It is widely held that there are important differences between indicative conditionals (e.g. “If the authors are linguists, they have written a linguistics paper”) and subjunctive conditionals (e.g. “If the authors had been linguists, they would have written a linguistics paper”). A central difference is that indicatives and subjunctives convey different stances towards the truth of their antecedents. Indicatives (often) convey neutrality: for example, about whether the authors in question are linguists. Subjunctives (often) convey the falsity of the antecedent: for (...) example, that the authors in question are not linguists. This paper tests prominent accounts of how these different stances are conveyed: whether by presupposition or conversational implicature. Experiment 1 tests the presupposition account by investigating whether the stances project – remain constant – when embedded under operators like negations, possibility modals, and interrogatives, a key characteristic of presuppositions. Experiment 2 tests the conversational-implicature account by investigating whether the stances can be cancelled without producing a contradiction, a key characteristic of implicatures. The results provide evidence that both stances – neutrality about the antecedent in indicatives and the falsity of the antecedent in subjunctives – are conveyed by conversational implicatures. (shrink)

Is the state a collective agent? Are citizens responsible for what their states do? If not citizens, then who, if anyone, is responsible for what the state does? Many different sub-disciplines of philosophy are relevant for answering these questions. We need to know what “the state” is, who or what it's composed of, and what relation the parts stand in to the whole. Once we know what it is, we need to know whether that thing is an agent, in particular (...) a moral agent capable of taking moral responsibility for its actions. We have to know what it takes for it to be capable of moral responsibility, e.g., what the functional equivalents in groups are of knowledge, intention, foreseeability, recklessness, and so on. And once we've established that it is an agent, and is responsible for what it does, we have to explain whether and in what way this implicates members, i.e., whether state responsibility distributes to the members of states, whoever they may be. Answers to these questions come from metaphysics, social ontology, action theory, epistemology, political theory, and ethics. In what follows, we'll give an outline of some different ways of answering these questions. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference (...) to Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

This chapter provides a historical reconstruction of how Alfred Schutz’s American writings were critically engaged by the feminist sociologists Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Schutz’s articulation of a phenomenological sociology in relation to, among others, the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the philosophies of science of Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel proved fruitful to Smith in the development of her feminist standpoint theory in her 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Collins likewise (...) draws on Schutz’s writing in the development of her own standpoint theory in her 1986 paper “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” but in a way that addresses some of her own concerns with Smith’s feminist sociology. As I hope to show with the recovery of this underappreciated history, the critical insights of Smith and Collins with regard to the possible uses and limits of phenomenology for feminist theorizing, are still valuable today. (shrink)

In the article “A Tension in the Strong Program: The Relation between the Rational and the Social,” I stated that David Bloor, citing the principle of symmetry, expresses that rational and irrational beliefs must be explained in the same way, that is, by causes of the same kind. On this wise, he rejects the methodology of traditional philosophers and historians of science as asymmetrical; since they explain evidence-based beliefs with epistemic reasons and unreasonable beliefs—e.g. beliefs based on indoctrination, propaganda, ideology, (...) and superstition—citing social factors. On the other hand, Bloor argues that the rational is made entirely of the social and, therefore, is itself a kind of social factor. But by admitting this maximum conception of social constructivism, Bloor can no longer consider the rational and the social as two separate identities and accuse the traditional view of asymmetry. However, Professor Finn Collin says that Bloor’s critique of the traditional model never commits him to the duality of the rational and the social. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen and Andrew Mason have recently argued, against many contemporary philosophers, that feasibility is not a legitimate constraint in theorizing about social justice. Their main argument is that principles of justice are logically independent of issues of feasibility and, consequently, feasibility has no bearing on the correctness of these principles. This article is a critical examination of three attempts to show that Cohen and Mason’s argument is unsound. The examined attempts are those of Harry Brighouse, Collin Farrelly, and (...) David Miller. I argue that all these arguments are based on false, unjustified or implausible, premises and/or assumptions. Consequently, they cannot discredit the soundness of Cohen and Mason’s argument and of the thesis that feasibility is not, in fact, a legitimate constraint in theorizing about social justice. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the articles by Marie C. Swabey, Thelma Z. Lavine, Grace A. de Laguna and Dorothy Walsh on the objectivity of scientific knowledge. We will see Swabey placing herself outside the historicist traditions of (later) authors (e.g., Thomas Kuhn), and arguing that the rationality and objectivity of science are grounded in synthetic a priori justified logical principles. Lavine and de Laguna, by contrast, embrace socio-historical approaches to the study of science, thus anticipating later developments in philosophy of science. (...) Still, whereas Lavine embraces a relativist notion of objectivity, de Laguna argues that science, at least in some respects, actually is universally valid. Walsh, finally, like Swabey, believes in context-independent objectivity that is grounded in metaphysics, but like de Laguna and Lavine, contends that such objectivity is discipline-specific. (shrink)

In “A Tension in the Strong Program: The Relation between the Rational and the Social”, Shahram Shahryari (2021) advances the following thesis: In his Strong Program in the sociology of science, David Bloor blames traditional philosophy of science for adopting a dualist strategy in explaining scientific developments, as it employs rational explanation for successful science and social explanation for flawed science. Instead, according to Bloor, all scientific developments should be explained monistically, i.e. in terms of social causes. This is also (...) referred to as the Symmetry Principle, and it is a key tenet in the Strong Program. The author detects a tension here, as Bloor apparently asserts that traditional philosophy of science deploys two kinds of explanation, and simultaneously insists that there is only one kind, i.e. social explanation. (shrink)

This thesis contends that the possession of a sense of humour would contribute considerably to the quality of human life. It is an exploration and discussion of some of the difficulties involved in justifying the development of humour in terms of a philosophy of education. In light of developments in the digital age with consequent changes in science, technology and society, the educated person of the future will have to be less concerned with the accumulated knowledge of the past than (...) with the development and interplay of social and natural environments. Such a person will need to have, more than ever, a sense of what is truly real and what is truly valuable in human life. If the primary purpose of education is the preparation of students for their future lives, educators are now faced with some challenging problems. Apart from the high social value of laughter, there is a recognized relationship between humour and intelligence. Knowing that the two are related proves to be a key factor in understanding the learning process and assuring that the development of a sense of humour in education is worthy of consideration. (shrink)

David Estlund has recently asked: how can structural injustice warrant resentment and indignation, given that it cannot fully be traced to culpable conduct? This article answers Estlund’s question. I propose that a social structure is an object that persists through time and is materially constituted by humans in relation. I use accounts of the point of blame to vindicate attitudes of resentment and indignation that target social structures themselves, without necessarily targeting their human constituents.

A plausible thought about vagueness is that it involves semantic incompleteness. To say that a predicate is vague is to say (at the very least) that its extension is incompletely specified. Where there is incomplete specification of extension there is indeterminacy, an indeterminacy between various ways in which the specification of the predicate might be completed or sharpened. In this paper we show that this idea is bound to founder by presenting an argument to the effect that there are vague (...) predicates which cannot be sharpened in such a way as to meet certain basic constraints (of penumbral connection and public accessibility) that must be imposed on the very notion of a sharpening. (shrink)

Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. Does this make conceptual sense or is this merely political rhetoric? And what are the implications for these individuals within groups? Collins outlines a Tripartite Model of group duties that can target political demands at the right entities, in the right way and for the right reasons.

In this paper, I discuss the myriad ways that gender roles are interrogated within The Left Hand of Darkness and “When It Changed.” I first examine gender as science in §1, outlining the ways Le Guin and Russ consider and critique essentialist perspectives holding that gender roles are ‘natural’ phenomena driven by rigid biological differences between men and women. Then, in §2, I explore gender as fiction, analyzing how each text presents gender roles as discursively constructed and malleable. In §3, (...) I explicate these observations within a hybrid conceptualization of gender as science fiction and argue that this suitably describes the gender portrayals Le Guin and Russ make in their texts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Organismal superposition holds that the same individual both is and is not an organism, as a consequence of organismal pluralism. When coupled with the assumption that death is the cessation of an organism, this entails that there is no unique answer as to whether brain death is biological death. This essay argues that concerns about organismal pluralism and superposition do not undermine a theory of biological death, nor entail any metaphysical indeterminacy about the biological vital status of a brain-dead individual.

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. Not all groups are moral agents. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties. Moreover, if such duties imply ability then moral agents – of both the individual and group varieties – can only bear duties over actions they are able to perform. I tease out the implications of this for duties over group actions, and argue that groups in many instances cannot bear these duties. This is because only groups (...) with the right kind of structure – groups I call ‘collectives’ – have the agency to bear action-demanding duties. Yet neither can individuals bear these duties, assuming that individuals cannot perform group actions and that duty implies ability. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties to perform some group actions. I argue we can solve this problem by assigning collectivization duties to individuals – duties to form a collective that then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers. (shrink)

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, and Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by a) a conversational implicature, b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or c) a conventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses and the accumulating evidence from other studies as (...) well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals.

The ethics of care has flourished in recent decades yet we remain without a succinct statement of its core theoretical commitment. This book uses the methods of analytic philosophy to argue for a simple care ethical slogan: dependency relationships generate responsibilities. It uses this slogan to unify, specify and justify the wide range of views found within the care ethical literature.

In this chapter, Marie Collins Swabey critiques naturalism and defends a rationalistic conception of knowledge.

In this chapter, Stephanie Collins examines the idea that individuals can acquire ‘membership duties’ as a result of being members of a group that itself bears duties. In particular, powerful and wealthy states are duty-bearing groups, and their citizens have derivative membership duties (for example, to contribute to putting right wrongs that have been done in the past by the group in question, and to increase the extent to which the group fulfils its duties). In addition, she argues, individuals (...) have duties to signal their willingness to coordinate with others so as to do more good than the sum of what each could do on their own. Putting these two things together, Collins suggests, individuals’ duties in (for instance) matters of global poverty might be largely driven by such group-based considerations, leaving little room for the duties that would follow from more individualistic reasoning. (shrink)

Which kinds of responsibility can we attribute to which kinds of collective, and why? In contrast, which kinds of collective responsibility can we not attribute—which kinds are ‘gappy’? This study provides a framework for answering these questions. It begins by distinguishing between three kinds of collective and three kinds of responsibility. It then explains how gaps—i.e. cases where we cannot attribute the responsibility we might want to—appear to arise within each type of collective responsibility. It argues some of these gaps (...) do not exist on closer inspection, at least for some collectives and some of the time. (shrink)

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. (...) We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her. (shrink)

Organizations do moral wrong. States pursue unjust wars, businesses avoid tax, charities misdirect funds. Our social, political, and legal responses require guidance. We need to know what we’re responding to and how we should respond to it. We need a metaphysical and moral theory of wrongful organizations. This book provides a new such theory, paying particular attention to questions that have been underexplored in existing debates. These questions include: where are organizations located as material objects in the natural world? What’s (...) the metaphysical relation between organizations and their members? Can organizations be blameworthy for attitudes and character traits, as well as for actions? What about feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame—can organizations feel these emotions and why does this matter? How and why are members implicated in organizations’ wrongs? How should organizations’ reparative costs be apportioned among members? The book answers these questions. It argues that organizations are material objects with humans as material parts—much like how a pizza is a material object with slices as material parts. This picture helps us make sense of organizations’ blameworthiness, including blame for organization-level actions, attitudes, and character traits. The book argues that organizations can experience moral self-awareness—a crucial component of guilt, remorse, and shame. Members can be implicated in organizations’ actions in numerous ways—and, it is argued, members’ level of implication should determine their share of organizations’ reparative burdens. (shrink)

Philosophers increasingly argue that collective agents can be blameworthy for wrongdoing. Advocates tend to endorse functionalism, on which collectives are analogous to complicated robots. This is puzzling: we don’t hold robots blameworthy. I argue we don’t hold robots blameworthy because blameworthiness presupposes the capacity for a mental state I call ‘moral self-awareness’. This raises a new problem for collective blameworthiness: collectives seem to lack the capacity for moral self-awareness. I solve the problem by giving an account of how collectives have (...) this capacity. The trick is to take seriously individuals’ status as flesh-and-blood material constituents of collectives. The idea will be: under certain conditions that I specify, an individual can be the locus of a collective's moral self-awareness. The account provides general insights concerning collectives’ dependence on members, the boundaries of membership, and the locus of collectives’ phenomenology. (shrink)

A collective duty gap arises when a group has caused harm that requires remedying but no member did harm that can justify the imposition of individual remedial duties. Examples range from airplane crashes to climate change. How might collective duty gaps be filled? This paper starts by examining two promising proposals for filling them. Both proposals are found inadequate. Thus, while gap-filling duties can be defended against objections from unfairness and demandingness, we need a substantive justification for their existence. I (...) argue that substantive justification can be found in the normative force of commitments individuals make to others with regard to ends. Along the way, I argue that gap-filling duties must be conceptualized differently in group agents, as compared to non-agent groups: in the former, gap-filling duties can be understood as duties to “take up the slack”; in the latter, this would be a category error. (shrink)

Modal epistemologists parse modal conditions on knowledge in terms of metaphysical possibilities or ways the world might have been. This is problematic. Understanding modal conditions on knowledge this way has made modal epistemology, as currently worked out, unable to account for epistemic luck in the case of necessary truths, and unable to characterise widely discussed issues such as the problem of religious diversity and the perceived epistemological problem with knowledge of abstract objects. Moreover, there is reason to think that this (...) is a congenital defect of orthodox modal epistemology. This way of characterising modal epistemology is however optional. It is shown that one can non-circularly characterise modal conditions on knowledge in terms of epistemic possibilities, or ways the world might be for the target agent. Characterising the anti-luck condition in terms of epistemic possibilities removes the impediment to understanding epistemic luck in the case of necessary truths and opens the door to using these conditions to shed new light on some longstanding epistemological problems. (shrink)

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what (...) they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts. (shrink)

A standard objection to socioeconomic human rights is that they are not claimable as human rights: their correlative duties are not owed to each human, independently of specific institutional arrangements, in an enforceable manner. I consider recent responses to this ‘claimability objection,’ and argue that none succeeds. There are no human rights to socioeconomic goods. But all is not lost: there are, I suggest, human rights to ‘socioeconomic consideration’. I propose a detailed structure for these rights and their correlative duties, (...) while remaining neutral on substantive moral debates. I argue that socioeconomic-consideration human rights are satisfactorily claimable and sufficiently practical. (shrink)

Background: Efforts to better understand and improve letters of recommendation (LORs) in the resident selection process have identified unwritten rules and hidden practices that may limit their effectiveness. The objective of our study is to explore these unwritten rules and hidden practices more fully in one Canadian academic medical community. -/- Methods: We conducted semi-structured, discourse-based interviews with 18 faculty members from the departments of Internal Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Interviews were guided by sample LORs (...) and were focused on experiences with either writing or reading LORs. We analyzed interviews using key concepts from genre theory and Aristotle’s appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos. -/- Results: Participants described how the practices surrounding LORs are guided by unwritten rules. These practices contributed to writers’ use of visible strategies and textual silence to establish credibility, build a strong case, and appeal to readers. Readers rely on similar strategies, but not always as intended by the writers. -/- Conclusions: The unwritten rules of one academic community can impede a nationally-facilitated resident selection process. Our findings highlight how critiques and potential improvements to LORs could benefit from considering the use of visible and invisible rhetorical strategies in specific contexts. (shrink)

Stephen Law developed a challenge to theism, known as the evil-god challenge (Law (2010) ). The evil-god challenge to theism is to explain why the theist’s responses to the problem of evil are any better than the diabolist’s – who believes in a supremely evil god – rejoinders to the problem of good, when all the theist’s ploys (theodicy, sceptical theism, etc.) can be parodied by the diabolist. In the first part of this article, I extend the evil-god challenge by (...) showing that additional theist replies to the problem of evil (more theodicies, the privation view of evil, and others) also may be appropriated, with just as much plausibility, in support of the diabolist position. In the second part of the article, I defend the evil-god challenge against several objections. (shrink)

The dead donor rule justifies current practice in organ procurement for transplantation and states that organ donors must be dead prior to donation. The majority of organ donors are diagnosed as having suffered brain death and hence are declared dead by neurological criteria. However, a significant amount of unrest in both the philosophical and the medical literature has surfaced since this practice began forty years ago. I argue that, first, declaring death by neurological criteria is both unreliable and unjustified but (...) further, the ethical principles which themselves justify the dead donor rule are better served by abandoning that rule and instead allowing individuals who have suffered severe and irreversible brain damage to become organ donors, even though they are not yet dead and even though the removal of their organs would be the proximal cause of death. (shrink)

Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusions is (...) important, since philosophers who endorse large-scale non-agentive groups’ abilities almost universally endorse their obligations. More importantly, the twin arguments (one for abilities, one against obligations) make the following novel contribution: abilities imply agency-involving explanations, while obligations imply action-guidance. This general conclusion should be of interest beyond social ontology. (shrink)

Can the best arguments for a privation theory of evil be parodied, with equal plausibility, as arguments for a privation theory of good? The privation theory of evil claims that evil has no positive existence, and it is but a privation of good. The privation theory of good claims the opposite. I approach this topic as one element in the so-called evil-God Challenge. Stephen Law has argued that the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect God (...) (theism) is on a par with the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, but completely evil-God (maltheism). In fact, he concludes, the arguments for an evil God are symmetrical with, and isomorphic to, those for a good God. The privation theory of evil has often been used to defend theism against the argument from evil. Thus, part of the evil-God Challenge is to evaluate arguments for the privation theory of evil for their vulnerability to maltheist parody. I consider a broad range of arguments for the privation theory of evil, and I argue that most of them are vulnerable to parodic neutralization. Furthermore, I argue that although the thesis of the convertibility of being and goodness is often held to entail the privation theory of evil, or to be entailed by it (or to be equivalent to it), it is independent of the privation theory. I do find that David Oderberg’s recent argument for the privation theory of evil resists any easy maltheist parody, but I argue that it has a defect. I sketch an argument according to which his good-as-fulfillment account is compatible with a perfectly evil god. My tentative conclusion is that the privation theory of evil enjoys little more plausibility than does the privation theory of good. (shrink)

We explicate representational content by addressing how representations that ex- plain intelligent behavior might be acquired through processes of Darwinian evo- lution. We present the results of computer simulations of evolved neural network controllers and discuss the similarity of the simulations to real-world examples of neural network control of animal behavior. We argue that focusing on the simplest cases of evolved intelligent behavior, in both simulated and real organisms, reveals that evolved representations must carry information about the creature’s environ- ments (...) and further can do so only if their neural states are appropriately isomor- phic to environmental states. Further, these informational and isomorphism rela- tions are what are tracked by content attributions in folk-psychological and cognitive scientific explanations of these intelligent behaviors. (shrink)

In order for states to fulfil their moral duties, costs must be passed to individual citizens. This paper asks how these costs should be distributed. I advocate the common-sense answer: the distribution of costs should, insofar as possible, track the reasons behind the state’s duty. This answer faces a number of problems, which I attempt to solve.

Many governments are failing to act sufficiently strongly on climate change. Given this, what should motivated affluent individuals in high-consumption societies do? This paper argues that social norms are a particularly valuable target for individual climate action. Within norm-promotion, the paper makes the case for a focus on anti-fossil fuel norms specifically. Section 1 outlines gaps in the existing literature on individuals’ climate change obligations. Section 2 characterises social norms. Section 3 provides seven reasons why social norms are a particularly (...) worthy target for individual climate actors. Section 4 asks which social norms individuals should emphasise, arguing that anti-fossil fuel norms have advantages over emissions reduction and offsetting norms. Section 5 outlines the pathways and mechanisms individuals might exploit to promote anti-fossil fuel norms. (shrink)

Individuals sometimes pass their duties on to collectives, which is one way in which collectives can come to have duties. The collective discharges its duties by acting through its members, which involves distributing duties back out to individuals. Individuals put duties in and get (transformed) duties out. In this paper we consider whether (and if so, to what extent) this general account can make sense of states' duties. Do some of the duties we typically take states to have come from (...) individuals having passed on certain individual duties? There are complications: states can discharge their duties by contracting fulfilment out to non-members; states seem able to dissolve the duties of non-members; and some of states' duties are not derived in this way. We demonstrate that these complicate, but do not undermine, the general account and its application to states. And the application has an interesting upshot: by asking which individuals robustly participate in this process of duty transfer-and-transformation with a given state, we can begin to get a grip on who counts as a member of that state. (shrink)

When we say that ‘the government should be ashamed’, can we be taken literally? I argue that we can: organisations have duties over their emotions. Emotions have both functional and felt components. Often, emotions’ moral value derives from their functional components: from what they cause and what causes them. In these cases, organisations can have emotional duties in the same way that they can have duties to act. However, emotions’ value partly derives from their felt components. Organisations lack feelings, but (...) can have duties to increase the likelihood that their members have relevant emotions (with the right felt components), in virtue of and in accordance with their role in the organisation. To systematise these conclusions, I provide a taxonomy of organisations’ – and individuals’ organisationally situated – emotional duties. This taxonomy will enable scholars of electoral politics, international politics and public policy to systematically integrate emotions into the study of organisations. (shrink)

Trust not only disposes us to feel betrayed, trust can be betrayed. Understanding what a betrayal of trust is requires understanding how trust can ground an obligation on the part of the trusted person to act specifically as trusted. This essay argues that, since trust cannot ground an appropriate obligation where there is no prior obligation, a betrayal of trust should instead be conceived as the violation of a trust-based obligation to respect an already existing obligation. Two forms of trust (...) are evaluated for their potential to ground such a second-order obligation. One form counts as a gift to the trusted person only because it does not involve an expectation of trustworthiness; the other form cannot count as a gift but confers an honor because it does include an expectation of trustworthiness. Only trust that confers an honor generates a second-order obligation whose violation would be a betrayal of trust. -/- . (shrink)

Why, morally speaking, ought we do more for our family and friends than for strangers? In other words, what is the justification of special duties? According to partialists, the answer to this question cannot be reduced to impartial moral principles. According to impartialists, it can. This paper briefly argues in favour of impartialism, before drawing out an implication of the impartialist view: in addition to justifying some currently recognised special duties, impartialism also generates new special duties that are not yet (...) widely recognised. Specifically, in certain situations, impartial principles generate duties to take actions and adopt attitudes in our personal lives that increase the chance of new or different special relationships being formed—new or different friendships, family-like relationships, relationships akin to co-nationality, and so on. In fact, even if one thinks partialism is the best justification of the duties we have once in special relationships, impartialist justifications for taking steps to form such relationships should have some sway. Moreover, a little reflection shows that these duties are not as demanding or counterintuitive as one might expect. (shrink)

Realist theories of legislative intent can be divided between aggregative theories (on which legislative intent is what some proportion of legislators intend) and common intent theories (on which legislative intent is a unanimous intent among legislators). In this paper, we advance and defend an alternative realist conception of legislative intent: the Rational Unity Account. On this account, the legislature is an agent with a distinctive ‘rational point of view’—a concept we adopt from social ontology. The legislature’s rational point of view (...) is shaped by its procedures and structures, in ways not determined by either a common intention held by legislators or an aggregation of the intentions of legislators. We explain how our view improves on existing accounts. We then apply it to three cases to demonstrate its implications for legal interpretation. Importantly, on the proposed account, legislative intent can depart from what individual legislators think or know. (shrink)

In this paper, a novel experimental task is developed for testing the highly influential, but experimentally underexplored, possible worlds account of conditionals (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). In Experiment 1, this new task is used to test both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For indicative conditionals, five competing truth tables are compared, including the previously untested, multi-dimensional possible worlds semantics of Bradley (2012). In Experiment 2, these results are replicated and it is shown that they cannot be accounted for by an alternative (...) hypothesis proposed by our reviewers. In Experiment 3, individual variation in truth assignments of indicative conditionals is investigated via Bayesian mixture models that classify participants as following one of several competing models. As a novelty of this study, it is found that a possible worlds semantics of Lewis and Stalnaker is capable of accounting for participants’ aggregate truth value assignments in this task. Applied to indicative conditionals, we show across three experiments, that the theory both captures participants’ truth values at the aggregate level (Experiments 1 and 2) and that it makes up the largest subgroup in the analysis of individual variation in our experimental paradigm (Experiment 3). (shrink)

The foundational principles of representative democracy are under attack globally. What we desperately need are enlightened and persuasive public intellectuals who can help us see through the fog of our fear, anger, and disillusionment, to find our rational political commitments again. One of these public intellectuals is undoubtedly Yuval Noah Harari, the bestselling author of three recent books – Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari is also a frequent contributor in the popular press, and a (...) guest on shows, podcasts, panels, and as a keynote speaker. Add to all this that Harari is acting on his lofty academic ideals through ‘Sapienship’, a multidisciplinary organization he cofounded that advocates for global responsibility, clarifies the global conversation, and focuses attention on the most important global challenges. I single out Harari because I presume many readers will be familiar with his work. He is certainly one of the fastest rising stars of public intellectualism. Unfortunately, his work is undercut by the philosophical positions he put forth in his first bestselling book, Sapiens. In this review/critique I wish to show that in order for Harari advance a coherent political or ideological argument, he must first shore up his philosophical commitments. (shrink)

Some contemporary states are morally culpable for historically distant wrongs. But which states for which wrongs? The answer is not obvious, due to secessions, unions, and the formation of new states in the time since the wrongs occurred. This paper develops a framework for answering the question. The argument begins by outlining a picture of states’ agency on which states’ culpability is distinct from the culpability of states’ members. It then outlines, and rejects, a plausible-seeming answer to our question: that (...) culpability transmits from a past state’s action to a present state just if the two states share a numerical identity, for example as determined by international law. I advocate a different answer: culpability transmits from a past action to a present state to the extent that the present state ‘descends from’ the aspects of the past state that underpinned the past action. One potential upshot is that some present-day settler-colonies (such as Australia) are culpable for the centuries-ago invasion of their lands by European powers—even though these states did not perform these invasions and indeed did not exist at the time. (shrink)