we think of ourselves as being.” Zuko is frustrated because, despite consciously trying to change, his being-in-the-world conflicts with his Korsgaardian practical identity. His world is still shaped (residually) by an identity he wants to shed. The way Zuko’s world and actions continue to be shaped by an identity he is trying to leave behind highlights a key difficulty of transformation. Zuko’s desire to prove his worth to his father and his rage have so thoroughly permeated his being-in-the-world that they are second nature. They shape his orientation toward the world and fuel his firebending. For better and worse, his spontaneous actions do not always fall in step with his conscious commitments. The same skills and dispositions Zuko previously cultivated as central to his identity now lead to unwanted actions and keep him from aspired-to actions. To become good in the way he wants, Zuko must not only cultivate the dispositions that will allow his aspired-to identity to become part and parcel of his being-in-the-world, but he must clear out or modify the residual influence of his past identity and related dispositions and values. -/- . (shrink)

Must the best friends necessarily be good people? On the one hand, as Aristotle puts it, ‘people think that the same people are good and also friends’. But on the other hand, friendship sometimes seems to require that one behave badly. For example, a normally honest person might lie to corroborate a friend's story. What I will call closeness, which I take to include sensitivity to friends' subjective values and concerns as well as an inclination to take their subjective interests (...) as reasons for action, is characteristic of friendship. But this seems to require that good friends should be morally flexible, more so than is compatible with a virtuous character. This would imply tension between ideals of friendship and ideals of character. But there is an important connection between virtue and friendship which arises precisely from friends' closeness, when concern for wellbeing, another important feature of friendship, is also taken into account. This helps mitigate the tension and shows how friendship and virtue are interconnected. The connection in turn provides friendship-based reason to think the best friends must be good people, even though concerns of friendship may occasionally clash with other moral concerns. (shrink)

Politics abounds with bad language: lying and bullshitting, grandstanding and virtue signaling, code words and dogwhistles, and more. But why is there so much bad language in politics? And what, if anything, can we do about it? In this paper I show how these two questions are connected. Politics is full of bad language because existing social and political institutions are structured in such a way that the production of bad language becomes rational. In principle, by modifying these institutions we (...) can reduce the prevalence of bad language. However, as I show, such practical efforts are fraught with difficulties. After first outlining an account of bad language (Section 1), I examine the rationality of three different types of bad language: inaccurate language, insincere language, and unclear language (Section 2). Next, I discuss the possibility of implementing institutional reforms to improve the quality of political discourse (Section 3). However, I then outline and discuss two serious complications for institutional reforms—namely, they create risk of abuse, and they could preclude instances of seemingly bad language that, in fact, are socially beneficial (Section 4). I conclude with some thoughts about how to pursue institutional reform in an appropriately circumspect manner (Section 5). (shrink)

Very plausibly, there is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality – even if, as in a kind of Truman Show scenario, intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive standards. One of these self-defining capacities, or capacities whose exercise reveals (...) who we are, is Reason, our capacity for normative self-governance. I argue that in its practical use, Reason formally aims at competently realizing self-chosen valuable ends that are in harmony with each other, or valuable achievements. In its theoretical use, it formally aims at competently grasping fundamental enough subject matters, or a kind of understanding. Because success by reason’s own standards requires many things to go right, there are many different ways in which we can fall short. Some of them amount to partial success. But some, like incompetent inquiry that fails to yield understanding of its target, or taking inefficient means to a worthless end, are robust failures that amount to epistemic or agential unflourishing, and thus to a form of ill-being. (shrink)

According to luck egalitarianism, it is not unfair when people are disadvantaged by choices they are responsible for. This implies that those who are disadvantaged by choices that prevent disadvantage to others are not eligible for compensation. This is counterintuitive. We argue that the problem such cases pose for luck egalitarianism reveals an important distinction between responsibility for creating disadvantage and responsibility for distributing disadvantage which has hitherto been overlooked. We develop and defend a version of luck egalitarianism which only (...) holds people responsible for creating disadvantage. This revision enables luck egalitarianism to offer compensation to those who are disadvantaged by preventing disadvantage to others, like dependent caretakers, without compromising the responsibility–sensitivity at the heart of luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

When a mother deliberately harms her child, it is tempting to assume that she must be either insane or lacking the "natural" love of a mother for her children. We want to believe that such mothers have almost nothing in common with "good" mothers. Drawing extensively on empirical research, Sarah LaChance Adams' Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What A "Good" Mother Would Do shows that maternal ambivalence, simultaneous desires to nurture and violently reject one's children, is both common and reasonable, (...) the result of genuine conflicts between mothers' interests and those of their children. Both appropriate support and deliberative agency are necessary to avoid maternal ambivalence... (shrink)

Suppose you want to do as much good as possible. What should you do? According to members of the effective altruism movement—which has produced much of the thinking on this issue and counts several moral philosophers as its key protagonists—we should prioritise among the world’s problems by assessing their scale, solvability, and neglectedness. Once we’ve done this, the three top priorities, not necessarily in this order, are (1) aiding the world’s poorest people by providing life-saving medical treatments or alleviating poverty (...) itself, (2) preventing global catastrophic risks, such as those posed by nuclear war or rogue artificial intelligence, and (3) ending factory farming. These claims are both plausible and striking. If correct, they should prompt a stark revision of how we approach our altruistic activities. However, the project of determining how to do the most good—as opposed to say, whether we should do the most good—has only recently, within the last ten years, become the subject of serious academic attention. Many key claims have not yet been carefully scrutinised. This is a cause for concern: are effective altruists doing good badly? In this thesis, I critique and develop some of the latest claims about how individuals can do the most good. I do this in three areas: the value of saving lives (preventing premature deaths), how best to improve lives (making people happier during their lives), and cause prioritisation methodology (frameworks for determining which problems are the highest priorities). In each case, I raise novel theoretical considerations that, when incorporated, change the analysis. Roughly speaking, my main conclusions are (1) saving lives is not as straightforwardly good we tend to suppose, may not be good at all, and is not clearly a priority; (2) happiness can be measured through self-reports and, based on the self-reported evidence, treating mental health stands out as an overlooked problem that may be an even more cost-effective way to improve lives than alleviating poverty; (3) the cause prioritisation methodology proposed by effective altruists needs to be moderately reconceptualised and, when it is, it turns out it is not as illuminating a tool as we might have thought and hoped. (shrink)

Levy (2021 Levy, N. (2021). Bad beliefs: Why they happen to good people. Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]) argues that bad beliefs predominately stem from automatic (albeit rational) updating in response to testimonial evidence. To counteract such beliefs, then, we should focus on ridding our epistemic environments of misleading testimony. This paper responds as follows. First, I argue that the suite of automatic processes related to bad beliefs extends well beyond the deference-based processes that Levy identifies. Second, I push back (...) against Levy’s claim that bad beliefs stem from wholly rational processes, suggesting that, in many cases, such processes are better characterized as arational. Finally, I note that Levy is too quick to dismiss the role that individuals can play in cleaning up their own epistemic environments, and I suggest one route through which this is possible. (shrink)

Anyone familiar with Richard Kraut's work in ancient philosophy will be excited to see him putting aside the dusty tomes of the ancients and delving into ethics first-hand. He does not disappoint. His book is a lucid and wide-ranging discussion that provides at least the core of an ethical theory and an appealing set of answers to a range of ethical questions.Kraut aims to provide an alternative to utilitarianism that preserves the good-centred nature of that theory. He claims that all (...) justification ‘proceeds by way of good and bad’ and that the only way for something to be good or bad is for it to be good or bad for some living thing. He is adamant that this does not commit him to utilitarianism, nor to downplaying considerations such as promise-keeping or special relationships. On Kraut's view, such factors can make it the case that I have more reason to perform one action than another but it is a condition of my having any reason to perform an action that it does some good or impedes some harm. Kraut once seems to dissent from this, claiming that: ‘the strength of a practical reason varies according to …. (shrink)

In this afterword I will try to re-launch the inquiry into the causes of good-bad polity and good-bad relationships between man and society, individual and institutions. Through an analogy between Einaudi’s search for good government and Calvino’s “Invisible cities”, I will sketch an account of the human and invisible foundations – first of all: trust/distrust – of any good-bad polity.

Desire is commonly spoken of as a state in which the desired object seems good, which apparently ascribes an evaluative element to desire. I offer a new defence of this old idea. As traditionally conceived, this view faces serious objections related to its way of characterizing desire's evaluative content. I develop an alternative conception of evaluative mental content which is plausible in its own right, allows the evaluative desire theorist to avoid the standard objections, and sheds interesting new light on (...) the idea of evaluative experience. (shrink)

A central element in neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics is the focus on abstraction principles, and the use of abstraction principles to ground various areas of mathematics. But as is well known, not all abstraction principles are in good standing. Various proposals for singling out the acceptable abstraction principles have been presented. Here I investigate what philosophical underpinnings can be provided for these proposals; specifically, underpinnings that fit the neo-Fregean's general outlook. Among the philosophical ideas I consider are: general views on (...) a priori justification; the idea of abstraction as reconceptualization, the idea that truth is prior to reference in the sense associated with Frege's context principle; and various broadly relativistic views. The conclusions are by and large negative. (shrink)

Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a telic (...) structure, so that practical reason, for example, constitutively aims at competently realizing valuable ends that are in harmony. According to telic perfectionism, we do well when such formal aims are realized and badly when they’re frustrated. Crucially, our subjective nature is defined not only by how we reason but also by how we feel. And valenced experience, too, has built-in directionality, according to the most plausible views about the nature of pleasure and pain. The phenomenal character of unpleasant pain is inseparable from its setting for us the end of eliminating itself. As long as we are in pain, then, the formal aim of our self-defining capacity for valenced experience is frustrated. For telic perfectionism, unpleasant pain is thus robustly bad for us, and the explanation of its badness makes essential reference to how it feels. (shrink)

According to the Good True Self (GTS) theory, if an action is deemed good, its psychological source is typically viewed as more reflective of its agent’s true self, of who the agent really is ‘deep down inside’; if the action is deemed bad, its psychological source is typically viewed as more external to its agent’s true self. In previous work, we discovered a related asymmetry in judgments of blame- and praiseworthiness with respect to the mitigating effect of moral ignorance via (...) childhood deprivation. Inspired by work motivating the GTS theory, we ran a new study to discover whether our asymmetry likewise reflected judgments about the true self. It did. However, it is unclear whether our results fit with the ‘good’ part of the GTS theory: some of our and others’ results suggest that, in certain contexts, wrong actions are taken to be more expressive of agents’ true selves than right ones. In this paper, we propose that our and others’ data can be explained by the hypothesis that we are inclined to judge as the GTS theory predicts when there is a readily available external explanation for an agent’s action. In short, we give people the benefit of the doubt. (shrink)

According to McHugh and Way reasoning is a person-level attitude revision that is regulated by its constitutive aim of getting fitting attitudes. They claim that this account offers an explanation of what is wrong with reasoning in ways one believes to be bad and that this explanation is an alternative to an explanation that appeals to the so-called Taking Condition. I argue that their explanation is unsatisfying.