This chapter takes the form of a discussion between the editors of this volume and Steven Lukes, one the most eminent critics of methodological individualism. The focus is on Lukes’ interpretation of methodological individualism in terms of linguistic exclusivism (i.e., naive reductionism), the multiple-realization problem, Boudon’s and Elster’s micro-foundationalist approach, ontological individualism, and the rationality of human action.

I argue that there are non-trivial objective chances (that is, objective chances other than 0 and 1) even in deterministic worlds. The argument is straightforward. I observe that there are probabilistic special scientific laws even in deterministic worlds. These laws project non-trivial probabilities for the events that they concern. And these probabilities play the chance role and so should be regarded as chances as opposed, for example, to epistemic probabilities or credences. The supposition of non-trivial deterministic chances might seem to (...) land us in contradiction. The fundamental laws of deterministic worlds project trivial probabilities for the very same events that are assigned non-trivial probabilities by the special scientific laws. I argue that any appearance of tension is dissolved by recognition of the level-relativity of chances. There is therefore no obstacle to accepting non-trivial chance-role-playing deterministic probabilities as genuine chances. (shrink)

A new formulation of the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) for the existence of God is offered, which avoids a number of commonly raised objections. I argue that we can and should focus on the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe, and show how physics itself provides the probabilities that are needed by the argument. I explain how this formulation avoids a number of common objections, specifically the possibility of deeper physical laws, the multiverse, normalisability, whether God would fine-tune at (...) all, whether the universe is too fine-tuned, and whether the likelihood of God creating a life-permitting universe is inscrutable. (shrink)

I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the relative qualitative homogeneity of the brain's basic constituents, a discrepancy that has been raised as a problem for identity theorists by Maxwell and Lockwood (as one element of the ‘grain problem’), and more recently as a problem for panpsychists (under the heading of ‘the palette problem’). The challenge posed to panpsychists by this discrepancy is to make sense of how a relatively small ‘palette’ of basic qualities could (...) give rise to the bewildering diversity of qualities we, and presumably other creatures, experience. I argue that panpsychists can meet this challenge, though it requires taking contentious stands on certain phenomenological questions, in particular on whether any familiar qualities are actual examples of ‘phenomenal blending’, and whether any other familiar qualities have a positive ‘phenomenologically simple character’. Moreover, it requires accepting an eventual theory most elements of which are in a certain explicable sense unimaginable, though not for that reason inconceivable. Nevertheless, I conclude that there are no conclusive reasons to reject such a theory, and so philosophers whose prior commitments motivate them to adopt it can do so without major theoretical cost. (shrink)

This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, (...) the way we do with responses to fiction. I argue that carefully considering the relationship between other states and their imaginative counterparts sheds light on how we should expect i-desires to differ from desires, and suggests that we may often be in states that are _indeterminate_, in limbo between the two categories. This indeterminacy explains why the distinction is often hard to draw, and why these states can be revealing about us even without (determinately) being real desires. (shrink)

Philosophical exploration of individualism and externalism in the cognitive sciences most recently has been focused on general evaluations of these two views (Adams & Aizawa 2008, Rupert 2008, Wilson 2004, Clark 2008). Here we return to broaden an earlier phase of the debate between individualists and externalists about cognition, one that considered in detail particular theories, such as those in developmental psychology (Patterson 1991) and the computational theory of vision (Burge 1986, Segal 1989). Music cognition is an area in the (...) cognitive sciences that has received little attention from philosophers, though it has relatively recently been thrown into the externalist spotlight (Cochrane 2008, Kruger 2014, Kersten forthcoming). Given that individualism can be thought of as a kind of paradigm for research on cognition, we provide a brief overview of the field of music cognition and individualistic tendencies within the field (sections 2 and 3) before turning to consider externalist alternatives to individualistic paradigms (section 4-5) and then arguing for a qualified form of externalism about music cognition (section 6). (shrink)

John Broome has argued that value incommensurability is vagueness, by appeal to a controversial about comparative indeterminacy. I offer a new counterexample to the collapsing principle. That principle allows us to derive an outright contradiction from the claim that some object is a borderline case of some predicate. But if there are no borderline cases, then the principle is empty. The collapsing principle is either false or empty.

The starting point in the development of probabilistic analyses of token causation has usually been the naïve intuition that, in some relevant sense, a cause raises the probability of its effect. But there are well-known examples both of non-probability-raising causation and of probability-raising non-causation. Sophisticated extant probabilistic analyses treat many such cases correctly, but only at the cost of excluding the possibilities of direct non-probability-raising causation, failures of causal transitivity, action-at-a-distance, prevention, and causation by absence and omission. I show that (...) an examination of the structure of these problem cases suggests a different treatment, one which avoids the costs of extant probabilistic analyses. (shrink)

This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a long­standing intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: (...) what is it about consciousness that makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference? (shrink)

The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such ‘between-subjects unity’. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of ‘experience-sharing’, in which the same token experience belongs to more (...) than one subject. The second argument, based on the phenomenological claim that unified experiences have interdependent phenomenal characters, I show to rest on an equivocation. Finally, the third argument accuses between-subjects unity of being unimaginable, or more broadly a formal possibility corresponding to nothing we can make sense of. I argue that the familiar experience of perceptual co-presentation gives us an adequate phenomenological grasp on what between-subjects unity might be like. (shrink)

Panpsychism is a striking metaphysical claim: every part of the physical world has some form of consciousness. Does this striking claim have equally striking ethical implications? Does it change what duties we owe to which beings, or how we should understand the relation between self-interest and altruism? Some defenders as well as critics of panpsychism have suggested it does. Others have disagreed. In this paper, we attempt to survey and organize these existing discussions. We suggest that panpsychism is likely to (...) have significant implications, but that they 1) stop short of some of the most radical implications sometimes associated with the view (by both critics and proponents), and 2) often depend heavily on the exact sort of panpsychism that is endorsed, as well as how one settles various independent questions about value and identity. (shrink)

In Making Things Happen, James Woodward influentially combines a causal modeling analysis of actual causation with an interventionist semantics for the counterfactuals encoded in causal models. This leads to circularities, since interventions are defined in terms of both actual causation and interventionist counterfactuals. Circularity can be avoided by instead combining a causal modeling analysis with a semantics along the lines of that given by David Lewis, on which counterfactuals are to be evaluated with respect to worlds in which their antecedents (...) are realized by miracles. I argue, pace Woodward, that causal modeling analyses perform just as well when combined with the Lewisian semantics as when combined with the interventionist semantics. Reductivity therefore remains a reasonable hope. (shrink)

We respond to a Letter to the Editor regarding "Principlism and contemporary ethical considerations for providers of transgender health care." We address criticisms by Castle & Klein (2024) of blatant fatphobia related to the ethical elements concerning BMI restrictions for gender-affirming surgery. Our response corrects several mischaracterizations of the article and clarifies our position. My co-authors and I remain focused on advocating for patient-centered, ethically sound, evidence-based, and equitable healthcare policies.

Why does institutional police brutality continue so brazenly? Criminologists and other social scientists typically theorize about the causes of such violence, but less attention is given to normative questions regarding the demands of justice. Some philosophers have taken a teleological approach, arguing that social institutions such as the police exist to realize collective ends and goods based upon the idea of collective moral responsibility. Others have approached normative questions in policing from a more explicit social-contract perspective, suggesting that legitimacy is (...) derived by adhering to (limited) authority. This article examines methodologies within political philosophy for analyzing police injustice. The methodological inquiry leads to an account of how justice constrains the police through both special (or positional) moral requirements that officers assume voluntarily, as well as general moral requirements in virtue of a polity’s commitment to moral, political and legal values beyond law enforcement and crime reduction. The upshot is a conception of a police role that is constrained by justice from multiple foundational stances. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis maintains that cognitive processes and systems can, on occasion, stretch to include parts of the brain, body, and world. One outstanding puzzle facing this view is the “recruitment puzzle.” The recruitment puzzle asks how cognisers are able to reliably recruit internal and external resources such that they form extended systems. Andy Clark has recently suggested that predictive processing helps to address this puzzle. I argue that, while promising, Clark’s proposal remains incomplete. I suggest that Clark’s proposal (...) can be productively extended by disambiguating two important senses of recruitment: ready-to-hand and adaptive recruitment. After outlining the recruitment puzzle and Clark’s proposal, I suggest that careful attention to these two senses of recruitment helps to reveal further constructive ways of developing the extended mind thesis. (shrink)

Julian Koplin, drawing extensively on empirical data, has argued that vendors, even in well-regulated kidney markets, are likely to be significantly harmed. I contend that his reasoning to this conclusion is dangerously mistaken. I highlight two failures. First, Koplin is insufficiently attentive to the differences between existing markets and the regulated markets proposed by advocates. On the basis of this error, he wrongly concludes that many harms will persist even in a well-regulated system. Second, Koplin misunderstands the utilitarian assessment of (...) the market. He focuses on the costs and benefits of the transaction for the vendor. But, the relevant comparison is between an individual’s welfare across different courses of action, namely, vending and the nonvending alternative. Although Koplin’s empirically informed contribution is a welcome addition to this literature, the mistakes that pervade his interpretation of the data demand correction. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that the intolerance associated (...) with realism is mediated by moral conviction and perceived consensus. People tend to feel more strongly about those moral issues they ground objectively and, in doing so, are more prone to display the vice of moral smugness toward those who disagree with them. The remedy for this that has been recommended is humility which we found (Study 3) is indeed related to reduced intolerance, in part by predicting a reduction in realism, but also in part through a direct connection to intolerance. These results put pressure on abolitionists’ “argument from intolerance.”. (shrink)

Background: Transgender health care is a subject of much debate among clinicians, political commentators, and policy-makers. While the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (SOC) establish clinical standards, these standards contain implied ethics but lack explicit focused discussion of ethical considerations in providing care. An ethics chapter in the SOC would enhance clinical guidelines. Aims: We aim to provide a valuable guide for healthcare professionals, and anyone interested in the ethical aspects of clinical support for gender (...) diverse and transgender people of all ages. Recognizing that the WPATH is a global association, we address broad challenges. We offer a reflection on general ethical principles, providing conceptual tools for healthcare providers, patients, and families to navigate the specific challenges they might encounter in transgender health care, in line with WPATH’s worldwide mission and scope. Method: This article employs a descriptive analysis, and our framework of reference is the four principles of biomedical ethics: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Results: The article presents a discussion on the four ethical principles as applied to transgender health care. We address issues such as respect for patient autonomy in decision-making, the role of beneficence and nonmaleficence in clinical interventions, and the importance of justice in equitable treatment and access to care. Some of the ethical concerns we address in this article pertain to the current sociopolitical climate, where there has been increasing legal interference, internationally, for transgender and nonbinary people, particularly youth, seeking medical care. Discussion: We highlight the interplay between ethical principles and clinical practice, underscoring the need for ethical guidance in addressing the diverse challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients in transgender health care. We advocate for continuous refinement of ethical thinking to ensure that transgender health care is not only medically effective but also ethically sound. (shrink)

Two options are ‘incommensurate’ when neither is better than the other, but they are not equally good. Typically, we will say that one option is better in some ways, and the other in others, but neither is better ‘all things considered’. It is tempting to think that incommensurability is vagueness—that it is (perhaps) indeterminate which is better—but this ‘vagueness view’ of incommensurability has not proven popular. I set out the vagueness view and its implications in more detail, and argue that (...) it can explain most of the puzzling features of incommensurability. This argument proceeds without appeal to John Broome’s ‘collapsing principle’. (shrink)

A significant debate has developed around the question: What are the moral limits of the market? This paper argues that this debate proceeds on a mistake. Both those who oppose specific markets and those who defend them, adopt the same deficient approach. Participants illicitly proceed from an assessment of the transactions making up a market to a judgment of that market’s permissibility. This inference is unlicensed. We may know everything there is to know about the transactions in a specific market—they (...) might all be absolutely bad—but we will not yet know whether that market should be prohibited. To discern this, to establish that intervention in to some specific market is justifiable, one must supply a rather different assessment. One must compare the outcome in which that market is permitted with the best outcome available in its absence. None in this debate has offered such a judgment. (shrink)

I argue that it’s quite comprehensible to get upset about metaethical nihilism, to indulge what I call nihilistic despair. When we lose the objective moral or normative point of view, we lose the promise of luck-immune guidance and categorical importance, things many of us hope for. This is all quite Williams-friendly, but I reject his puzzling but suggestive remarks that nihilistic despair must be a self-pitying muddle. Finally, I argue that internalism about reasons is even more depressing than outright nihilism, (...) in one way at least. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the police role from within a broader philosophical context. Contending that the police are in the midst of an identity crisis that exacerbates unjustified law enforcement tactics, Luke William Hunt examines various major conceptions of the police—those seeing them as heroes, warriors, and guardians. The book looks at the police role considering the overarching societal goal of justice and seeks to present a synthetic theory that draws upon history, law, society, psychology, and (...) philosophy. Each major conception of the police role is examined in light of how it affects the pursuit of justice, and how it may be contrary to seeking justice holistically and collectively. The book sets forth a conception of the police role that is consistent with the basic values of a constitutional democracy in the liberal tradition. Hunt’s intent is that clarifying the police role will likewise elucidate any constraints upon policing strategies, including algorithmic strategies such as predictive policing. This book is essential reading for thoughtful policing and legal scholars as well as those interested in political philosophy, political theory, psychology, and related areas. Now more than ever, the nature of the police role is a philosophical topic that is relevant not just to police officials and social scientists, but to everyone. (shrink)

Imagine a case of wrongdoing—not something trivial, but nothing so serious that adequate reparations are impossible. Imagine, further, that the wrongdoer makes those reparations and sincerely apologizes. Does she have a moral right to be forgiven? The standard view is that she does not, but this paper contends that the standard view is mistaken. It begins by showing that the arguments against a right to be forgiven are inconclusive. It ends by making two arguments in defense of that right.

Some philosophical theories of consciousness imply consciousness in things we would never intuitively think are conscious—most notably, panpsychism implies that consciousness is pervasive, even outside complex brains. Is this a reductio ab absurdum for such theories, or does it show that we should reject our original intuitions? To understand the stakes of this question as clearly as possible, we analyse the structured pattern of intuitions that panpsychism conflicts with. We consider a variety of ways that the tension between this intuition (...) and panpsychism could be resolved, ranging from complete rejection of the theory to complete dismissal of the intuition, but argue in favour of more nuanced approaches which try to reconcile the two. (shrink)

The traditional No-Miracles Argument (TNMA) asserts that the novel predictive success of science would be a miracle, and thus too implausible to believe, if successful theories were not at least approximately true. The TNMA has come under fire in multiple ways, challenging each of its premises and its general argumentative structure. While the TNMA relies on explaining novel predictive success via the truth of the theories, we put forth a deductive version of the No-Miracles argument (DNMA) that avoids inference to (...) the best explanation entirely. Instead, a relatively simple empirical framework and a probabilistic analysis can accomplish the ambitious goals of the TNMA while entirely sidestepping its problems. This close-but-distinct argument has many independent strengths and comparatively few weaknesses. Indeed, objections tailored specifically to the DNMA reveal surprising insights into how exactly NMAs are neither circular nor question-begging, as has been widely speculated. (shrink)

The use of deception and dishonesty is widely accepted as a fact of life in policing. This paper thus defends a counterintuitive claim: Good faith is a normative foundation for the police as a political institution. Good faith is a core value of contracts, and policing is contractual in nature both broadly (as a matter of social contract theory) and narrowly (in regard to concrete encounters between law enforcement officers and the public). Given the centrality of good faith to policing, (...) dishonesty and deception on par with fraud are justified only as a narrowly circumscribed investigative tool that is constrained by institutional commitments to the fair distribution of security and the rule of law. The practical upshot is the preclusion of most dishonest and deceptive police tactics on par with fraud, leading to an institution that is less proactive and more reactive. (shrink)

Policing in many parts of the world—the United States in particular—has embraced an archetypal model: a conception of the police based on the tenets of individuated archetypes, such as the heroic police “warrior” or “guardian.” Such policing has in part motivated moves to (1) a reallocative model: reallocating societal resources such that the police are no longer needed in society (defunding and abolishing) because reform strategies cannot fix the way societal problems become manifest in (archetypal) policing; and (2) an algorithmic (...) model: subsuming policing into technocratic judgements encoded in algorithms through strategies such as predictive policing (mitigating archetypal bias). This paper begins by considering the normative basis of the relationship between political community and policing. It then examines the justification of reallocative and algorithmic models in light of the relationship between political community and police. Given commitments to the depth and distribution of security—and proscriptions against dehumanizing strategies—the paper concludes that a nonideal-theory priority rule promoting respect for personhood (manifest in community and dignity-promoting policing strategies) is a necessary condition for the justification of the above models. (shrink)

I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual's consciousness is described as a 'field'. I consider some of the contexts where this idea appears, in particular discussions of attention and the unity of consciousness. In neither case, I argue, do authors provide the resources to cash out all the implications of field-talk: in particular, they do not give sense to the idea of conscious elements being arrayed along multiple dimensions. I suggest ways to (...) extend and generalize the attentional construal of 'field-talk' to provide a genuine multiplicity of dimensions, through the notions of attentional proximity and causal proximity: the degree to which two experiential elements are disposed to bring one another into attention when attended, or to interact in other distinctively mental ways. I conclude that if consciousness is a field, it is one organized by attentional and/or causal proximity. (shrink)

An influential tradition in the philosophy of causation has it that all token causal facts are, or are reducible to, facts about difference-making. Challenges to this tradition have typically focused on pre-emption cases, in which a cause apparently fails to make a difference to its effect. However, a novel challenge to the difference-making approach has recently been issued by Alyssa Ney. Ney defends causal foundationalism, which she characterizes as the thesis that facts about difference-making depend upon facts about physical causation. (...) She takes this to imply that causation is not fundamentally a matter of difference-making. In this paper, I defend the difference-making approach against Ney’s argument. I also offer some positive reasons for thinking, pace Ney, that causation is fundamentally a matter of difference-making. (shrink)

We often have some reason to do actions insofar as they promote outcomes or states of affairs, such as the satisfaction of a desire. But what is it to promote an outcome? I defend a new version of 'probabilism about promotion'. According to Minimal Probabilistic Promotion, we promote some outcome when we make that outcome more likely than it would have been if we had done something (anything) else. This makes promotion easy and reasons cheap.

In an illuminating article, Claus Beisbart argues that the recently-popular thesis that the probabilities of statistical mechanics (SM) are Best System chances runs into a serious obstacle: there is no one axiomatization of SM that is robustly best, as judged by the theoretical virtues of simplicity, strength, and fit. Beisbart takes this 'no clear winner' result to imply that the probabilities yielded by the competing axiomatizations simply fail to count as Best System chances. In this reply, we express sympathy for (...) the 'no clear winner' thesis. However, we argue that an importantly different moral should be drawn from this. We contend that the implication for Humean chances is not that there are no SM chances, but rather that SM chances fail to be sharp. (shrink)

Extended cognition holds that cognitive processes sometimes leak into the world (Dawson, 2013). A recent trend among proponents of extended cognition has been to put pressure on phenomena thought to be safe havens for internalists (Sneddon, 2011; Wilson, 2010; Wilson & Lenart, 2014). This paper attempts to continue this trend by arguing that music perception is an extended phenomenon. It is claimed that because music perception involves the detection of musical invariants within an “acoustic array”, the interaction between the auditory (...) system and the musical invariants can be characterized as an extended computational cognitive system. In articulating this view, the work of J. J. Gibson (1966, 1986) and Robert Wilson (1994, 1995, 2004) is drawn on. The view is defended from several objections and its implications outlined. The paper concludes with a comparison to Krueger’s (2014) view of the “musically extended emotional mind”. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out some basic elements of a deontic logic with an implementation appropriate for handling conflicting legal obligations for purposes of programming autonomous machine agents. Kantian justice demands that the prescriptive system of enforceable public laws be consistent, yet statutes or case holdings may often describe legal obligations that contradict; moreover, even fundamental constitutional rights may come into conflict. I argue that a deontic logic of the law should not try to work around such conflicts but, (...) instead, identify and expose them so that the rights and duties that generate inconsistencies in public law can be explicitly qualified and the conflicts resolved. I then argue that a credulous, non-monotonic deontic logic can describe inconsistent legal obligations while meeting Kant’s demand for consistency in the prescriptive system of public law. Finally, I propose an implementation of this logic via a modified form of “answer set programming,” which I demonstrate with some simple examples. (shrink)

The assumption that psychological states and processes are computational in character pervades much of cognitive science, what many call the computational theory of mind. In addition to occupying a central place in cognitive science, the computational theory of mind has also had a second life supporting “individualism”, the view that psychological states should be taxonomized so as to supervene only on the intrinsic, physical properties of individuals. One response to individualism has been to raise the prospect of “wide computational systems”, (...) in which some computational units are instantiated outside the individual. “Wide computationalism” attempts to sever the link between individualism and computational psychology by enlarging the concept of computation. However, in spite of its potential interest to cognitive science, wide computationalism has received little attention in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This paper aims to revisit the prospect of wide computationalism. It is argued that by appropriating a mechanistic conception of computation wide computationalism can overcome several issues that plague initial formulations. The aim is to show that cognitive science has overlooked an important and viable option in computational psychology. The paper marshals empirical support and responds to possible objections. (shrink)

The central challenge of “machine ethics” is to build autonomous machine agents that act morally rightly. But how can we build autonomous machine agents that act morally rightly, given reasonable disputes over what is right and wrong in particular cases? In this chapter, I argue that Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy can provide an important part of the answer.

‘Radical enactivism’ (Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017) eschews representational content for all ‘basic’ mental activities. Critics have argued that this view cannot make sense of the workings of the imagination. In their recent book (2017), Hutto and Myin respond to these critics, arguing that some imaginings can be understood without attributing them any representational content. Their response relies on the claim that a system can exploit a structural isomorphism between two things without either of those things being a semantically evaluable (...) representation of the other. I argue that even if this claim is granted, there remains a problem for radically enactive accounts of imagining, namely that the active establishing and maintenance of a structural isomorphism seems to require representational content even if the exploitation of such an isomorphism, when established, does not. (shrink)

Talk of levels is everywhere in cognitive science. Whether it is in terms of adjudicating longstanding debates or motivating foundational concepts, one cannot go far without hearing about the need to talk at different ‘levels’. Yet in spite of its widespread application and use, the concept of levels has received little sustained attention within cognitive science. This paper provides an analysis of the various ways the notion of levels has been deployed within cognitive science. The paper begins by introducing and (...) motivating discussion via four representative accounts of levels. It then turns to outlining and relating the four accounts using two dimensions of comparison. The result is the creation of a conceptual framework that maps the logical space of levels talk, which offers an important step toward making sense of levels talk within cognitive science. (shrink)

Is it morally important to vote? It is common to think so, but both consequentialist and deontological strategies for defending that intuition are weak. In response, some theorists have turned to a role-based strategy, arguing that it is morally important to be an excellent citizen, and that excellent citizens vote. But there is a lingering puzzle: an individual vote changes very little (virtually nothing in large-scale elections), so why would the excellent citizen be so concerned to cast a ballot? Why (...) bother with something that has so little effect on the common good? This paper answers by developing the idea of respect for a practice, and then arguing that respect for democracy will often require citizens to vote. (shrink)

Sergio Tenenbaum and Diana Raffman contend that ‘vague projects’ motivate radical revisions to orthodox, utility-maximising rational choice theory. Their argument cannot succeed if such projects merely ground instances of the paradox of the sorites, or heap. Tenenbaum and Raffman are not blind to this, and argue that Warren Quinn’s Puzzle of the Self-Torturer does not rest on the sorites. I argue that their argument both fails to generalise to most vague projects, and is ineffective in the case of the Self-Torturer (...) itself. (shrink)

There is a growing sense that many liberal states are in the midst of a shift in legal and political norms—a shift that is happening slowly and for a variety of reasons relating to security. The internet and tech booms—paving the way for new forms of electronic surveillance—predated the 9/11 attacks by several years, while the police’s vast use of secret informants and deceptive operations began well before that. On the other hand, the recent uptick in reactionary movements—movements in which (...) the rule of law seems expendable—began many years after 9/11 and continues to this day. One way to describe this book is an examination of the moral limits on modern police practices that flow from the basic legal and political tenets of the liberal tradition. The central argument is that policing in liberal states is constrained by a liberal conception of persons coupled with particular rule of law principles. Part I consists of three chapters that constitute the book’s theoretical foundation, including an overview of the police’s law enforcement role in the liberal polity and a methodology for evaluating that role. Part II consists of three chapters that address applications of the theory, including the police’s use of informants, deceptive operations, and surveillance. The upshot is that policing in liberal societies has become illiberal in light of its response to both internal and external threats to security. The book provides an account of what it might mean to retrieve policing that is consistent with the basic tenets of liberalism and the limits imposed by those tenets. [This is an uncorrected draft of the book's preface and introduction, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.]. (shrink)

As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning about mechanisms. We discuss the manner in which mechanistic approaches serve to bridge levels rather than (...) reduce them, as well as the different ways in which mechanisms are discovered. Finally, we offer a more detailed example of an important psychological phenomenon for which mechanistic explanation has provided the main source of scientific understanding. (shrink)

The traditional problem of evil sets theists the task of reconciling two things: God and evil. I argue that theists face the more difficult task of reconciling God and evils that God is specially obligated to prevent. Because of His authority, God's obligation to curtail evil goes far beyond our Samaritan duty to prevent evil when doing so isn't overly hard. Authorities owe their subjects a positive obligation to prevent certain evils; we have a right against our authorities that they (...) protect us. God's apparent mistake is not merely the impersonal wrong of failing to do enough good — though it is that too. It is the highly personal wrong of failing to live up to a moral requirement that comes bundled with authority over persons. To make my argument, I use the resources of political philosophy and defend a novel change to the orthodox account of authority. (shrink)

The best arguments for a nation-state’s right to exclude unwanted outsiders actually condemn nation-level regimes of restriction. Two argumentative steps lead to this conclusion. The first points out that the best arguments for exclusion generalize: if they show that nation-states have the right to exclude, they perform the same service for a great many towns, cities, subnational states, and provinces. The second step constructs a dilemma. The right to exclude is important enough to justify the suffering of would-be immigrants, or (...) it is not. If it is, the right to exclude is very important indeed–would-be immigrants often suffer grievously. But nation-level regimes would then be a serious moral problem: they would deprive a great many municipalities of a right that matters a great deal. Turning to the dilemma’s second horn, if the right to exclude is not important enough to justify the suffering of would-be immigrants, nation-level regimes are straightforwardly immoral. Either way, we arrive at this paper’s central thesis: the best arguments for a nation-states right to exclude actually condemn nation-level regimes of exclusion. (shrink)

The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers of science, many of whom have (...) assimilated their conception of explanation to the ontic conception. (shrink)

Lisa Tessman (2016: 164) recounts the case of a Jewish mother, running from Nazis, who faced a terrible choice. She could (a) drown her infant, or (b) accept the virtual certainty that her baby’s cries would doom the refugee group she was fleeing with. Given those options, (b) is worse. If the whole group is discovered, many will die, including the infant. Still, preemptively drowning a baby—indeed one’s own baby—is a terrible act. To make sense of cases like this, Tessman (...) turns to the concept of moral failure: an act that violates an important moral value such that the loss cannot be fully redeemed by gains elsewhere. I will argue that criminal justice needs a moral framework like Tessman’s. It needs to make sense of the fact that some options are genuinely better than others, without letting honorifics like ‘justice’ obscure the equally important fact the best available option might be terrible. More specifically, I will argue that when punishment involves prison, as it often does, it is a moral failure. It can be justified only in the sense that preemptively drowning an infant can be justified: like the fleeing mother, society might on some terrible occasions find itself with no better alternative. (shrink)

The psychology and phenomenology of our knowledge of other minds is not well captured either by describing it simply as perception, nor by describing it simply as inference. A better description, I argue, is that our knowledge of other minds involves both through ‘perceptual co-presentation’, in which we experience objects as having aspects that are not revealed. This allows us to say that we perceive other minds, but perceive them as private, i.e. imperceptible, just as we routinely perceive aspects of (...) physical objects as unperceived. I discuss existing versions of this idea, particularly Joel Smith’s, on which it is taken to imply that our knowledge of other minds is, in these cases, perceptual and not inferential. Against this, I argue that perceptual co-presentation in general, and mind-perception in particular, yields knowledge that is simultaneously both perceptual and inferential. (shrink)

Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity — for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans. -/- According to the theory, advances in AI — specifically of the machine learning type that’s able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly — will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. (...) In this interpretation of events, every AI advance from Jeopardy-winning IBM machines to the massive AI language model GPT-3 is taking humanity one step closer to an existential threat. We’re literally building our soon-to-be-sentient successors. -/- Except that it will never happen. At least, according to the authors of the new book Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear. (shrink)