Humans and artificial intelligences (AI) will increasingly participate digitally and physically in conflicts yet there is a lack of trusted communications across agents and platforms. For example, humans in disasters and conflict already use messaging and social media to share information, however, international humanitarian relief organisations treat this information as unverifiable and untrustworthy. AI may reduce the ‘fog-of-war’ and improve outcomes, however current AI implementations are often brittle, have a narrow scope of application and wide ethical risks. Meanwhile, human error (...) causes significant civilian harms even by combatants committed to complying with international humanitarian law. AI offers an opportunity to help reduce the tragedy of war and better deliver humanitarian aid to those who need it. However, to be successful, these systems must be trusted by humans and their information systems, overcoming flawed information flows in conflict and disaster zones that continue to be marked by intermittent communications, poor situation awareness, mistrust and human errors. In this paper, we consider the integration of a communications protocol (the ‘Whiteflag protocol’), distributed ledger technology, and information fusion with artificial intelligence (AI), to improve conflict communications called “Protected Assurance Understanding Situation & Entities” PAUSE. Such a trusted human-AI communication network could provide accountable information exchange regarding protected entities, critical infrastructure; humanitarian signals and status updates for humans and machines in conflicts. Trust-based information fusion provides resource-efficient use of diverse data sources to increase the reliability of reports. AI can be used to catch human mistakes and complement human decision making, while human judgment can direct and override AI recommendations. We examine several case studies for the integration of these technologies into a trusted human-AI network for humanitarian benefit including mapping a conflict zone with civilians and combatants in real time, preparation to avoid incidents and using the network to manage misinformation. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman observed that we use only certain ‘good’ (viz. projectible) predicates during reasoning, with no obvious demarcation criterion in sight to distinguish them from the bad and gruesome ones. This apparent arbitrariness undermines the justifiability of our reasoning practices. Inspired by Quine’s 1969 paper on Natural Kinds, Peter Gärdenfors proposes a cognitive criterion based on his theory of Conceptual Spaces (CS). He argues the good predicates are those referring to natural concepts, and that we can capture naturalness in terms (...) of similarity. In contrast to Quine, he does not primarily rely on logic, but geometry. He frames his account as a descriptive project, however, and it is not obvious how it addresses the normative dimension of Goodman’s Riddle. This paper develops a charitable reconstruction of his argument, based on the idea that the instrumental success of our projectible concepts is grounded in their cognitive-pragmatic naturalness. It then explores three lines of reasoning against the argument: Evolutionarily motivated skepticism, the miracles argument, and the relation between instrumental and pragmatic success. I conclude that in its current form, the CS account fails to provide any justification of reasoning beyond appealing to its instrumental success, and that a metaphysically robust notion of naturalness helps to achieve the desired goal. (shrink)

Aphantasia, i.e., the inability to voluntarily form visual mental images, affects approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population and plays an important role in a more general debate revolving around the role of imagery for our cognition. This thesis investigates aphantasia by means of an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from contemporary neuroscientific research with historical philosophical arguments, with a specific focus on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A new theoretical concept, meta-imagination, is developed and it is argued that (...) the concept can explain why aphantasics perform successfully on a wide range of visual imagery tasks, thus providing important implications for the more general debate about the connection between imagery and cognition. (shrink)

Aphantasia, namely the inability to voluntarily form visual mental imagery, does not, counterintuitively, impair the affected from successfully performing mental imagery tasks. One way of explaining this finding is to posit that aphantasics, despite their claim to the contrary, can form visual imagery, a position here referred to as aphantasia skepticism. This article outlines and rejects two types of aphantasia skepticism and argues that the position results from what is coined the visualizer’s fallacy, namely the false belief that visual mental (...) imagery is necessary to carry out mental imagery tasks. Furthermore, it is argued that the visualizer’s fallacy and the resulting aphantasia skepticism are not only potentially harmful to aphantasics but may also lead to an impoverished view of the dynamics of cognition in general. -/- . (shrink)

This paper contributes to the emerging field of comparative metaethics by offering a reconstruction of the metaethical views implicit to the Daoist classic, the Laozi 老子 or Daodejing 道德經. It offers two novel views developed out of the Laozi: one-all value monism and moral trivialism. The paper proceeds by discussing Brook Ziporyn’s reading of the Laozi in terms of omnipresence and irony, and then applies his reading to moral properties like values and names (ming 名). The paper emboldens Ziporyn’s monistic (...) tendencies in order to claim that the Laozi not only treats the Dao as an omnipresent value, but also as the one value that is all values. I call this view one-all value monism. I then argue that, in terms of moral epistemology, one-all value monism entails moral trivialism, the view that all moral judgments are true. I conclude by emphasizing the therapeutic motivation for holding such apparently outrageous metaethical views. The paper thus defends the basic claim that there is a point at which Ziporyn’s omnipresence and irony become monism and true contradiction, and that further exploring the consequences of these inevitable transitions leads to the discovery of novel metaethical views. (shrink)

Many philosophers, in discussing supererogation, maintain that supererogatory actions must be done for the benefit of others. In this paper I argue that there can be instances of self-regarding supererogatory actions. That is, there are cases in which the primary (or sole) intended beneficiary of a supererogatory action is the agent herself, and she need not be acting out of a concern for morality or moral rules. In such cases the agent still acts suitably 'beyond the call of duty', and (...) in a morally praiseworthy fashion. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

This paper is a companion piece to my earlier paper “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions”. There are two intuitive charges against fallibilism. One is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it might be that he is not a Republican”. The second is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, even though (...) I’m not certain that he is”, or “I know that Bush it a Republican, even though it isn’t certain that he is.” In “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions”, I argue that fallibilism in epistemology does not countenance the truth of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it might be that he is not a Republican”. In this paper, I argue that there are independent reasons for thinking that utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though I’m not certain that he is” and “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it’s not certain that he is” are unassertible. More specifically, I argue that these are simply instances of Moore’s Paradox, such as “Dogs bark, but I don’t know that they do.” The right account of Moore’s Paradox does not involve the falsehood of the semantic content of the relevant utterances, but rather their pragmatic unacceptability. So the anti-fallibilist intuitions turn out to have pragmatic, rather than semantic import, and therefore do not tell against the truth of fallibilism. Fallibilism in epistemology is often thought to be theoretically desirable, but intuitively problematic. My purpose with these two papers is to show that fallibilism is not intuitively problematic. (shrink)

This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that led (...) to their conclusions. Furthermore, we generalize the epistemic landscape model, showing that one should be skeptical about the benefits of social learning in epistemically complex environments. (shrink)

The values-based approach to welfare holds that it is good for one to realize goals, activities, and relationships with which one strongly (and stably) identifies. This approach preserves the subjectivity of welfare while affirming that a life well lived must be active, engaged, and subjectively meaningful. As opposed to more objective theories, it is unified, naturalistic, and ontologically parsimonious. However, it faces objections concerning the possibility of self-sacrifice, disinterested and paradoxical values, and values that are out of sync with physical (...) and emotional needs. This paper revises the values-based approach, emphasizing the important—but limited—role consciously held values play in human agency. The additional components of human agency in turn explain why it is important for one’s values to cohere with one’s fixed drives, hard-wired emotional responses, and nonvolitionally guided cognitive pro- cesses. This affords promising responses to the objections above. (shrink)

Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discourse (...) is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)

Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud have both argued that the demands of being a good friend can conflict with the demands of standard epistemic norms. Intuitively, good friends will tend to seek favorable interpretations of their friends’ behaviors, interpretations that they would not apply to strangers; as such they seem prone to form unjustified beliefs. I argue that there is no such clash of norms. In particular, I argue that friendship does not require us to form beliefs about our friends (...) in the biased fashion suggested by Stroud and Keller. I further argue that while some slight bias in belief-formation might be permitted by friendship, any such bias would fall within the bounds of epistemic propriety. (shrink)

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom (...) on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities. (shrink)

Problem one: why, if God designed the human mind, did it take so long for humans to develop theistic concepts and beliefs? Problem two: why would God use evolution to design the living world when the discovery of evolution would predictably contribute to so much nonbelief in God? Darwin was aware of such questions but failed to see their evidential significance for theism. This paper explores this significance. Problem one introduces something I call natural nonbelief, which is significant because it (...) parallels and corroborates well-known worries about natural evil. Problems one and two, especially when combined, support naturalism over theism, intensify the problem of divine hiddenness, challenge Alvin Plantinga’s views about the naturalness of theism, and advance the discussion about whether the conflict between science and religion is genuine or superficial. (shrink)

Alongside a revival of interest in Thomism in philosophy, scholars have realised its relevance when addressing certain contemporary issues in bioethics. This book offers a rigorous interpretation of Aquinas's metaphysics and ethical thought, and highlights its significance to questions in bioethics. Jason T. Eberl applies Aquinas’s views on the seminal topics of human nature and morality to key questions in bioethics at the margins of human life – questions which are currently contested in the academia, politics and the media (...) such as: When does a human person’s life begin? How should we define and clinically determine a person’s death? Is abortion ever morally permissible? How should we resolve the conflict between the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research and the lives of human embryos? Does cloning involve a misuse of human ingenuity and technology? What forms of treatment are appropriate for irreversibly comatose patients? How should we care for patients who experience unbearable suffering as they approach the end of life? _Thomistic Principles and Bioethics_ presents a significant philosophical viewpoint which will motivate further dialogue amongst religious and secular arenas of inquiry concerning such complex issues of both individual and public concern. (shrink)

Epistemologists often assume that an agent’s epistemic goal is simply to acquire as much knowledge as possible for herself. Drawing on an analogy with ethics and other practices, I argue that being situated in an epistemic community introduces a range of epistemic virtues (and goals) which fall outside of those typically recognized by both individualistic and social epistemologists. Candidate virtues include such traits as honesty, integrity (including an unwillingness to misuse one’s status as an expert), patience, and creativity. We can (...) understand such traits to be epistemic virtues insofar as they tend to produce knowledge – not for the agent alone, but for her community. Recognition of such ‘otherregarding epistemic virtues’ both broadens the area of inquiry of epistemology, and introduces new standards for the evaluation of epistemic agents. (shrink)

There is a debate among moral error theorists. It concerns what is to be done with moral discourse once it is believed to be systematically false or untrue. It has been called the ‘now what’ problem. Should error theorists abolish morality or insulate themselves in some way from this nihilistic consequence of belief in error theory? Assertive moral abolitionism aims to have error theorists avoid any insulation and abolish morality altogether. Revolutionary moral fictionalism aims for insulation by having error theorists (...) start treating morality as a useful fiction. There are certain problems with assertive moral abolitionism and revolutionary moral fictionalism, however. This paper argues for a hybrid view that combines the best parts of both views. I call this position ‘reactionary moral fictionalism.’ It says it might be wise for certain individual error theorists to abolish morality in most cases, but remain quiet about their abolition. It also says that these error theorists should use morality as a fiction in those situations where it would be practically detrimental not to use moral discourse. In such situations, the error theorist should employ moral fictionalism. A fictionalist approach should thus be used only as a passive reaction to contexts where it cannot be avoided. The advice offered to certain individual error theorists by reactionary moral fictionalism is thus ‘abolish morality when one can, but use morality as a fiction when one has to.’ It is argued that this solution to the ‘now what’ problem offers superior therapeutic benefits for these individuals and could possibly serve as a compromise between assertive moral abolitionism and revolutionary moral fictionalism. (shrink)

Leading versions of hedonism generate implausible results about the welfare value of very intense or unwanted pleasures, while recent versions of desire satisfactionism overvalue the fulfillment of desires associated with compulsions and addictions. Consequently, both these theories fail to satisfy a plausible condition of adequacy for theories of well-being proposed by L.W. Sumner: they do not make one’s well-being depend on one’s own cares or concerns. But Sumner’s own life-satisfaction theory cannot easily be extended to explain welfare over time, and (...) it makes mistaken (autonomous, informed) self-assessment impossible. A new account of well-being based on the stable realization of personal values enjoys the advantages claimed for these subjective theories while avoiding these problems. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic, mind-independent grounding of proper function and natural norms. The attribution of perspectives to biological systems is intended to be neither metaphorical (...) nor anthropomorphic: I do not mean to imply that such systems thereby must possess agency, cognition, intentions, concepts, or mental or psychological states. Instead, such systems provide the grounding for norms of performance when they internally enforce their own standard of (i.e., their own perspective on) what constitutes proper functioning or malfunctioning. By operating with a fixed, determinate level of generality, such systems provide the basis for an account of proper function that is immune to generality problems. (shrink)

A paradox involving promises to perform supererogatory actions is developed. Several attempts to resolve the problem, focusing in particular on changing our understanding of supererogatory actions, are explored. It is concluded that none of the proposed solutions are viable; the problem lies in promises with certain contents, not in our understanding of supererogation.

Winning essay of the American Society for Aesthetics' inaugural Peter Kivy Prize. Extends Kivy's notion of sonic picturing through engagement with recent work in philosophy of perception. Argues that sonic pictures are more widespread and more aesthetically and artistically important than even Kivy envisioned. Topics discussed include: the nature of sonic pictures; the nature of sounds; what we can (and more importantly, cannot) conclude from musical listening; sonic pictures in film; beatboxing as an art of sonic picturing; and cover songs (...) as sonic pictures. To be published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued for what I call the reason-giving requirement for conscientious refusal in reproductive healthcare. According to this requirement, healthcare practitioners who conscientiously object to administering standard forms of treatment must have arguments to back up their conscience, arguments that are purely public in character. I argue that such a requirement, though attractive in some ways, faces an overlooked epistemic problem: it is either too easy or too difficult to satisfy in standard cases. I close by briefly considering (...) whether a version of the reason-giving requirement can be salvaged despite this important difficulty. (shrink)

According to what I call ‘the asymmetry thesis’, persons, though they are the direct bearers of the properties expressed by mental predicates, are not the direct bearers of properties such as those expressed by ‘weighs 135 pounds’ or ‘has crossed legs’. A number of different views about persons entail the asymmetry thesis. I first argue that the asymmetry thesis entails an error theory about our discourse involving person‐referring terms. I then argue that it is further threatened by consideration of the (...) grounds we have for self‐ascribing mental and physical predicates. (shrink)

It is rarely noticed that Oakeshott occasionally quotes the Zhuangzi in Rationalism in Politics. The Zhuangzi was an ancient Daoist text emphasizing the free and wandering life of someone who skillfully acts without pretension or independent purpose. Oakeshott quoted it in support of his own typically Oakeshottian conclusions. But I argue in this paper that Oakeshott misunderstood the actual force of the anecdotes to which he referred. Oakeshott used Daoist wisdom to support his practical philosophy but entirely missed that the (...) Zhuangzi was all about achieving a higher immersion in or indifference to reality, and hence was not about battling against ‘rationalism in politics’ but about transcending rationalism, irrationalism and even practice in order to achieve a higher therapeutic end. (shrink)

In this essay, I aim to defend Spinoza against Hegel’s claim that he annihilated finite things and the real differences they instantiate. To counter Hegel’s charge of acosmism, I try to conceive of a Spinozist kind of acosmism that would mean not a metaphysical eliminativism or nihilism about finitude and diversity, but rather a metaphysical fictionalism about finitude that entails a latent application of the principle of the discernibility of identicals. I do this by focusing on the correspondence between Spinoza’s (...) three kinds of knowledge – imagination, intellection, and intuition – and his understanding of things as being finite, infinite in kind, and absolutely infinite. In the process, I also entertain Yitzhak Melamed’s argument that Hegel was wrong to accuse Spinoza of acosmism, but was onto something by noting the lack of full or self-subsistent existence on the part of finite modes. Melamed offers a reading that claims Spinozist individuals are weak and functional properties that follow from God as his effects. I respond that Melamed would be correct only if we view things from the perspective of the first kind of knowledge, which is a perspective that is by definition false. I conclude, then, that finite things in Spinoza, qua finite, are not illusions, but fictions, and that when viewed truly or truthfully they are so many infinite in kind or absolutely infinite ways one infinite and eternal substance, God or nature, is discernibly identical to itself. (shrink)

It is argued that Nozick's experience machine thought experiment does not pose a particular difficulty for mental state theories of well-being. While the example shows that we value many things beyond our mental states, this simply reflects the fact that we value more than our own well-being. Nor is a mental state theorist forced to make the dubious claim that we maintain these other values simply as a means to desirable mental states. Valuing more than our mental states is compatible (...) with maintaining that the impact of such values upon our well-being lies in their impact upon our mental lives. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain the conceptual connections between happiness and well-being. It first distinguishes episodic happiness from happiness in the personal attribute sense. It then evaluates two recent proposals about the connection between happiness and well-being: (1) the idea that episodic happiness and well-being both have the same fundamental determinants, so that a person is well-off to a particular degree in virtue of the fact that they are happy to that degree, and (2) the idea that happiness in the (...) personal attribute sense can serve as a ‘‘proxy’’ for well-being, i.e., that a person’s degree of deep or robust happiness approximates their degree of well-being. It is argued that happiness in both these senses is conceptually, metaphysically, and empirically distinct from well- being. A new analysis of welfare, well-being as agential flourishing, can explain welfare’s real connection to happiness in both the episodic and personal attribute senses. It predicts that such happiness is only directly beneficial when it is valued, when it is a form of valuing, or when it underwrites (i.e., serves as the causal basis for) the disposition to realize one’s values. It is therefore a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for especially high levels of well-being. This analysis of welfare integrates many insights from the eudaimonic tradition of welfare and happiness research in psychology, and also addresses common criticisms of these eudaimonic models. (shrink)

A longstanding philosophical tradition holds that the primary objects of hearing are sounds rather than sound sources. In this case, we hear sound sources by—or in virtue of—hearing their sounds. This paper argues that, on the contrary, we have good reason to believe that the primary objects of hearing are sound sources, and that the relationship between a sound and its source is much like the relationship between a color and its bearer. Just as we see objects in seeing their (...) colors, so we hear sound sources in hearing their sounds. (shrink)

I argue that recent virtue theories (including those of Hursthouse, Slote, and Swanton) face important initial difficulties in accommodating the supererogatory. In particular, I consider several potential characterizations of the supererogatory modeled upon these familiar virtue theories (and their accounts of rightness) and argue that they fail to provide an adequate account of supererogation. In the second half of the paper I sketch an alternative virtue-based characterization of supererogation, one that is grounded in the attitudes of virtuous ideal observers, and (...) that avoids the concerns raised in the first part of the paper. (shrink)

Subjectivists about practical normativity hold that an agent’s favoring and disfavoring attitudes give rise to practical reasons. On this view, an agent’s normative reason to choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream ultimately turns on facts about what appeals to her rather than facts about what her options are like attitude-independently. Objectivists—who ground reasons in the attitude-independent features of the things we aim at—owe us an explanation of why it is rational to choose what we favor, if not because favoring is (...) a source of reasons. My aim in this paper is to supply such a story. The proposal is roughly that when an agent cannot base her choices on her judgments about what she has most reason to do, structural rationality extends to her a license to choose something just because she favors it, without imbuing favoring with the authority of a normative reason. (shrink)

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep (...) moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships. (shrink)

A consensus exists among contemporary philosophers of biology about the history of their field. According to the received view, mainstream philosophy of science in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s focused on physics and general epistemology, neglecting analyses of the 'special sciences', including biology. The subdiscipline of philosophy of biology emerged (and could only have emerged) after the decline of logical positivism in the 1960s and 70s. In this article, I present bibliometric data from four major philosophy of science journals (Erkenntnis, (...) Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science), covering 1930-59, which challenge this view. (shrink)

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)

Induced by intake of the psychedelic substances LSD, psilocybin, DMT and mescaline, psychedelic experiences have been extensively described by subjects as entailing a most unusual increase in the scope and quality of their consciousness. Accordingly, psychedelic experiences have been widely characterised as an “expansion of consciousness.” This article poses the following question, as yet unaddressed in contemporary philosophy and the tradition of phenomenology: to what exactly does “expansion of consciousness” refer as a general characterisation of psychedelic experiences, and what role (...) might attention play therein? On the basis of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenology of attention, the following thesis is presented: (a) “expansion of consciousness” refers to a particular restructuration of consciousness in psychedelic experiences. (b) This occurs by means of certain extreme transformations in direction, scope, mode and degree of attention. In order to explicate this thesis, the characteristic features of psychedelic experiences that pertain to expansion of consciousness and attention are first systematically identified from a survey of subject reports. Second, it is demonstrated that the few previous attempts to understand expansion of consciousness in terms of attention as a filter/reducing-valve, spotlight or zoom-lens each fail to explain how consciousness is structured in psychedelic experiences. Third, it is argued that psychedelic expansion of consciousness is a general restructuration of consciousness by means of extreme attentional transformations. In conclusion, brief consideration is given to the question of whether psychedelic expansion of consciousness can have epistemic and ethical value for life. (shrink)

Recent work in the psychology of happiness has led some to conclude that we are unreliable assessors of our lives and that skepticism about whether we are happy is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. I argue that such claims, if true, have worrisome implications for procreation. In particular, they show that skepticism about whether many if not most people are well positioned to create persons is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. This skeptical worry should not be (...) confused with a related but much stronger version of the argument, which says that all human lives are very bad and not worth starting. I criticize the latter stance, but take seriously the former stance and hope it can be answered in future work. (shrink)

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can (...) provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the recent explosion of literature on the epistemological role of emotions and other affective states by defending two claims. First, affective states might do more than position us to receive evidence or function as evidence. Affective states might be thought to appraise evidence, in the sense that affective states influence what doxastic state is rational for someone given a body of evidence. The second claim is that affective evidentialism, the view that affective states function rationally in (...) this way, is not just possible but plausible and fruitful. We offer two arguments in favor of affective evidentialism. (shrink)

Virtue theorists in ethics often embrace the following characterizationof right action: An action is right iff a virtuous agent would performthat action in like circumstances. Zagzebski offers a parallel virtue-basedaccount of epistemically justified belief. Such proposals are severely flawedbecause virtuous agents in adverse circumstances, or through lack ofknowledge can perform poorly. I propose an alternative virtue-based accountaccording to which an action is right (a belief is justified) for an agentin a given situation iff an unimpaired, fully-informed virtuous observerwould deem the (...) action to be right (the belief to be justified). (shrink)

In this paper I respond to a set of basic objections often raised against those virtue theories in ethics which maintain that moral properties such rightness and goodness (and their corresponding concepts) are to be explained and understood in terms of the virtues or the virtuous. The objections all rest on a strongly-held intuition that the virtues (and the virtuous) simply must be derivative in some way from either right actions or good states of affairs. My goal is to articulate (...) several distinct, though related, objections grounded in this intuition, and to argue that virtue ethicists have ample resources to respond to these worries. The explanatory primacy of the virtuous over the right or the good emerges as a distinct and viable position. (shrink)

Hans Frei, one of the most influential American theologians of the twentieth century, is generally considered a founder of postliberal theology. Frei never set forth his thinking systematically, and he has been criticized for being inconsistent, contradictory, and insufficiently rigorous. Jason Springs seeks here to offer a re-evaluation of Frei's work. Arguing that Hans Frei's theology cannot be understood without a meticulous consideration of the complex equilibrium of his theological and philosophical interests and influences, Springs vindicates Frei's christologically motivated (...) engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, and Erich Auerbach, as well as his use of ordinary language philosophy and non-foundational philosophical insights, while illuminating his indebtedness to Karl Barth's theology. Moreover, by placing Frei's work in critical conversation with developments in pragmatist thought and cultural theory since his death, this re-reading aims to resolve many of the misunderstandings that vex his theological legacy. What emerges from Toward a Generous Orthodoxy is a sharpened account of the christologically anchored, interdisciplinary, and conversational character of Frei's theology, one he came to describe as a "generous orthodoxy"--modeling a way for academic theological voices to take seriously both their vocation to the Christian church and their roles as interlocutors in academic discourse. (shrink)

Doing Practical Ethics supports the deliberate practice of philosophical skills relevant to understanding, evaluating, and developing arguments in forms commonly used in the field of practical ethics. Each chapter includes an explanation of a specific moral reasoning skill, demonstration exercises with sample solutions that offer students immediate feedback on their initial practice attempts, and extensive sets of practice exercises. It is suitable for any ethics course that centrally features argument from principle, argument from analogy, or inference to the best explanation. (...) It may be used as a standalone text in a debate-focused course. Paired with an anthology in a readings-focused course, it will help students develop the skills they need to understand and evaluate the arguments in the assigned readings. (shrink)

Antiquated Classical pictures of the universe have been formative in shaping the modern idea that, to the extent change is caused, it is fixed in advance. This idea has played a role in making it seem to many that what we are discovering through science supports the exclusion of free will from models for the relevant neural and bodily changes. I argue that giving up this unwarranted notion about causation opens us to the likelihood that how a person expresses free (...) will offers unique explanatory value. I then briefly discuss some further issues with either including or excluding expressions of free will from our explanations, as well as some implications for AI and everyday life. (shrink)

I present an account of epistemic autonomy as a distinctively wide-ranging epistemic virtue, one that helps us to understand a range of phenomena that might otherwise seem quite disparate – from the appropriate selection of epistemic methods, stances and topics of inquiry, to the harms of epistemic oppression, gaslighting and related phenomena. The account draws on four elements commonly incorporated into accounts of personal autonomy: (i) self-governance, (ii) authenticity, (iii) self-creation and (iv) independence. I further argue that for a distinctively (...) epistemic virtue of autonomy; the above elements must ultimately reliably lead to valuable epistemic goods (for the agent herself and others). I then turn to the domains or ways in which epistemic autonomy so understood, can be made manifest. I suggest that epistemic autonomy is a virtue that allows us to appropriately choose (i) subject matters and areas of inquiry, (ii) methods, sources, and processes of belief formation, (iii) epistemic goals and (iv) epistemic stances or frameworks. So understood, epistemic autonomy has a role to play in shaping most every aspect of our epistemic lives. (shrink)