We first argue that there are cases of “blameless non-belief.” That is, some people—through no fault of their own—fail to enter into a conscious relationship with God. But if so, then it would be unjust of God to make certain particular goods (e.g., one’s salvation, the possibility of an ethical or a meaningful life, or entrance into heaven) depend upon one having a conscious relationship with God. So, given that God is just, then despite what some theists believe, a relationship (...) with God (even assuming that God exists) cannot be a necessary condition for the attainment of these goods; there might, e.g., be atheists in heaven, even assuming that theism is true. This implies that religion is a far less important component of people’s lives than many might think. (shrink)

We raise various puzzles about the relationship between God and the meaning of life. These difficulties suggest that, even if we assume that God exists, and even if God’s existence would entail that our lives have meaning, God is not and could not be the source of the meaning of life. We conclude by discussing implications of our arguments: these claims can be used in a novel argument for atheism; these claims undermine an extant argument for God’s existence; and they (...) suggest that atheism is consistent with our lives having meaning. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (...) (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology. (shrink)

What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle.

Suppose that you are engaging with someone who is your oppressor, or someone who espouses a heinous view like Nazism or a ridiculous view like flat-earthism. In contexts like these, there is a disparity between you and your interlocutor, a dramatic normative difference across which you are in the right and they are in the wrong. As theorists of humility, we find these contexts puzzling. Humility seems like the *last* thing oppressed people need and the *last* thing we need in (...) dealing with those whose views are heinous or ridiculous. Responding to such people via humility seems uncalled for, even inappropriate. But how could this be, given that humility is a *virtue*? The purpose of the paper is to explore this puzzle. We explain what the puzzle is and then attempt to draw some lessons from it: first, the lesson that the importance of humility is limited in several ways, and second, the lesson that humility nonetheless has several important roles to play, even for people who are in the right in contexts of disparity. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski reject expressive objections to markets on the grounds that market symbolism is culturally contingent, and contingent cultural symbols are less important than the benefits markets offer. I grant and, but I deny that these points suffice as grounds to dismiss expressive critiques of markets. For many plausible expressive critiques of markets are not symbolic critiques at all. Rather, they are critiques grounded in the idea that some market transactions embody morally inappropriate normative stances toward (...) the goods or services on offer. (shrink)

In response to prominent criticisms of virtue ethical accounts of right action, Daniel Russell has argued that these criticisms are misguided insofar as they rest on an incorrect understanding of what virtue ethicists mean by ‘right action’, drawing on Rosalind Hursthouse’s influential account of the term. Liezl van Zyl has explored, though not fully-endorsed, a similar approach. The response holds that virtue ethicists do not embrace a strong connection between (i) right action and (ii) what any given agent ought to (...) do in a given set of circumstances. Rather, ‘right action’ is a matter of action assessment, and indicates that a given action is morally excellent and praiseworthy. More generally, the proposed account of rightness emphasizes both (i) an agent’s past and how she came to be in certain circumstances - is it a result of her own vice or wrong actions? and (ii) the agent’s own future happiness and well-being - will an action be so terrible that her life is marred and ruined? The narrative structure of an agent’s life thus plays a significant role in determining whether an action is right. This revisionary conception of right action is the focus of the current chapter. (shrink)

This article challenges a particular form of Eliminative Materialism as presented in the work, "Quining Qualia" where Dr. Daniel Dennett argues that qualia, as he defines it, does not exist. The paper underscores the contradictory nature of Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" and shows how he assumes the very notion he proports to defeat namely, that first-person (or subjective) conscious experience, commonly termed "qualia," exists.

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply “wisdom”) is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live and conduct herself. Because wisdom is such an important and high-level achievement, we should wonder: what is the nature of wisdom? What kinds of skills, habits and capacities does it involve? Can real people actually develop it? If so, how? I argue that we can answer these questions by modeling wisdom on expert decision-making skill in complex areas (...) like firefighting. I develop this expert skill model of wisdom using philosophical argument informed by relevant empirical research. I begin in Chapter 1 by examining the historical roots of analogies between wisdom and practical skills in order to motivate the expert skill model. In Chapter 2, I provide the core argument for the expert skill model. I then use the remaining chapters to pull out the implications of the expert skill model. In Chapter 3, I show that the expert skill model yields practical guidance about how to develop wisdom. In Chapter 4, I address the objection, due to Daniel Jacobson, that wisdom is not a skill that humans could actually develop, since skill development requires a kind of feedback in practice that is not available for all-things-considered decisions about how to live. Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply the expert skill model to the question, much discussed by virtue ethicists, of whether a wise person deliberates using a comprehensive and systematic conception of the good life. (shrink)

A pressing problem for many non-realist1 theories concerning various specific subject matters is the challenge of making sense of our ordinary propositional attitude claims related to the subject in question. Famously in the case of ethics, to take one example, we have in ordinary language prima facie ascriptions of beliefs and desires involving moral properties and relationships. In the case, for instance, of “Jason believes that Kylie is virtuous”, we appear to have a belief which takes Kylie to be (...) a certain way. If Jason desires that Kylie acts as she ought, he appears to have a desire which has as its content that Kylie perform actions of a certain sort (i.e. the actions that she ought to perform). However, for non-cognitivists in ethics who reject the idea that sentences such as “Kylie is virtuous” or “Kylie acts as she ought” are in the business of making truth-apt claims, or representing that certain moral features are possessed by objects or events, or even, in extreme cases, that such claims express propositions at all, the semantic analysis of the example propositional attitude claims made about Jason will have to be non-standard. (This is merely an application of the well-known “Frege-Geach problem” (see Geach 1965) to the case of embedding moral vocabulary in propositional-attitude ascriptions.). (shrink)

This essay is my review of Colleen Dyble’s book, Taming Leviathan: Waging a War of Ideas around the World. Dyble is affiliated with the legendary classical liberal British think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs. Her anthology is a collection of essays by people around the world who have been involved with similar free-market think tanks in countries with historically statist economic systems. These writers include Greg Lindsay, founder of the Center for Independent Studies in Australia; Margaret Tse, of the (...) Instituto Liberdade in Brazil; Michael Walker, co-founder of the Fraser Institute in Canada; Cristian Larroulet, of Libertad y Desarrollo in Chile; Giancarlo Ibarguen, of the Center for Economic and Social Studies in Guatemala (which actually founded a free-market-oriented university); Parth Shah, founder of the Center for Civil Society in India; Daniel Doron, co-founder of the Israeli Center for Social and Economic Progress; Alberto Mingardi, of the Instituto Bruno Leoni in Italy; Masaru Uchigama, founder of the Japanese for Tax Reform; Elena Leontjeva, co-founder of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute; Alexander Magno, co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Freedom in the Philippines; and last, Leon Louw, of the Free Market Foundation of South Africa. I then discuss seven important reasons why classical liberal think tanks are so important in modern societies. (shrink)

I argue that, according to Just War Theory, those who work as administrative personnel in the private military industry can be permissibly harmed while at work by enemy combatants. That is, for better or worse, a Just War theorist should consider all those who work as administrative personnel in the private military industry either: (i) individuals who may be permissibly restrained with lethal force while at work, or (ii) individuals who may be harmed by permissible attacks against their workplace. In (...) doing so, I also provide some critical analysis of the relevant Just War concepts. (shrink)

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére’s article “Compression in Philosophy” seeks to pose François Laruelle’s engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler’s epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of “opacity,” the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical “data.” Laruelle’s generic immanence is posed against Stiegler’s process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler’s philosophy seeks to (...) reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler’s Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the relation between Stiegler's artefaction and “compression” while, simultaneously, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler. I also further elaborate on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler’s work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Al-exander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova’s unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital. (shrink)

A popular argument is that peer disagreement about controversial moral topics undermines justified moral belief in a way that peer disagreement about non-moral topics does not undermine justified non-moral belief. Call this argument the argument for moral skepticism from peer disagreement. Jason Decker and Daniel Groll have recently made a companions in guilt response to this argument. Decker and Groll argue that if peer disagreement undermines justified moral belief, then peer disagreement undermines much non-moral justified belief; if the argument (...) for moral skepticism from peer disagreement succeeds, then a kind of non-moral skepticism holds too. And we should not hold that the status of such non-moral beliefs are undermined by peer disagreement. In this paper, I shows that Decker and Groll’s companions in guilt argument fails. I then draw out the implications of my argument for the epistemology of disagreement and the epistemology of moral disagreement more generally. For instance, I then argue that peer disagreement about morality does not undermine all justified moral belief but that peer disagreement about morality does preclude most moral beliefs from being justified and constituting knowledge in a way that peer disagreement about non-moral topics does not preclude most non-moral beliefs from being justified and constituting knowledge. (shrink)

Academic misconduct is a prominent issue at postsecondary institutions. This issue includes the act of plagiarism, which has received considerable attention on campuses. There is a growing body of research examining why students engage in plagiarism, and what they know about plagiarism, but little of this research is guided by a theoretical framework. Although all students may be tempted to plagiarize, students in teacher education programs represent a unique population because they are concerned with developing their own academic performance alongside (...) the skills necessary to manage situations of academic misconduct as future teachers. Therefore, our first aim was to examine preservice teachers’ beliefs about plagiarism. Then, following the principles of Attribution Theory, our second aim was to investigate how beliefs of controllability related to acts of plagiarism impacted participants views on responsibility, emotions, help giving, and reporting. We used a within-person repeated measures design with three levels of controllability manipulated through hypothetical scenarios of plagiarism to collect data from 201 preservice teachers. Overall, preservice teachers had strong beliefs about plagiarism. Moreover, when scenarios included students who engaged in plagiarism that was controllable, participants were more likely to view the student as responsible, feel anger towards them, support punishment, and recommend reporting the student, than when the act of plagiarism was not seen as controllable. We provide recommendations for instructors and administrators for supporting students and highlight limitations and directions for future research. (shrink)

Endurantists have recently faced a mereological puzzle in various forms. Here I argue that, instead of presenting a genuine worry, the puzzle actually reveals a common misunderstanding about the endurantist ontology. Furthermore, through this discussion of the alleged problem and the misunderstanding which motivates it, I reveal metaphysical commitments the endurantist has that may not be widely recognized. For instance, she is committed to interesting and perhaps controversial views about shape and location. I highlight these commitments and what they mean (...) for the endurantist. (shrink)

Conceptual metaphor provides a potentially powerful counseling framework, generalizable across theoretical orientations. According to the conceptual perspective, metaphor is not merely a matter of language, but is an indispensable dimension of human understanding and experience whereby more abstract ideas (like relationships) are understood in terms of more concrete experiences (like journeys). Consequently, when a couple in counseling says, “we're just spinning our wheels,” they are not only using a common colloquial expression, but also giving information about how they conceptualize their (...) relationship. This article provides a theoretical foundation for use of conceptual metaphor and offers examples of its potential for counseling. (shrink)

Here I defend the compatibility of presentism and time travel against a few objections. Keller and Nelson argue that, if presentism is at all plausible, presentism and time travel are as compatible as eternalism and time travel. But Miller and Sider are not convinced. I reply that for their concerns to have merit, Miller and Sider must assume presentists are committed to positions they need not be; I explain why presentists are not so committed and, in the process, defend Keller (...) and Nelson’s position that there is no roadblock to presentist time travel that does not also apply to eternalist time travel. (shrink)

Mereological challenges have recently been raised against the endurantist. For instance, Barker and Dowe (2003) have argued that eternalist endurantism entails (1) persisting objects are both 3D and 4D, and that (2) the lives of persisting objects last longer than they actually do. They also argue that presentist endurantism also entails, albeit in a tensed way, that (3) the lives of persisting objects last longer than they actually do. While they’ve further argued (2005) that the objections raised by McDaniel (2003) (...) and Beebee and Rush (2003) fail, here I show that such objections are tenable without requiring further significant metaphysical commitments; I argue that such endurantist defences are tenable, contra to prior analyses. (shrink)

Attempting to settle various debates from recent literature regarding its precise nature, I offer a detailed conceptual analysis of toleration. I begin by isolating toleration from other notions; this provides us some guidance by introducing the eight definitional conditions of toleration that I then explicate and defend. Together, these eight conditions indicate that toleration is an agent’s intentional and principled refraining from interfering with an opposed other (or their behavior, etc.) in situations of diversity, where the agent believes she has (...) the power to interfere. This non-normative definition can serve as a preliminary to normative discussions of toleration. (shrink)

This report by the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage addresses how countries can make fair progress towards the goal of universal coverage. It explains the relevant tradeoffs between different desirable ends and offers guidance on how to make these tradeoffs.

Contemporary philosophical debates surrounding toleration have revolved around three issues: What is toleration? Should we tolerate and, if so, why? What should be tolerated? These questions are of central importance to social and political thought.

The central claim is that the semantic knowledge exercised by people when they speak is practical knowledge. The relevant idea of practical knowledge is explicated, applied to the case of speaking, and connected with an idea of agents’ knowledge. Some defence of the claim is provided.

Early in the history of liberalism, its most important proponents were concerned with freedom of religion. As polities and individuals now accept a dizzying array of religions, this has receded to the background for most theorists. It nonetheless remains a concern. Freedom of speech is a similar concern and very much in the foreground for theorists looking at the current state of academia. In this essay, I argue that inappropriate limits to freedom of religion and inappropriate limits to freedom of (...) speech—especially in the form of de-platforming on college campuses—both have, as one of their effects, what I call harms of silence. This means we ought not have those limits, so should seek to change them where they exist. (shrink)

Hugh LaFollette proposed parental licensing in 1980 (and 2010)--not as a requirement for pregnancy, but for raising a child. If you have a baby, are not licensed, and do not get licensed, the baby would be put up for adoption. Despite the intervention required in an extremely personal area of life, I argue that those who endorse the harm principle ought to endorse parental licensing of this sort. Put differently, I show how the harm principle strengthens the case for parental (...) licensing. (shrink)

Two normative principles of toleration are offered, one individual-regarding, the other group-regarding. The first is John Stuart Mill’s harm principle; the other is “Principle T,” meant to be the harm principle writ large. It is argued that the state should tolerate autonomous sacrifices of autonomy, including instances where an individual rationally chooses to be enslaved, lobotomized, or killed. Consistent with that, it is argued that the state should tolerate internal restrictions within minority groups even where these prevent autonomy promotion of (...) members of the group. Finally, it is argued that toleration excludes external protections of minority groups. (shrink)

This article defends the use of fanciful examples within the method of wide reflective equilibrium. First, it characterizes the general persuasive role of described cases within that method. Second, it suggests three criteria any example must meet in order to succeed in this persuasive role; fancifulness has little or nothing to do with whether an example is able to meet these criteria. Third, it discusses several general objections to fanciful examples and concludes that they are objections to the abuse of (...) described cases; they identify no special problem with fanciful examples. (shrink)

Critics of liberalism in the past two decades have argued that the fact that we are necessarily "situated" or "embedded" means that we can not always choose our own ends (for example, our conceptions of the good or our loyalties to others). Some suggest that we simply discover ourselves with these "connections." If correct, this would argue against (Rawlsian) hypothetical contract models and liberalism more broadly, make true impartiality impossible, and give support to traditionalist views like those of Alasdair MacIntyre, (...) Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel. These same critics argue that liberalism's rejection or neglect of this supposed fact of our moral life has pernicious anti-social affects. I argue that the critics are wrong in both cases, defending what I call "strong voluntarism." In contrast both to recent critics of liberalism and the dominant trend in recent liberal thought, my defense of strong voluntarism allows that we can always choose to accept or reject any end we happen to have but that this does not lead to any pernicious anti-social effects. (shrink)

This article investigates the semantics of sentences that express numerical averages, focusing initially on cases such as 'The average American has 2.3 children'. Such sentences have been used both by linguists and philosophers to argue for a disjuncture between semantics and ontology. For example, Noam Chomsky and Norbert Hornstein have used them to provide evidence against the hypothesis that natural language semantics includes a reference relation holding between words and objects in the world, whereas metaphysicians such as Joseph Melia and (...) Stephen Yablo have used them to provide evidence that apparent singular reference need not be taken as ontologically committing. We develop a fully general and independently justified compositional semantics in which such constructions are assigned truth conditions that are not ontologically problematic, and show that our analysis is superior to all extant rivals. Our analysis provides evidence that a good semantics yields a sensible ontology. It also reveals that natural language contains genuine singular terms that refer to numbers. (shrink)

Communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel, defend what we may call the ‘social constitution thesis.’ This is the view that participation in society makes us what we are. This claim, however, is ambiguous. In an attempt to shed some light on it and to better understand the impact its truth would have on our beliefs regarding autonomy, I offer four possible ways it could be understood and four corresponding senses of individual independence and autonomy. I also indicate (...) what senses liberals can accept that we are socially constituted and in what sense I take communitarians to argue we are socially constituted. (shrink)

We explain libertarian thought about family and children, including controversial issues in need of serious attention. To begin our discussion of marriage, we distinguish between procedural and substantive contractarian approaches to marriage, each endorsed by various libertarians. Advocates of both approaches agree that it is a contract that makes a marriage, not a license, but disagree about whether there are moral limits to the substance of the contract with only advocates of the substantive approach accepting such. Either approach, though, offers (...) advantages over the current licensing system, so we discuss paths from that to a contractarian system. We also discuss the concept of marriage itself, the ages of consent for marriage, sexual activity, and reproduction, as well as how marriages can be dissolved, and coercion that sometimes occurs in marriage. We then turn to children. We first discuss reproductive freedom and then discuss the moral relationship between children and parents, especially considering stewardship, propertarian, and best interests approaches (we also touch on anti-natalism). One of the biggest issues facing parents is how to properly raise and educate children; we discuss this in depth and consider the sort of schooling that should be offered in a free society. Since children lack the requisite ability to consent, they cannot choose their education; how to respond to this is of the utmost importance for libertarians. As we note, the same issue of consent looms large for many forms medical treatment of children. (shrink)

Liberalism, historically, is closely associated with increased toleration, so it is unsurprising that a variety of contemporary authors (Hampton, Kukathas, Barry, Ten) consider toleration to be “the substantive heart of liberalism” (Hampton 1989, 802). The precise role of toleration in liberalism, though, is unclear; different liberals have different views. In this essay, I will discuss three sorts of liberal theories and indicate how they approach questions of toleration, arguing that one of them supports toleration of more sorts of activities (including (...) speech acts and lifestyles) than the others. While I think this is reason to favor that sort of theory, I will not defend that claim. Some reasonably think (and defend the view) that though toleration is of value, its limits should be drawn more narrowly. (shrink)

The basic idea of this essay is that it is a mistake to deny the existence of psychological harms or that such harms may justify limiting certain sorts of speech acts in certain sorts of circumstances, but that such circumstances are not part of the paradigmatic college environment.

In this paper, I first argue that waste is best understood as (a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process. I next argue for the immorality of waste. My concluding suggestions are that (W1) if one person needs something for her preservation and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it, and refuses (...) to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second may be morally wrong and that (W2) if one person needs something for her preservation understood according to her metric and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it according to his own metric, and refuses to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second is morally wrong. (shrink)

We live in a market system and witness much economic inequality. Although such inequality may not be an essential characteristic of market systems, it seems historically inevitable. How we should evaluate this inequality, on the other hand, is contentious. I propose that bleeding heart libertarians provide the best diagnosis and prescription.

We live in a market system with much economic inequality. This may not be an essential characteristic of market systems but seems historically inevitable. How we should evaluate it, on the other hand, is contentious. I propose that bleeding heart libertarianism provides the best diagnosis and prescription.

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...) surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research. (shrink)

I aim in this paper to provide defense of one way to look at what should be regulated in the market place. In particular, I discuss what should be tolerated and argue against corporate welfare. I begin by endorsing John Stuart Mill’s harm principle as a normative principle of toleration. I call strict commitment to the harm principle when considering the regulatory structure of markets market libertarianism and oppose that to promotionism, the view that endorses government interference to promote business (...) interests. I next discuss the widespread use of promotionist policies, arguing against them and for market libertarianism. I also consider problems for my view, recognizing that one of my responses may leave some thinking the paper is a reductio of the market libertarian view because of the sort of slow-growth state it endorses. Others will recognize it as a view promoted by some of the U.S. founding fathers and find it attractive in its own right. (shrink)

Whether Social Media Companies (hereafter, SMCs) such as Twitter and Facebook limit speech is an empirical question. No one disputes that they do. Whether they “censor” speech is a conceptual question, the answer to which is a matter of dispute. Whether they may do so is a moral question, also a matter of dispute. We address both of these latter questions and hope to illuminate whether it is morally permissible for SMCs to restrict speech on their platforms. This could be (...) part of a larger argument, when we do not explicitly offer here, that states ought not to forbid SMCs from censoring. We do not focus on legal statutes or precedent. We argue that nonstate actors can (as a conceptual matter) and may (as a moral matter) impede the freedoms of others to express themselves. That is, barring rare emergencies, nonstate actors may censor individuals even when states may not. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to provide what is necessary for a conceptual analysis of toleration such that one would have a clear definition of this central liberal tenet. First, notions related to but different from toleration are discussed; this provides guidance by introducing the likely definitional conditions of toleration. Next, those conditions are explicated and defended. Putting the conditions together, we can say an agent tolerates when she intentionally and on principle refrains from interfering with an opposed other (...) (or their behavior, etc.), though she believes she has the power to interfere. This definition is neither normatively loaded nor sufficient for moral or political theory. Readers may also prefer a definition made with some subset of the conditions rather than all. (shrink)

We discuss the crucial, but easily missed, link between paternalism and incarceration. Legal paternalists believe law should be used to help individuals stay healthy or moral or become healthier or morally better. Criminal laws are paternalistic if they make it illegal to perform some action that would be bad for the actor to do, regardless of effects on others. Yet, one result of such laws is the punishment, including incarceration, of the very same actors—also clearly bad for them even if (...) meant to be rehabilitative. Therein lies an oddity: paternalist criminal law—and thepresumably rehabilitativepunishments that serve as responses to infringements of such laws—is meant to help the actor but in fact has the opposite effect on net. Incarceration is particularly problematic on this front as it harms the alleged criminal in ways that go beyond the harm they would have caused themselves. Incarceration also may undermine the actor’s ability to improve his decision-making abilities or his moral character. The effects of the punishment also drift to others—family and friends, as well as business associates, of the punished. Paternalists, inasmuch as they are motivated by beneficence or concern about moral character, must account for all of these costs as threats to well-being and the conditions for acting morally. Given the link between paternalism and incarceration, we propose that if we are to take seriously the problem of over-incarceration in the U.S., we must reconsider the use of paternalism in criminal law; we sketch several alternatives. We believe paternalists should support our resistance to incarceration and seriously consider these alternatives. (shrink)

Emily Chamlee-Wright is clearly right that self-censorship is an issue of concern within the academy. How much of a problem it is—how widespread and how bad it is when it occurs—is unclear and difficult to quantify. Administrators, faculty, and students all self-censor from time to time. Sometimes the self-censorship is just a matter of being polite or exercising pedagogical restraint, as Chamlee-Wright notes. The worry, of course, is that sometimes it prevents open and honest discussion about difficult topics and thus (...) stymies learning and truth-seeking. While I will keep these caveats in mind, I also want to help strengthen Chamlee-Wright’s case. I will also, though, point out a difficulty. (shrink)

Given that one of the major goals of the practice of Philosophy for Children (P4C) is the development of critical thinking skills (Sharp 1987/2018, pp. 4 6), an urgent question that emerged for one of the authors, who is of Chinese Heritage and a novice practitioner at a P4C summer camp was whether this emphasis on critical thinking might make this practice incompatible with the fabric of Chinese culture. Filial piety (孝), which requires respect for one’s parents, elders, and ancestors (...) is considered an important virtue in Asian culture, as is the preservation of harmony. But if one of the goals of P4C is to teach youngsters to courageously pursue reasoned dialogue, does this not set-up young Asians for serious conflict when they come face-to-face with positions that are articulated by elders, but which are ones to which they are diametrically opposed; a racist grandmother, for instance, or an uncle who insists that those at the Tiananmen Square uprising were nothing but hooligan’s. It is this question that we will explore in this presentation. In the process, we will come to the conclusion that, when positions seem irreconcilable, rather than continuing to pursue rigorous critical interchange that may do little other than escalate insult, the facilitator, rather, ought to move toward creating a deeper understanding of each position juxtaposed against its opposing view (a process that we refer to as ‘collaborative caring’), so as to produce side-by-side understanding, knowing that communal bonds have been maintained and, hence, that the opportunity for genuine reasoned collaborative inquiry on other issues and at future times remains open. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on what liberal states should tolerate outside their borders. This requires definitions of `liberalism, ́ `toleration, ́ and `state. ́ In the first section of this paper, I briefly indicate how I use those and other terms necessary to the discussion and introduce the normative principle I take liberals to be committed to. In the second section, I continue clearing the path for the rest of my discussion. In the rest of (...) the paper, I draw conclusions about what liberals should tolerate outside their state that I believe follow from the proffered definitions and principles. I limit myself to interference aimed at providing humanitarian aid, but do so in a way that is meant to provide resources for thinking about other sorts of interventions. In the third section, I consider humanitarian interventions done with the permis- sion of the other state and will point toward a toleration-based view; here we are really talking about non-toleration of suffering. In the fourth section, I consider humanitarian interventions done without the permission of the other state; here we are talking about non-toleration of a state that harms its residents. I consider an objection in section five. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an account of harm as event-based but also in the mold of the account offered by Joel Feinberg in his magnum opus, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law.3 The analysis I offer is meant, that is, to be serviceable in a project like Feinberg’s–that is, it is one of normative political philosophy—and, importantly here, useful for determining when speech might rightly be limited. On the account defended here, to undergo a harm is to be (...) the subject of an event wherein one’s interests are wrongfully set back and wherein the status of the undergoing of the harm derives from its being the sort of event that it is (namely, a setting back of interests), independently of the badness of any resulting state. (shrink)

Critics of liberalism have argued that liberal individualismmisdescribes persons in ignoring the degree to which they aredependent on their communities. Indeed, they argue that personsare essentially socially constituted. In this paper, however, Iprovide two arguments – the first concerning communitariandescriptive claims about persons, our society, and the communitarian ideal society, and the second regarding thecommunitarian view of individual autonomy – that the communitariantheory of Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel,relies on individuals either being independent from theircommunities or having a (...) community-independent desire. Thisis indicative of a deep contradiction in communitarian thought. (shrink)

A response to critical commentaries. Crookston begins her commentary by noting that my book would have been better with answers to “the following three questions: (1) Why is the harm principle the right principle upon which to base a theory of toleration? (2) How is Cohen thinking of the concept of volenti? (p. x ) Is interference (i.e., the abandonment of toleration) ever morally required by the harm principle?” (p. x ). She is right, and I address these questions below (...) in Sections 2, 3, and 4. That is the bulk of this essay. I then turn to Kelley's issues in Sections 6, 7, and 8; these have to do with “the link between toleration and relativism,” the way I distinguish “the concepts of toleration and endurance,” and a “question about moral toleration” (p. x ). Despite much agreement, there are points of contention and I try to make my position clearer in response . (shrink)

It is often claimed that liberalism is falsely and perniciously universalist. I take this charge seriously, exploring three positions: the communitarians’, Rorty’s, and that of “comprehensive” liberalism. After explaining why universalism is thought impossible, I examine the communitarian view that value is determined within communities and argue that it results in a form of relativism that is unacceptable. I next discuss Richard Rorty’s liberal acceptance of “conventionalism” and explain how, despite his rejection of universalism, Rorty remains a liberal. I then (...) present a defense of universalism, based in part on arguments that parallel Thomas Nagel’s arguments in defense of a “view from nowhere” and Jean Hampton’s objectivist arguments against Rawls’s moves to a “merely political” theory. That defense requires that we can distance ourselves from our ends to make moral judgments shorn of all partialities. (shrink)