This paper provides an examination of some problems caused by the concentration of influence in the capital markets of developed countries. In particular, I argue that large asset managers exercise quasi-political power that is not democratically legitimate. In section two, I will examine the economic driver behind the size and power of the big asset managers: the passive investing revolution. I will discuss several respects in which this revolution has fundamentally changed capital markets, most notably by making a large share (...) of investors universal owners. In the third section, I argue for my central analytical conjecture: asset managers exercise quasi-political power. They use their influence to shape the rules of the game in public capital markets in order to implement social and environmental policies that have traditionally been the exclusive purview of states. “Asset manager capitalism” is a recent term coined to refer to the contemporary system of corporate governance that succeeded the Berle and Means corporation with its dispersed ownership; the argument of this section is that asset manager capitalism is also a new political-economic regime. In the fourth section I defend my central normative claim: asset manager capitalism is an untenable and illegitimate political-economic arrangement, for at least two reasons. First, the power of asset managers is not checked by any institutional constraints, and is not rendered legitimate by any democratic process. More fundamental than this procedural critique is an argument that the interests of asset managers could not be aligned with the public interest, given the fact that the distribution of capital is highly unequal. I conclude by discussing several proposals to reform asset manager capitalism. (shrink)

Desire satisfactionists are united by their belief that what makes someone well-off is the satisfaction of their desires. But this commitment obscures a number of underlying differences, since there are several theoretical choice points on the way to making this commitment precise. This article is about two of the most important choice points. The first concerns an epistemic requirement on well-being. Suppose that one's desire that P is satisfied. Must one also know (or believe, or justifiably believe) that one's desire (...) that P is satisfied in order to benefit from P? If so, there is an epistemic requirement on well-being. The second concerns the time at which one benefits. Well-being is a temporal phenomenon: given that one benefits from the satisfaction of one's desire that P, when does one benefit? Perhaps one benefits at the times at which one desires P, or the times at which P obtains, or both. I defend a view I call “concurrent awareness desire satisfactionism”: one benefits only at times at which both one desires P and P obtains (concurrence) and one benefits only if one is aware that one's desire is satisfied (awareness). I motivate this view by showing how it gives us solutions to many of the canonical problems facing desire satisfactionism. Then I put the two parts of the view together and explore some of its further implications. Ultimately, I conclude that well-being is an organic unity composed of a desiderative component, an epistemic component, and a worldly component, none of which are valuable on their own, but which are valuable when they are related in the right way. (shrink)

The experience machine poses the most important problem for hedonist theories of well-being. I argue that desire satisfactionism about well-being faces a similar problem: the desire machine. Upon entering this machine, your desires are altered through some minor neurosurgery. In particular, the machine causes you to desire everything that actually happens. The experience machine constructs a simulated world that matches your preexisting desires. The desire machine reconstructs your conative state to match the preexisting world. Desire satisfactionism recommends entering the desire (...) machine because you will then have more satisfied desires, but this seems wrong. -/- In this paper, I consider how desire satisfactionists might avoid the result that entering the desire machine increases one’s well-being. First, I further motivate why this problem arises. Second, I consider coherence-based norms of rational desire change. Finally, I argue that introducing a substantive account of fitting desire is the only plausible solution, but that this response requires abandoning pure subjectivism about well-being. (shrink)

The market failures approach to business ethics has recently garnered substantial critical attention (see, e.g., Cohen and Peterson 2019; Moriarty 2020; Steinberg 2017; Hsieh 2017; von Kriegstein 2016; Smith 2018; Endorfer and Larue 2022; Singer 2018). Though precursors of this view can be found in the literature (e.g., McMahon 1981; Friedman 1970), it was Joseph Heath (2004, 2006, 2014, 2023) who developed the approach and gave it its name. The market failures approach (henceforth: MFA) is concerned with the ethical obligations (...) of managers of firms (Heath 2014, 69). Roughly, it holds that managers ought not to conduct their businesses in a way that exploits market failures. “Market failure” is a technical term, meaning any failure of the conditions of the first fundamental welfare theorem, sometimes called the “Pareto conditions” (see Arrow 1951). The theorem states that if the Pareto conditions hold, then the market equilibrium will use society’s scarce resources efficiently, meaning that no one could be made better-off without making anyone else worse off. Efficiency, according to Heath (2014, chapter 7), is the implicit morality of the market. We coordinate much of our shared activity using markets, Heath claims, because of their ability to produce efficient results. Markets are good forms of social organization, according to Heath, because they are the best way to promote our values given empirical facts about the frailties of human psychology and the informational constraints that we face. As such, managers ought not compromise the very conditions that justify a market economy by profiting from breakdowns in the market’s efficiency. Managers are permitted to maximize profits, so long as they do not violate the market’s norm of efficiency in so doing. This is because the fundamental justification for the profit motive is that it is necessary for the operation of the price system which is essential to the efficiency properties of markets. In this paper, I will argue that the MFA is more general than even Heath himself claims. The MFA describes the professional obligations of managers, but the view I develop, the generalized market failures approach, describes the obligations of all market participants. Since efficiency is the implicit morality of the market, it binds not just managers, but all market participants, including consumers, investors and workers. Market participants are permitted to maximize the benefit they gain from market interactions, as long as they do so in a way that does not take advantage of any market failures. Generalizing the MFA in this way has three benefits: first, we gain a unified understanding of the ethics of non-managerial market roles; second, we will develop an even better understanding of the duties of managers; finally, it gives us the resources to respond to some familiar objections to the MFA found in the literature. In the next section, I will further motivate the MFA and explain how this motivation can be easily generalized to other market roles. Importantly, one can avoid benefiting from a market failure in two distinct ways: by avoiding transactions that exploit market failures or by transacting in such markets and then remediating the harm done, by compensating those negatively affected by the market failure. This section concludes by discussing how the remediation duties are to be split between the transacting parties and how to identify the parties to whom compensation is owed. In section 3, I use the tools of the generalized MFA to develop a unified ethics of consumption, investment and labor, respectively. This is the basis of a grand abductive argument for the generalized MFA. The view is strongly supported by the fact that it provides attractive and unifying explanations of our obligations in domains as variegated as carbon offsetting, CEO compensation, the reparations white Americans owe to black Americans and occupational licensure. Section 4 briefly concludes. (shrink)

Consider the most recent Yale-Harvard football game, an event which occurred on 11/20/21 in New Haven, lasting about three hours. This event, like many college football games before, was composed of four quarters, each of which was composed of possessions, each of which was composed of downs, each of which was composed of particular movements, tackles and decisions of the individual players. Each of these parts of the game was itself an event, occurring in a smaller region of space and (...) time than the game itself. Each of these events involved material objects like players, helmets, jerseys, etc. Each had causes and effects, and each instantiated qualitative properties, such as being a kickoff or being a tackle. These are paradigmatic examples of events. Events are many and varied; some other examples include the melting of an ice cube, the birth of a horse, the supernova of a star, the presidential election campaign and a winter snowstorm. Each of these took place in a certain region of spacetime, had other events as parts, involved certain objects, had causes and effects, and instantiated properties. Objects and their properties are not the only furniture in the world. Events are a crucial part of our manifest and scientific pictures of the world. We go to football games, think about and participate in elections, eagerly anticipate the birth of a child, and quantify over and explain such things in our scientific theories. Yet, events have received insufficient attention from metaphysicians. Some philosophers have been skeptical of events, holding that talk of events can be paraphrased away, or that events can be reduced to objects and properties.1 When philosophers have accepted events, their motivations have usually been extrinsic—events are introduced in order to play a role in a larger philosophical system. This tendency has led philosophers to miss a number of interesting features of events. In this paper, I wish to reverse that trend by developing an ontology of events which is not an afterthought with respect to another philosophical project. In so doing, I will provide answers to substantive metaphysical questions about the relations in which events stand and their identity conditions. In the next section, I identify four basic relations in which events stand: parthood, involvement, causation and instantiation, focusing in particular on involvement. Then, I argue that events are individuated by their involvements, and criticize the identity conditions which have been offered by other philosophers, notably Quine, Davidson and Kim. I then conclude. (shrink)

Natural resources, especially land, play an important role in many economic problems society faces today, including the climate crisis, housing shortages and severe inequality. Yet, land has been either entirely neglected or seriously misunderstood by contemporary theorists of distributive justice. I aim to correct that in this paper. In his theory of original acquisition, Locke did not carefully distinguish between the value of natural resources and the value that we add by laboring upon them. This oversight led him to the (...) mistaken conclusion that labor mixing gives the laborer an entitlement to both the improvement and the resource. I explain how Locke's false belief that the proviso was satisfied in his time was the fundamental cause of this error. -/- Instead, we should think, following Henry George, that the community is entitled to the economic value of natural resources, because the community created the value of resources, not the individual improver. I discuss an argument from George's "Progress and Poverty" that selfownership is actually inconsistent with (rather than the ground for, as Locke thought) private appropriation of natural resources. I present George's argument that private appropriation of natural resources is akin to forced labor, which is remarkably similar to Nozick's infamous argument that taxation is akin to forced labor. -/- I then develop my own view of original acquisition, inspired by George. The selfownership of improvers gives them an entitlement to improvements that they generate. But the self-ownership of everyone else precludes an entitlement to natural resources value. Natural resource rents should not be enjoyed only by those who improve the resource, but rather, by all community members in proportion to the share of demand for natural resources they are responsible for. In the last section, I consider and refute an objection from the luck egalitarian claiming that natural talents are relevantly similar to land. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nature of reality by looking at the philosophical debate between realism and idealism and at scientific investigations in quantum physics and at recent studies of animal senses, neurology and cognitive psychology. The concept of perceptual relativity is examined and this involves looking at sense perception in other animals and various examples of perceptual relativity in science. It will be concluded that the universe is observer dependent and that there is no reality independent of the observer, which (...) is knowable to the observer. The paper concludes by an investigation of what an observer dependent universe would be like and that recognition of an observer dependent world would lead to a more open minded and tolerant world. (shrink)

In recent years, the science and the philosophy of consciousness has seen growing interest in structural questions about consciousness. This is the Editorial Introduction for a special volume for Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on “Structuralism in Consciousness Studies.”.

Deflationists hold that it does not seem to us, in experience, as though time robustly passes. There is some recent empirical evidence that appears to support this contention. Equally, empirical evidence suggests that we naïvely represent time as dynamical. Thus deflationists are faced with an explanatory burden. If, as they maintain, the world seems to us in experience as though it is non-dynamical, then why do we represent time as dynamical? This paper takes up the challenge of investigating, on the (...) part of the deflationist, one candidate explanation. We hypothesise that people’s belief that the future is what we call deliberatively open partly explains why they represent time as dynamical. In a series of two experiments we test this hypothesis. We find no evidence that beliefs about deliberative openness explain why people represent time as dynamical. Hence there remains an explanatory burden for the deflationist to discharge. (shrink)

This paper outlines a new pluralistic theory of normative reasons for belief, welfarist pluralism, which aims to explain how there can be basic alethic/epistemic reasons for belief and basic pragmatic/non-alethic reasons for belief that can combine to determine what one ought to believe. The paper shows how this non-derivative first-order pluralism arises from a purely welfarist account of the foundations of theoretical normativity, thereby combining foundational pragmatism with non-derivative pluralism about normative reasons for belief. In addition, this paper outlines how (...) welfarist pluralism provides a new and potentialy attractive account of the value of truth (or its indicators), namely that the value of truth (or its indicators) is its direct contribution to individuals' personal good or wellbeing. (shrink)

The existing philosophical debate about the nature of reasons for belief between pragmatists and evidentialists has been substantially biased in favor of evidentialists. The literature has been focused on gathering and evaluating evidence pertaining to evidentialism and pragmatism, in the form of philosophical arguments for and against these two theses. But this way of proceeding simply presumes the truth of evidentialism, since it assumes that what we should be doing when evaluating pragmatism and evidentialism is collecting relevant evidence in order (...) to determine which of them we should believe. Evidentialism recommends this way of proceeding, but pragmatism does not. Holding the debate on terms more favorable to the pragmatist would require also identifying and assessing the practical reasons in favor of belief in pragmatism and evidentialism. Ultimately, as I will argue in this paper, conducting the debate in a fair way will shed new light on the merits of pragmatism and the flaws of evidentialism. In the first section, I outline some terminological preliminaries and identify how the discussion is biased in favor of evidentialism. In the second section, I identify the practical reasons bearing on belief in pragmatism and evidentialism. I argue that there are structural reasons why almost everyone, almost all of the time, will have more than ample practical reason to be a pragmatist rather than an evidentialist. Then, in the third section, I examine the prospect that pragmatism and evidentialism could be self-defeating theories, and show that the self-defeat of evidentialism is both more likely and worse than the self-defeat of pragmatism. In the fourth section, I discuss how to rationally change or make up one’s mind about pragmatism and evidentialism, and how to determine what to believe under uncertainty about whether pragmatism or evidentialism is correct. Then, I conclude. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an argument for the view that every body of evidence rationalizes exactly one doxastic attitude to each proposition. This is the uniqueness thesis. I do this by identifying a family of explanatory demands facing permissivists, those who deny the uniqueness thesis. Permissivists have traditionally motivated their view by attempting to identify counterexamples to the uniqueness thesis. But they have not developed a more general account of when permissive cases arise, and why. Permissivists cannot explain why (...) permissive cases are permissive, or how permissive they are. The paper contains three sections. First, I identify the explanatory demands facing the permissivist. Second, I survey a few existing proposals in the literature for how these explanatory demands might be answered, and argue that they fail. In the third section, I consider how permissivists might “soften” these explanatory demands, by holding that the permissible range of attitudes has vague borders, or that we do not know where its borders lie. I argue against both options. To do this, I present a general argument that there cannot be vague deontic facts, by appealing to a dominance principle and basic principles of deontic logic. If there are no deontic facts, then the permissible range of attitudes could not have vague borders, so the explanatory demands facing the permissivist remain unanswered. (shrink)

This paper is written to question the widespread belief among anthropologists that prehistoric hunter gatherers knew about agriculture long before agriculture began to be practised. The paper suggests gradually accumulating human knowledge led to the development of agriculture rather than population pressure, favourable mutations or convenient climate, all of which would have occurred at various times long before agriculture was developed, without leading to the discovery of agriculture.

In this paper I will introduce a new compatibilist account of free action: indirect conscious control compatibilism, or just indirect compatibilism for short. On this account, actions are free either when they are caused by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes, or else by sub‐personal level processes influenced in particular ways by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes. This view is motivated by a problem faced by a certain family of compatibilist views, which I call conscious control views. These views hold that we act (...) freely when we act in a way that is caused by certain conscious psychological processes. One problem for such views is that current neuroscience suggests that most of our actions are not caused by such processes. Instead, many of the actions we typically suppose are free are caused by sub‐personal level processes and hence would count as not free according to contemporary conscious control views. I argue, contra these views, that many actions caused by these sub‐personal level processes are indirectly free. Further, most of the actions we ordinarily judge to be free are free in this indirect manner. (shrink)

This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research (...) program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution ; Enculturation and regulative folk psychology ; and Defenses of pluralism. (shrink)

Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...

Abstract: The topic for this paper is the phenomenon of apparent value incommensurability—two goods are apparently incommensurable when it appears that neither is better than the other nor are they equally good. I shall consider three theories of this phenomenon. Indeterminists like Broome (1997) hold that the phenomenon is due to vagueness: when two goods appear to be incommensurable, this owes to the fact that “better than” is vague. Incommensurabilists like Chang (2002) hold that some goods appear to be incommensurable (...) because they genuinely are, because it is determinately the case than neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. I defend epistemicism, the view that the appearance of value incommensurability is due only to our ignorance of how goods compare. In reality, all goods are commensurable. I offer two arguments for epistemicism and against other views. First, epistemicists are committed to less unexplained axiological structure than are non-epistemicists, who must explain the extra structure that they posit. Second, only epistemicists have an adequate explanation of some facts about the scope of apparent incommensurability. Finally, I identify a class of putative counterexamples to the epistemicist’s analysis, and argue that these counterexamples do not succeed. If my arguments are sound, then, we have very good reason to think that for any two things that are good, either one is (determinately) better than the other, or they are (determinately) equally good. (shrink)

This paper presents 59 new studies (N = 72,310) which focus primarily on the “bat and ball problem.” It documents our attempts to understand the determinants of the erroneous intuition, our exploration of ways to stimulate reflection, and our discovery that the erroneous intuition often survives whatever further reflection can be induced. Our investigation helps inform conceptions of dual process models, as “system 1” processes often appear to override or corrupt “system 2” processes. Many choose to uphold their intuition, even (...) when directly confronted with simple arithmetic that contradicts it – especially if the intuition is approximately correct. (shrink)

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a (...) degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...) themselves substantive. (shrink)

This chapter articulates two concerns that Karl Jaspers raised (with Hannah Arendt) about the common practice of viewing moral evil as unintelligible. The first is that this involves exoticizing the act and/or perpetrator in such a way that moral condemnation becomes difficult. The second is that it can lead us to treat the perpetrator, place, or victim as tainted or stained by a force whose motives we cannot grasp; this in turn can lead to magical thinking about evil as somehow (...) contagious or contaminating. After distinguishing some of the main categories of evil discussed in the western tradition, I examine ways in which moral evil, in particular, has been characterized as unintelligible, and try to discern which of them raises these Jaspersian concerns. I argue that there are at least two conceptions of “radical evil”—not the Kantian one, but the ones articulated by Hannah Arendt—that do so. (shrink)

There are two kinds of time-bias: near-bias and future-bias. While philosophers typically hold that near-bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future-bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been levelled against both near-bias and future-bias, the kind of arbitrariness in question has been different. In this paper we investigate whether there are forms of arbitrariness that are common to both kinds (...) of preferences, and hence whether there are versions of the arbitrariness objection that are objections both to near-bias and future-bias. If there are, then this might go some way towards undermining normative hybridism and to defending a thorough-going time-neutralism. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)

I reply to seven objections to anthropomorphic theism: (1) That anthropomorphic theism is idolatrous. In reply I rely on the concept/conception distinction. (2) That faith requires certainty. In reply I argue that full belief may be based on probable inference. (3) That the truly infinite is incomprehensible. In reply I distinguish two senses of knowing what you mean. (4) "You Kant say that!" In reply I distinguish shallow from deep Kantianism. (5) "Shall Old Aquinas be forgot?" In reply I discuss (...) the simplicity of God. (6) What those garrulous mystics say about the ineffable. In reply I argue that mystics should be anthropomorphites. (7) Antitheodicy. In reply I distinguish the community of all agents from the community of finite frail agents. (shrink)

An increasing amount of twenty-first century metaphysics is couched in explicitly hyperintensional terms. A prerequisite of hyperintensional metaphysics is that reality itself be hyperintensional: at the metaphysical level, propositions, properties, operators, and other elements of the type hierarchy, must be more fine-grained than functions from possible worlds to extensions. In this paper I develop, in the setting of type theory, a general framework for reasoning about the granularity of propositions and properties. The theory takes as primitive the notion of a (...) substitution on a proposition (property, etc.) and, among other things, uses this idea to elucidate a number of theoretically important distinctions. A class of structures are identified which can be used to model a wide range of positions about the granularity of reality; certain of these structures are seen to receive a natural treatment in the category of M-sets. (shrink)

Philosophers commonly say that beliefs come in degrees. Drawing from the literature, I make precise three arguments for this claim: an argument from degrees of confidence, an argument from degrees of firmness, and an argument from natural language. I show that they all fail. I also advance three arguments that beliefs do not come in degrees: an argument from natural language, an argument from intuition, and an argument from the metaphysics of degrees. On the basis of these arguments, I conclude (...) that beliefs do not come in degrees. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that ‘one-instant worlds’—worlds that contain a single instant—fail to contain time. We experimentally investigate whether these worlds satisfy the folk concept of time. We found that ~50% of participants hold that there is time in such worlds. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities. First, the population disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, with there being a substantial sub-population for whom the presence of neither an (...) A-, B-, nor C-series, is necessary for time, and hence those folk have a radically more minimal concept of time than has been attributed to them by philosophers. Or, second, the population do not disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, but disagree about what it takes for a world to fail to contain even a C-series. (shrink)

We investigated, experimentally, the contention that the folk view, or naïve theory, of time, amongst the population we investigated is dynamical. We found that amongst that population, ~ 70% have an extant theory of time that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory, and ~ 70% of those who deploy a naïve theory of time deploy a naïve theory that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory. Interestingly, while we found stable results across our (...) two experiments regarding the percentage of participants that have a dynamical or non-dynamical extant theory of time, we did not find such stability regarding which particular dynamical or non-dynamical theory of time they take to be most similar to our world. This suggests that there might be two extant theories in the population—a broadly dynamical one and a broadly non-dynamical one—but that those theories are sufficiently incomplete that participants do not stably choose the same dynamical theory as being most similar to our world. This suggests that while appeals to the ordinary view of time may do some work in the context of adjudicating disputes between dynamists and non-dynamists, they likely cannot do any such work adjudicating disputes between particular brands of dynamism. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates the contention that the folk concept of time is a functional concept: a concept according to which time is whatever plays a certain functional role or roles. This hypothesis could explain why, in previous research, surprisingly large percentages of participants judge that there is time at worlds that contain no one-dimensional substructure of ordered instants. If it seems to participants that even in those worlds the relevant functional role is played, then this could explain why they (...) judge that there is time in those worlds. While our experiment supported the finding that participants are reticent to judge that there is no time, actually, we found no evidence that this is because they deploy a functionalist concept, at least of the kind proposed in recent research. Our findings are, however, consistent with the folk deploying a much more minimal functionalist concept according to which time is just whatever it is—regardless of its nature—that plays the role of grounding our temporal phenomenology. (shrink)

Is consciousness intrinsically valuable? Some theorists favor the positive view, according to which consciousness itself accrues intrinsic value, independent of the particular kind of experience instantiated. In contrast, I favor the neutral view, according to which consciousness is neither intrinsically valuable nor disvaluable. The primary purpose of this paper is to clarify what is at stake when we ask whether consciousness is intrinsically valuable, to carve out the theoretical space, and to evaluate the question rigorously. Along the way, I also (...) show why the neutral view is attractive and why certain arguments for the positive view do not work. (shrink)

It has been argued recently that classical theism and Lewisian modal realism are incompatible theses. The most substantial argument to this effect takes the form of a trilemma. It argues that no sense can be made of God’s being a necessary being in the modal realistic picture, on pain of, among other things, modal collapse. The question of this essay is: Is that so? My goal here is to detail the reasons that have been offered in support of this contention (...) and then defend the coherence of theistic modal realism from the trilemma. I call my reply to the argument an “Anselmian-Thomistic” defense, since it appeals to resources from classical medieval philosophy, especially from Anselm and Aquinas. (shrink)

An increasing amount of contemporary philosophy of mathematics posits, and theorizes in terms of special kinds of mathematical modality. The goal of this paper is to bring recent work on higher-order metaphysics to bear on the investigation of these modalities. The main focus of the paper will be views that posit mathematical contingency or indeterminacy about statements that concern the `width' of the set theoretic universe, such as Cantor's continuum hypothesis. Within a higher-order framework I show that contingency about the (...) width of the set-theoretic universe refutes two orthodoxies concerning the structure of modal reality: the view that the broadest necessity has a logic of S5, and the "Leibniz biconditionals" stating that what is possible, in the broadest sense of possible, is what is true in some possible world. Nonetheless, I suggest that the underlying picture of modal set-theory is coherent and has attractions. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates one aspect of the folk concept of time by testing how the presence or absence of directedness impacts judgements about whether there is time in a world. Experiment 1 found that dynamists, showed significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in dynamically directed worlds than in non-dynamical non-directed worlds. Comparing our results to those we describe in Latham et al., we report that while ~ 70% of dynamists say there is time in B-theory worlds, (...) only ~ 45% say there is time in C-theory worlds. Thus, while the presence of directedness makes dynamists more inclined to say there is time in a world, a substantial subpopulation of dynamists judge that there is time in non-directed worlds. By contrast, a majority of non-dynamists judged that there was time in both growing block worlds and C-theory worlds, with no significant differences between the means. Experiment 2 found that when participants are only presented with non-dynamical worlds—namely, a directed world and a non-directed world—they report significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in B-theory worlds. However, the majority of participants still judge that there is time in C-theory worlds. We conclude that while the presence of directedness bolsters judgements that there is time, most people do not judge it to be necessary for time. (shrink)

Virtue theories have become influential in ethics and epistemology. This paper argues for a similar approach to argumentation. Several potential obstacles to virtue theories in general, and to this new application in particular, are considered and rejected. A first attempt is made at a survey of argumentational virtues, and finally it is argued that the dialectical nature of argumentation makes it particularly suited for virtue theoretic analysis.

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Most elpistologists now agree that hope for a specific outcome involves more than just desire plus the presupposition that the outcome is possible. This paper argues that the additional element of hope is a disposition to focus on the desired outcome in a certain way. I first survey the debate about the nature of hope in the recent literature, offer objections to some important competing accounts, and describe and defend the view that hope involves a kind of focus or attention. (...) I then suggest that this account makes sense of the intuitive thought that there are moral and pragmatic norms on hope that go beyond the norms on desires and modal presuppositions. I conclude by considering some key questions. (shrink)

The usual way of discussing normativity and naturalism is by running through a standard range of issues: the relations of fact and value, objectivity, reason and emotion, is and ought, and the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’. This is a naturalism that is virtually silent on nature. I outline an alternative approach that relates normativity to our nature as living beings, for whom specific things are good or bad for us. Our nature as evaluative beings is shown to be rooted in and (...) emergent from this biological normativity. There is also significant downward causation, such that our brain-bodies are continually modified by our experience and thoughts. Cultures, as emergent from the affordances of our brain-bodies, create further extensive, irreducible sources of normativity, albeit ones which do not wholly escape biological normativity and can impact back on it. (shrink)

Most work in Kant’s epistemology focuses on what happens “upstream” from experience, prior to the formation of conscious propositional attitudes. By contrast, this essay focuses on what happens "downstream": the formation of assent (Fuerwahrhalten) in its various modes. The mode of assent that Kant calls "Belief" (Glaube) is the main topic: not only moral Belief but also "pragmatic" and "doctrinal" Belief as well. I argue that Kant’s discussion shows that we should reject standard accounts of the extent to which theoretical (...) reason can provide justified assent about things-in-themselves, in favor of one that is much more liberal. Interpretive benefits are not the only results of the discussion, however. I also hope it will become clear along the way that there is such a thing as Kantian Belief, and that we often have quite a lot of it. -/- . (shrink)

It is sometimes supposed that, in principle, we cannot offer an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. I argue that this supposition is a mistake, and stems from a needlessly myopic conception of the form explanations can legitimately take. After making this more general point, I proceed to offer a speculative suggestion regarding one sort of explanation which can in principle serve as an answer to the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” The suggestion is (...) that there may be something rather than nothing in virtue of the truth of certain sorts of subjunctive conditionals. (shrink)

This paper explains and defends a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On this view, credences are a species of beliefs, and the degree of credence is determined by the content of what is believed. We begin by developing what we take to be the most plausible belief-first view. Then, we offer several arguments for it. Finally, we show how it can resist objections that have been raised to belief-first views. We conclude that the belief-first view is (...) more plausible than many have previously supposed. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

This is a discussion of the state of discussion on pragmatic reasons for belief.

Conscious experiences are characterized by mental qualities, such as those involved in seeing red, feeling pain, or smelling cinnamon. The standard framework for modeling mental qualities represents them via points in geometrical spaces, where distances between points inversely correspond to degrees of phenomenal similarity. This paper argues that the standard framework is structurally inadequate and develops a new framework that is more powerful and flexible. The core problem for the standard framework is that it cannot capture precision structure: for example, (...) consider the phenomenal contrast between seeing an object as crimson in foveal vision versus merely as red in peripheral vision. The solution I favor is to model mental qualities using regions, rather than points. I explain how this seemingly simple formal innovation not only provides a natural way of modeling precision, but also yields a variety of further theoretical fruits: it enables us to formulate novel hypotheses about the space and structures of mental qualities, formally differentiate two dimensions of phenomenal similarity, generate a quantitative model of the phenomenal sorites, and define a measure of discriminatory grain. A noteworthy consequence is that the structure of the mental qualities of conscious experiences is fundamentally different from the structure of the perceptible qualities of external objects. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...) human lives are worse than very long lives wholly devoid of pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, or any other goods, or (2) very short lives containing nothing but suffering are worth living. Since neither result is plausible, we ought to reject the view that life itself is good. On the view I favor, any given life may be worth living because of the goods that it contains, but life itself is neutral. (shrink)

The notion of function is indispensable to our understanding of distinctions such as that between being broken and being in working order (for artifacts) and between being diseased and being healthy (for organisms). A clear account of the ontology of functions and functioning is thus an important desideratum for any top-level ontology intended for application to domains such as engineering or medicine. The benefit of using top-level ontologies in applied ontology can only be realized when each of the categories identified (...) and defined by a top-level ontology is integrated with the others in a coherent fashion. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) has from the beginning included function as one of its categories, exploiting a version of the etiological account of function that is framed at a level of generality sufficient to accommodate both biological and artifactual functions. This account has been subjected to a series of criticisms and refinements. We here articulate BFO’s account of function, provide some reasons for favoring it over competing views, and defend it against objections. (shrink)

This paper argues that underlying social biases are able to affect the processes underlying linguistic interpretation. The result is a series of harms systematically inflicted on marginalised speakers. It is also argued that the role of biases and stereotypes in interpretation complicates Miranda Fricker's proposed solution to epistemic injustice.