The paper has two aims. The first is to propose a general framework for organizing some central questions about normative practical reasons in a way that separates importantly distinct issues that are often run together. Setting out this framework provides a snapshot of the leading types of view about practical reasons as well as a deeper understanding of what are widely regarded to be some of their most serious difficulties. The second is to use the proposed framework to uncover and (...) diagnose what I believe is a structural problem that plagues the debate about practical reasons. A common move in the debate involves a proponent of one type of view offering what she and others proposing that type consider to be a devastating criticism of an opposing type of view, only to find that her criticism is shrugged off by her opponents as easy to answer, misguided, or having little significance for their view. This isn’t due to conceptual blindness or mere slavish devotion to a theory but something fundamental about the argumentative structure of a debate over genuinely shared issues. Hence, the debate about practical reasons suffers from argumentative gridlock. The proposed framework helps us to see why this is so, and what we might do to move beyond it. (shrink)

The possibility of changing the past by means of time-travel appears to depend on the possibility of distinguishing the past as it is ‘before’ and ‘after’ the time-travel. So far, all the metaphysical models that have been proposed to account for the possibility of past-changing time-travels operate this distinction by conceiving of time as multi-dimensional, and thus by significantly inflating our metaphysics of time. The aim of this article is to argue that there is an (...) intuitive sense in which past-changing time-travels are metaphysically possible also in one-dimensional time. (shrink)

There is an intuition that the past does not ever change. In their paper ‘The puzzle of the changing past,’ Luca Barlassina and Fabio Del Prete argue that in 2012 the past changed. I show that we are not in a position to accept their argument.

Change blindness is the striking failure to see large changes that normally would be noticed easily. Over the past decade this phenomenon has greatly contributed to our understanding of attention, perception, and even consciousness. The surprising extent of change blindness explains its broad appeal, but its counterintuitive nature has also engendered confusions about the kinds of inferences that legitimately follow from it. Here we discuss the legitimate and the erroneous inferences that have been drawn, and offer a set of (...) requirements to help separate them. In doing so, we clarify the genuine contributions of change blindness research to our understanding of visual perception and awareness, and provide a glimpse of some ways in which change blindness might shape future research. (shrink)

The past is deeply important to many of us. But our concern about history can seem puzzling and needs justification. After all, the past cannot be changed: we can help the living needy, but the tears we shed for the long dead victims of past tragedies help no one. Attempts to justify our concern about history typically take one of two opposing forms. It is assumed either that such concern must be justified in instrumental or otherwise self-centered (...) and present-centered terms or that our interest in history must be utterly disinterested and pursued for its own sake. But neither approach can fully explain, or justify, our concern about the past. I propose a third approach, on which the past matters because it contains much that is of value—all those past people and the things they did or had endured—and this value calls for our fitting response. In short: the significance of the past is past significance. (shrink)

If you utter sentence (1) ‘Obama was born in 1961’ now, you say something true about the past. Since the past will always be such that the year 1961 has the property of being a time in which Obama was born, it seems impossible that could ever be false in a future context of utterance. We shall consider the case of a sentence about the past exactly like (1), but which was true when uttered a few years (...) ago and is no longer true now. On this basis, we shall conclude that the past has changed. (shrink)

Barlassina and Del Prete argue that the past can change, on the basis that there is no other explanation for the truth values of certain claims involving the past-tense predicate ‘won the Tour de France in 2000’. To establish this, they argue that no contextualist account of this predicate will be able to explain these truth values. I show that their argument straightforwardly fails. Not only does a tweak to the contextualist account they consider suffice to explain these (...) truth values, there is in fact an even simpler and more plausible non-contextualist account that can do the same work. Put simply: there is no puzzle of the changing past. (shrink)

In the intriguing article The puzzle of the changing past, Barlassina and Del Prete argue that, if one grants a platitude about truth and accepts a simple story that they tell, one is forced to conclude that the past has changed. I will suggest that there is a coherent way to resist that conclusion. The platitude about truth is in fact a platitude, but the story is not exactly as they tell it.

The goal of this paper is to defend the general tenet that time travelers cannot change the past within B-theoretical models of time, independently of how many temporal dimensions there are. Baron Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98, 129–147 offered a strong argument intended to reach this general conclusion. However, his argument does not cover a peculiar case, i.e. a B-theoretical one-dimensional model of time that allows for the presence of internal times. Loss Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 96, 1–11 used the latter (...) model to argue that time travelers can change the past within such model. We show a way to debunk Loss’s argument, so that the general tenet about the impossibility of changing the past within B-theoretical models is maintained. (shrink)

Architecture is about to enter its first magical phase: a time when buildings actively co-operate with their inhabitants; when objects know what they are, where they are, what is near them; when social and physical space lose their type coupling; when wall and partitions change with mood and task. As engineers and scientists explore how to digitse the world around us, the classical constraints of design, ruled so long by the physics of space, time, and materials, are starting to crumble. (...) Documents can be laid down in one place, automatically cloned, and a copy picked up in another. Meetings scheduled for 9am to 10am can be joined by latecomers at noon, who then participate in a captured form of the event and are ‘edited into’ the past. People on the West coast of the USA can participate, in a telepresent way, with their colleagues on the East coast, and hold a meeting against a virtual backdrop, such as a production line in their Taiwanese factory. Walls seem to dematerialise, remote objects can be touched virtually, shaped, passed through one another. Technology is moving inexorably so that being in one place at a time no longer need dominate how we work and play. Material boundaries are losing their meaning, and interface and information space are catch words that architects must master. -/- In this article I will discuss some of the theoretical ideas shaping our new conception of form, function, and interactivity. My view is that of a cognitive scientist interested in how cognition is distributed throughout our environment. Since the ground rules defining the structure of environments are changing, our very idea of how we are embedded in the world is changing. Architecture is at a new frontier. (shrink)

If you utter sentence ‘Obama was born in 1961’ now, you say something true about the past. Since the past will always be such that the year 1961 has the property of being a time in which Obama was born, it seems impossible that could ever be false in a future context of utterance. We shall consider the case of a sentence about the past exactly like , but which was true when uttered a few years ago (...) and is no longer true now. On this basis, we shall conclude that the past has changed. (shrink)

The present article analyzes the world order in the past, present and future as well as the main factors, foundations and ideas underlying the maintaining and change of the international and global order. The first two sections investigate the evolution of the world order starting from the ancient times up to the late twentieth century. The third section analyzes the origin and decline of the world order based on the American hegemony. The authors reveal the contradictions of the current (...) unipolar world and explain in what way globalization has become more profitable for the developing countries but not for the developed ones. In the paper also explains the strengthening belief that the US leading status will inevitably weaken. In this connection we discuss the alternatives of the American strategy and the possibility of the renaissance of the American leadership. The last section presents a factor analysis which allows stating that the world is shifting toward a new balance of power and is likely to become the world without a leader. The new world order will consist of a number of large blocks, coalitions and countries acting within a framework of rules and mutual responsibility. However, the transition to a new world order will take certain time (about two decades). This period, which we denote as the epoch of new coalitions, will involve a reconfiguration of the World System and bring an increasing turbulence and conflict intensity. (shrink)

Why has James been relatively absent from the neopragmatist revival of the past twenty years? I argue that part of the reason is that his psychological projects seem to hold little promise for a socially and culturally progressive philosophical project, and that his concern with religious issues makes him seem like a religious apologist. Bringing together James's psychological writings with his philosophical writings shows these assumptions to be wrong. I offer a reading of “The Will to Believe” and The (...) Principles of Psychology to support my position (a) that James's philosophical methodology and his psychological works lend themselves to a naturalized approach to philosophical inquiry, which both allows for a reshaping of traditional philosophical questions and offers a check on scientism, and (b) that, contrary to many commentators' claims, James is not defending religion against science but is instead using science to address epistemic and moral issues more broadly. I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which James's naturalism demands a reconsideration of the nature of philosophical inquiry, as well as a revised view of a scientific psychology that avoids scientism. (shrink)

In an ever-changing world, when we search for answers on our present challenges, it can be tricky to extrapolate past realities when concerning science-based issues. Climate change, public health or artificial intelligence embody issues on how scientific evidence is often challenged, as false beliefs could drive the design of public policies and legislation. Therefore , how can we foresee if science can tip the scales of political legislation? In this article, we outline how models of historical cases can (...) be used to predict and understand how scientific evidence can influence the emergence (or fall-back) of science based-legislation. We also present frameworks on how to use past episodes of History of Science and Alternative History insights to build epistemic models, based on previous successful approaches on the spread of scientific misinformation. These models will help the accuracy of the design of eventual alternative realities, that can come insightful on present decision making methodologies. (shrink)

That we find the idea of travelling in time, and in particular travelling backwards in time, fascinating, is evidenced by the plethora of new science fictions shows depicting time travel that hit our TV screens in 2016. I love time travel shows, and I can hardly keep up. In almost all cases these shows depict what philosophers call inconsistent time travel stories: stories that commit what my colleague Nick Smith (The University of Sydney) calls the second time around fallacy. These (...) stories depict individuals travelling back in time (or in some cases sending a signal back in time) in order to change some past event (or, in some cases, to try and mitigate the changes brought about by some other time travellers). -/- It’s easy to see why these storylines are captivating. They ask us to imaginatively entertain questions about the robustness of the present. We are asked to ponder to what extent the way things are now is the product of fluky events, so that had the past been ever so slightly different, the present would be very different indeed. These questions are intriguing because we all wonder to what extent our present selves are the result of choices we made, where we could so easily have made others, and to what extent who we are is most robust, resilient under small changes in our past decisions. (shrink)

A central tenet of truthmaker theory is that necessitation is necessary for truthmaking (NEC). This paper defends NEC in a novel, piecemeal way, namely by responding to a potential counterexample involving a changing past. If Carter won a race at t1 but is later disqualified at t2, then Carter no longer won at t1. A wholly past event seems to have changed in the future. The event makes ‘Carter won the race at t1’ (RACE) true between t1‐2 (...) but fails to make it true at t2. So, we have a potential counterexample to necessitation: a truthmaker of RACE fails in another context to make the same truthbearer RACE true. I argue that the best solution to this challenge is not that there are different truthbearers at t1‐2 and t2 (the semantic response), or that RACE was never true because of the future disqualification or will always be true despite the future disqualification. The best solution is to accept that the past can change: past events can change based on what happens in the future (e.g., via their effects). This paper's novel defence of necessitation will illustrate the importance of utilising explicitly ontological and commonsensical tools in accounting for truth. (shrink)

The article reviews some analyses of temporal language in logical approaches to natural language semantics. It considers some asymmetries between past and future, manifested in language, which motivate the “standard view” of the non-reversibility of time and the persistence of the past. It concludes with a puzzle about the changing past which challenges the standard view.

Philosophers have long noted, and empirical psychology has lately confirmed, that most people are “biased toward the future”: we prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. At least two explanations have been offered for this bias: belief in temporal passage and the practical irrelevance of the past resulting from our inability to influence past events. We set out to test the latter explanation. In a large survey, we find that participants (...) exhibit significantly less future bias when asked to consider scenarios where they can affect their own past experiences. This supports the “practical irrelevance” explanation of future bias. It also suggests that future bias is not an inflexible preference hardwired by evolution, but results from a more general disposition to “accept the things we cannot change”. However, participants still exhibited substantial future bias in scenarios in which they could affect the past, leaving room for complementary explanations. Beyond the main finding, our results also indicate that future bias is stake-sensitive and that participants endorse the normative correctness of their future-biased preferences and choices. In combination, these results shed light on philosophical debates over the rationality of future bias, suggesting that it may be a rational response to empirical realities rather than a brute, arational disposition. (shrink)

The concept of “going native in reverse” reflects the fact that nowadays more and more people involved in new religious movements and esoteric groups participate in academic activities related to the study of religion in general and particularly in the study of their movements. On the one hand, these people bring insider’s perspective in the academia. On the other hand, they bring academic knowledge and critical mind in esoteric community and change it. This situation seems to be a positive tendency (...) in the development of modern spirituality both for insiders and for the society in general, because contemporary knowledge and critical mind can make religious and esoteric currents more subtle and adequate for the modern world. But what is the future of this tendency in regard to an insider/outsider problem? Maybe they can change the academia by bringing new unexpected perspectives in the study of religion and esotericism. However, conservative academic elites can finally reject researchers who try to bring the insider perspective in the academia and even expel them from academic circles. In this case they will turn into a marginal group inside the academia, and for their skeptical colleagues they will remain to be those eccentrics who want “to wear the esoteric and the scholarly hat simultaneously”, as W. J. Hanegraaff put it. On the other hand, such researchers may try to form a new discipline, so to speak an “esoteric divinity” that will fight for the place both in the academia and in the esoteric community in the next decades. However, the esoteric community itself may reject this tendency, because many of its participants today seem to have an inimical attitude toward to rationalism and the academia. (shrink)

Climate change, primarily driven by human activities, is becoming one of the most urgent global challenges of our time. Despite lingering doubts about climate change in some research documents, strong consensus within the scientific community still affirms that global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. Over the past decade, significant efforts have been made by humans to address the climate change crisis, resulting in certain impacts in combating climate change and raising awareness about its consequences. However, the question (...) remains: Are we heading in the right direction to effectively address this crisis, or do we need to reconsider our approach? This essay will examine some of major achievements in the fight against climate change, the increasing awareness of its impacts, the escalating severity of the climate crisis, and whether our actions are on the right track or require reevaluation. (shrink)

Mathematics has always been a core part of western education, from the medieval quadrivium to the large amount of arithmetic and algebra still compulsory in high schools. It is an essential part. Its commitment to exactitude and to rigid demonstration balances humanist subjects devoted to appreciation and rhetoric as well as giving the lie to postmodernist insinuations that all “truths” are subject to political negotiation. In recent decades, the character of mathematics has changed – or rather broadened: it has become (...) the enabling science behind the complexity of contemporary knowledge, from gene interpretation to bank risk. Mathematical understanding is all the more necessary for future jobs, as well as remaining, as ever, a prophylactic against the more corrosive philosophical views emanating from the humanities. (shrink)

Pessimists sometimes declare that death makes everything we do pointless or meaningless. In this essay, I consider the motivations for this worry about our collective mortality. I then examine some common responses to this worry that emphasize moderating our standards or changing our goals. Given some limitations of the “moderating our standards” response, I suggest that Viktor Frankl’s view about the permanence of the past offers a different and perhaps better way of responding to the worry that death (...) renders our lives meaningless. After outlining his view, its implications, and the view of time it assumes, I consider and respond to some possible objections to Frankl’s view. If Frankl is right, death cannot make life meaningless or pointless because meaning is attained within life, and when we die our completed lives endure as part of the past. (shrink)

In this article I critically discuss English-speaking philosophical literature addressing the question of what it essentially means to speak of 'life’s meaning'. Instead of considering what might in fact confer meaning on life, I make two claims about the more abstract, meta-ethical question of how to understand what by definition is involved in making that sort enquiry. One of my claims is that over the past five years there has been a noticeable trend among philosophers to try to change (...) our understanding of what talk of 'life’s meaning' connotes. For example, whereas most philosophers for a long while had held that such talk is about a kind of value possible in the life of human beings, recently some have argued that certain non-human parts of nature can exhibit meaningfulness, which, furthermore, is not necessarily something valuable. The second claim I advance is that there is strong reason to reject this trend, and instead for philosophers to retain the long-standing approach. (shrink)

This article suggests a change of perspective on philosophy’s engagement with its past. It argues that rather than the putative purport of giving life to the past philosopher’s work, philosophical engagement with the past gives life to one’s own. Drawing on the neo-pragmatist thesis of Robert Brandom, it suggests looking to what philosophers do when they attribute meaning to concepts and considering their engagement with the past as appropriation in consequence. By scrutinizing Robert Pippin’s opposing thesis (...) of philosophical engagement with the past as dialogue, and carefully examining Brandom’s, the article suggests an account for appropriation that shows it to be non-dialogical, and hence unable to yield the fruits associated with this conception, but also insightful and rich with other philosophical values. Brandom and John McDowell’s dispute over the interpretation of Wilfrid Sellars provides an illustration of the proposed perspective and of those values. (shrink)

(written in 2017) According to Dorothea Debus (2007), all emotional aspects related to an act of remembering are present and new emotional responses to the remembered past event. This is a common conception of the nature of the emotional aspect of personal memories, if not explicitly defended then at least implicitly accepted in the literature. In this article, I first criticize Debus’ arguments and demonstrate that she does not give us valid reasons to believe that all the emotional aspects (...) related to a memory are present and new emotional responses to that past event. I then criticize Debus’ thesis tout court for being a direct consequence of assuming a particular conceptualization of the nature of emotions: emotions as physiological changes. Finally, based on a different conceptualization of emotions that focuses on their relational nature, I propose an alternative framework for analyzing the different possible emotional aspects of our personal memories. This leads me to conclude, contrary to Debus, that some emotional aspects of our memories are not occurrent emotions but are better conceived as quasi-emotions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between change and the B-theory of time, sometimes also called the Scientific view of time, according to which reality is a four-dimensional spacetime manifold, where past, present and future things equally exist, and the present time and non-present times are metaphysically the same. I argue in favour of a novel response to the much-vexed question of whether there is change on the B-theory or not. In fact, B-theorists are often (...) said to hold a ‘static’ view of time. But this far from being innocent label: if the B-theory of time presents a model of temporal reality that is static, then there is no change on the B-theory. From this, one can reasonably think as follows: of course, there is change, so the B-theory must be false. What I plan to do in this paper is to argue that in some sense there is change on the B-theory, but in some other sense, there is no change on the B-theory. To do so, I present three instances of change: Existential Change, namely the view that things change with respect to their existence over time; Qualitative Change, the view that things change with respect to how they are over time; Propositional Change, namely the view that things (i.e. propositions) change with respect to truth value over time. I argue that while there is a reading of these three instances of change that is true on the B-theory, and so there is change on the B-theory in this sense, there is a B-theoretical reading of each of them that is not true on the B-theory, and therefore there is no change on the B-theory in this other sense. (shrink)

In the present chapter I try to determine to what extent the public policies adopted by Romanian governments following the fall of the communist regime contributed to alleviating the most egregious past injustice, the Holocaust. The measures taken for memorializing the Holocaust will be analysed through the lens of a mixed reparatory justice – relational egalitarian account. Employing such a framework entails a focus on symbolic reparations, meant to promote civic trust, social solidarity, and encourage the restoration of social (...) and cultural capital in societies affected by historical injustices. Such symbolic reparations can include public atonement, changing street names, establishing memorials, funding museums, including Holocaust study in the national curriculum, setting national days for the commemoration of the Holocaust, etc. The need for symbolic reparation has become increasingly clearer in the literature on Holocaust memorialization, and the present paper intends to go a step further, by providing researchers with a theoretical approach that can be used to make better sense of the effects of measures taken as part of the process of Holocaust remembrance. In the chapter I also address the issue of determining who the duty-bearers should be. I argue that there could be several indicators for reparatory justice, including in this case compensation programs and the establishment of institutions that would allow dialogue between descendants of the victims and descendants of the perpetrators, a sine qua non condition for restoring social trust in communities marked by violations of human rights, especially of such a scale as the Holocaust. (shrink)

Dĩ nhiên ngàn đời xưa nay cây vẫn như vậy. Nhưng cái sự quen thuộc ngàn đời vẫn có nhiều thứ có thể làm người quan sát thấy thú vị, đáng học hỏi và hiểu thêm ra vài điều giá trị.

This paper argues for the existence of a fourth positive generic value relation that can hold between two items beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’: namely ‘on a par’.

Originalism has long been criticized for its “law office history” and other historical sins. But a recent “positive turn” in originalist thought may help make peace between history and law. On this theory, originalism is best understood as a claim about our modern law — which borrows many of its rules, constitutional or otherwise, from the law of the past. Our law happens to be the Founders’ law, unless lawfully changed. This theory has three important implications for the role (...) of history in law. First, whether and how past law matters today is a question of current law, not of history. Second, applying that current law may often require deference to historical expertise, but for a more limited inquiry: one that looks specifically at legal doctrines and instruments, interprets those instruments in artificial ways, and makes use of evidentiary principles and default rules when the history is obscure. Third, ordinary legal reasoning already involves the application of old law to new facts, an inquiry that might other-wise seem daunting or anachronistic. Applying yesterday’s “no vehicles in the park” ordinance is no less fraught — and no more so — than applying Founding-era legal doctrines. (shrink)

This article explores the main similarities and differences between Derek Parfit’s notion of imprecise comparability and a related notion I have proposed of parity. I argue that the main difference between imprecise comparability and parity can be understood by reference to ‘the standard view’. The standard view claims that 1) differences between cardinally ranked items can always be measured by a scale of units of the relevant value, and 2) all rankings proceed in terms of the trichotomy of ‘better than’, (...) ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. Imprecise comparability, which can be understood in terms of the more familiar notions of cardinality and incommensurability, rejects only the first claim while parity rejects both claims of the standard view. -/- I then argue that insofar as those attracted to imprecise comparability assume that all rankings are trichotomous, as Parfit appears to, the view should be rejected. This is because imprecise equality is not a form of equality but is a sui generis ‘fourth’ basic way in which items can be ranked. We should, I argue, understand imprecise equality as parity, and imprecise comparability as entailing ‘tetrachotomy’ – that if two items are comparable, one must better than, worse than, equal to, or on a par with the other. Thus those attracted to the idea that cardinality can be imprecise should abandon trichotomy and accept parity and tetrachotomy instead. -/- Finally, I illustrate the difference between Parfit’s trichotomous notion of imprecise comparability and parity by examining how each notion might be employed in different solutions to the problem posed by the Repugnant Conclusion in population ethics. I suggest that parity provides the arguably more ecumenical solution to the problem. (shrink)

This paper investigates two puzzles in practical reason and proposes a solution to them. First, sometimes, when we are practically certain that neither of two alternatives is better than or as good as the other with respect to what matters in the choice between them, it nevertheless seems perfectly rational to continue to deliberate, and sometimes the result of that deliberation is a conclusion that one alternative is better, where there is no error in one’s previous judgment. Second, there are (...) striking differences between rational agents – some rational agents have most reason to pursue careers on Wall Street while others have most reason to take up a career in teaching, or scuba diving, or working for political causes. These differences aren’t plausibly explained by ‘passive’ facts about our psychology or their causal interaction with our environment; instead, these facts seem in some sense to ‘express who we are’. But what is this sense? These puzzles disappear if we adopt a novel view about the source of the normativity of reasons – some reasons are given to us and others are reasons in virtue of an act of will. We make certain considerations reasons through an act of will and thus sometimes make it true through an act of agency that we have most reason to do one thing rather than another. (shrink)

This paper is the introduction to the volume. It gives an argumentative view of the philosophical landscape concerning incommensurability and incomparability. It argues that incomparability, not incommensurability, is the important phenomenon on which philosophers should be focusing and that the arguments for the existence of incomparability are so far not compelling.

This chapter argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model—as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you make a (...) promise to x, then you have a reason to x’. Instead, internal commitments are that in virtue of which one has the special reasons of committed relationships; they are the grounds of such reasons. In this way, the will is a source of practical normativity. (shrink)

Can quite different values be rationally weighed against one another? Can the value of one thing always be ranked as greater than, equal to, or less than the value of something else? If the answer to these questions is no, then in what areas do we find commensurability and comparability unavailable? And what are the implications for moral and legal decision making? This book struggles with these questions, and arrives at distinctly different answers.".

In virtue of what is something a reason for action? That is, what makes a consideration a reason to act? This is a metaphysical or meta-normative question about the grounding of reasons for action. The answer to the grounding question has been traditionally given in ‘pure’, univocal terms. This paper argues that there is good reason to understand the ground of practical normativity as a hybrid of traditional ‘pure’ views. The paper 1) surveys the three leading ‘pure’ answers to the (...) question of a normative ground, 2) examines one or two of the most difficult problems for each, proposing along the way a new objection to one, and 3) argues that a particular hybrid view about normative grounds –‘hybrid voluntarism’ – avoids each of the main problems faced by the three leading ‘pure’ views. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model – as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you (...) make a promise to x, then you have a reason to x’. Instead, internal commitments are that in virtue of which one has the special reasons of committed relationships; they are the grounds of such reasons. In this way, the will is a source of practical normativity. (shrink)

What makes a choice hard? I discuss and criticize three common answers and then make a proposal of my own. Paradigmatic hard choices are not hard because of our ignorance, the incommensurability of values, or the incomparability of the alternatives. They are hard because the alternatives are on a par; they are comparable, but one is not better than the other, and yet nor are they equally good. So understood, hard choices open up a new way of thinking about what (...) it is to be a rational agent. (shrink)

‘Normative powers’ are capacities to create normative reasons by our willing or say-so. They are significant, because if we have them and exercise them, then sometimes the reasons we have are ‘up to us’. But such powers seem mysterious. How can we, by willing, create reasons? In this paper, I examine whether normative powers can be adequately explained normatively, by appeal to norms of a practice, normative principles, human interests, or values. Can normative explanations of normative powers explain how an (...) exercise of the will can afford us special freedom in determining our reasons? I argue that normative approaches to answering this question prove to be inadequate. To vindicate the thought that normative powers can make our reasons ‘up to us’, we need an altogether different approach to understanding them, one that is located not in the normative but in the metaphysical. I end the paper by sketching a metaphysical explanation of normative powers. This metaphysical defence of normative powers provides a window into a different, more agent-centered way of thinking about rational agency. (shrink)

Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, a slur in the Bostonian (...) argot, is used to secretly derogate African Americans without causing offense. Second, this paper points out that many theories of slurs run into problems because they conflate derogatory force with offensiveness. For example, the prohibition theory’s account of offensiveness in terms of prohibitions struggles to explain why ‘Monday’ is derogatory when it is not a prohibited word in English. Third, this paper offers a new explanation of this distinction from the perspective of a speech act theory of slurs; derogatory force is different from offensiveness because they arise from two different kinds of speech acts that slurs are used to perform, i.e., the illocutionary act of derogation and the perlocutionary act of offending. This new explanation avoids the problems faced by other theories. (shrink)

In "Changing the Past" (2010), Peter van Inwagen argues that a time traveler can change the past without paradox in a growing block universe. After erasing the portion of past existence that generates paradox, a new, non-paradox-generating block can be "grown" after the temporal relocation of the time traveler. -/- I articulate and explore the underlying mechanism of Van Inwagen's model: the time traveler's control over the location of the objective present. Van Inwagen's model is aimed (...) at preventing paradox by changing the past, but it achieves something broader than paradox avoidance: it gives tools for a new model of time travel. I use van Inwagen's tools to develop a new kind of time travel in which in which the location of the objective present is shifted by the time traveler. I call this type of time travel Movable Objective Present, or MOP. After defining MOP, I argue that it is compatible with any theory of time that accepts hypertime, including presentism and moving spotlight theory. (shrink)

This paper proposes a way to understand transformative choices, choices that change ‘who you are.’ First, it distinguishes two broad models of transformative choice: 1) ‘event-based’ transformative choices in which some event—perhaps an experience—downstream from a choice transforms you, and 2) ‘choice-based’ transformative choices in which the choice itself—and not something downstream from the choice—transforms you. Transformative choices are of interest primarily because they purport to pose a challenge to standard approaches to rational choice. An examination of the event-based transformative (...) choices of L. A. Paul and Edna Ullman-Margalit, however, suggests that event-based transformative choices don’t raise any difficulties for standard approaches to rational choice. An account of choice-based transformative choices—and what it is to be transformed—is then proposed. Transformative choices so understood not only capture paradigmatic cases of transformative choice but also point the way to a different way of thinking about rational choice and agency. (shrink)

This paper begins with a response to Josh Gert’s challenge that ‘on a par with’ is not a sui generis fourth value relation beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. It then explores two further questions: can parity be modeled by an interval representation of value? And what should one rationally do when faced with items on a par? I argue that an interval representation of value is incompatible with the possibility that items are on a par (a mathematical (...) proof is given in the appendix). I also suggest that there are three senses of ‘rationally permissible’ which, once distinguished, show that parity does distinctive practical work that cannot be done by the usual trichotomy of relations or by incomparability. In this way, we have an additional argument for parity from the workings of practical reason. (shrink)

This introductory article describes the phenomena of incommensurability and incomparability, how they are related, and why they are important. Since incomparability is the more significant phenomenon, the paper takes that as its focus. It gives a detailed account of what incomparability is, investigates the relation between the incomparability of values and the incomparability of alternatives for choice, distinguishes incomparability from the related phenomena of parity, indeterminacy, and noncomparability, and, finally, defends a view about practical justification that vindicates the importance of (...) incomparability — assuming it exists — for practical reason. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory, and theories of slurs aim at explaining their “derogatory force”. This paper draws a distinction between the type derogatory force and the token derogatory force of slurs. To explain the type derogatory force is to explain why a slur is a derogatory word. By contrast, to explain the token derogatory force is to explain why an utterance of a slur is derogatory. This distinction will be defended by examples in which the type and the token derogatory force (...) come apart. Because of the distinction, an adequate theory of slurs must be plausible for both the type and the token derogatory force. However, I will argue that many theories fail to be plausible for both. In particular, Hom’s combinatorial externalism and the conventional implicature theory offer implausible accounts of the token derogatory force, whereas the prohibitionist theory is insufficient to explain the type derogatory force. (shrink)

What sorts of consideration can be normative reasons for action? If we systematize the wide variety of considerations that can be cited as normative reasons, do we find that there is a single kind of consideration that can always be a reason? Desire-based theorists think that the fact that you want something or would want it under certain evaluatively neutral conditions can always be your normative reason for action. Value-based theorists, by contrast, think that what plays that role are evaluative (...) facts (or the facts that subvene them) about what you want, such as the fact that having it would be good in some way. This paper argues that value-based theorists are wrong; if we try to find a single kind of consideration that can always be normative reason, we find that sometimes our reason is the fact that we want something and not any corresponding evaluative fact. (shrink)

This paper presents an argument against the widespread view that ‘hard choices’ are hard because of the incomparability of the alternatives. The argument has two parts. First, I argue that any plausible theory of practical reason must be ‘comparativist’ in form, that is, it must hold that a comparative relation between the alternatives with respect to what matters in the choice determines a justified choice in that situation. If comparativist views of practical reason are correct, however, the incomparabilist view of (...) hard choices should be rejected. Incomparabilism about hard choices leads us to an implausible error theory about the phenomenology of hard choices, threatens an unattractive view of human agency, and leaves us in perplexity about what we are doing when we choose in hard choices. The second part of the argument explores the main competitor to comparativist views of practical reason, noncomparativist view, according tow which a choice is justified so long as it is not worse than any of the alternatives. This view is often assumed by rational choice theorists but has its best philosophical defense in work by Joseph Raz. On Raz’s view, incomparabilism about hard choices avoids the problems faced if comparativism is correct, but it faces different difficulties. I argue that Raz’s noncomparativist view mistakenly assimilates practical reason to more restricted normative domains such as the law. (shrink)

One of the most common judgments of normative life takes the following form: With respect to some things that matter, one item is better than the other, with respect to other things that matter, the other item is better, but all things considered – that is, taking into account all the things that matter – the one item is better than the other. In this paper, I explore how all-things-considered judgments are possible, assuming that they are. In particular, I examine (...) the question of how the different considerations relevant to an all-things-considered judgment come together in a way that gives each relevant consideration its proper due. I propose an answer which provides a unified account of all-things-considered judgments and highlights a deep connection between value and reason. My suggestion is that ‘all things considered’ is, in effect, a placeholder for a more comprehensive, sometimes nameless, value that includes the things considered as parts, and that this more comprehensive value determines how the things considered normatively relate. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory words and they are used to derogate certain groups. Theories of slurs must explain why they are derogatory words, as well as other features like independence and descriptive ineffability. This paper proposes an illocutionary force indicator theory of slurs: they are derogatory terms because their use is to perform the illocutionary act of derogation, which is a declarative illocutionary act to enforce norms against the target. For instance, calling a Chinese person “chink” is an act of derogation (...) to enforce racist norms that license exclusion of the Chinese, deny their rights to dignity, etc. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a more comprehensive explanation of the features of slurs than earlier speech act approaches. Second, it provides a theory that is immune to the problems faced by existing theories, such as wrong predictions of truth-conditions, explaining unacceptability to non-bigots, and explaining slurs against the dominant groups. (shrink)

Recently, some of the leading proponents of the view that there is widespread incommensurability among goods have suggested that the incommensurability of some goods is a constitutive feature of the goods themselves. So, for example, a friendship and a million dollars are incommensurable because it is part of what it is to be a friendship that it be incommensurable with money. According to these ‘constitutive incommensurabilists’ incommensurability follows from the very nature of certain goods. In this paper, I examine this (...) idea and argue that constitutive incommensurabilists have mistaken for constitutive incommensurability a particular emphatic kind of comparability. This examination involves an account of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ goods and an explanation of how goods of different ‘types’ figure in practical conflict. (shrink)