According to pluralistic intuitionist theories, some of our moral beliefs are non-inferentially justified, and these beliefs come in both an a priori and an a posteriori variety. In this paper I present new support for this pluralistic form of intuitionism by examining the deeply social nature of moral inquiry. This is something that intuitionists have tended to neglect. It does play an important role in an intuitionist theory offered by Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau (forth), but whilst they invoke the social (...) nature of moral inquiry in order to argue that ordinary moral intuitions are trustworthy, my argument focuses on what I will call the ‘frontiers’ of moral inquiry. I will show that inclusive and cooperative dialogue is necessary at moral inquiry’s frontiers, and that intuitionists can expect such dialogue to result in both a priori and a posteriori moral beliefs. (shrink)

Christos Kyriacou has recently proposed charging moral error theorists with intellectual vice. He does this in response to an objection that Ingram makes against the 'moral fixed points view' developed by Cuneo and Shafer-Landau. This brief paper shows that Kyriacou's proposed vice-charge fails to vindicate the moral fixed points view. I argue that any attempt to make an epistemic vice-charge against error theorists will face major obstacles, and that it is highly unlikely that such a charge could receive the (...) evidential support that it would need in order to play the dialectical role that Kyriacou has in mind for it. I conclude that the moral fixed points view remains in serious trouble. (shrink)

Presentism and Eternalism are competing views about the ontological and temporal structure of the world, introduced and demarcated by their answers to questions about what exists and whether what exists changes. The goal of this chapter is to give the reader a clear understanding of Presentism and Eternalism, and a sense of some considerations used to critically assess the views by briefly rehearsing some of the main philosophical problems facing them.

Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, should accept a thisness ontology, since it can do considerable work in defence of presentism. In this paper, I propose a version of presentism that involves thisnesses of past and present entities and I argue this view solves important problems facing standard versions of presentism.

Recently, some have attempted to reformulate debates in first-order metaphysics, particularly in the metaphysics of time and modality, for reasons due to Williamson. In this paper, we focus on the ways in which the likes of Cameron, Correia and Rosenkranz, Deasy, Ingram, Tallant, Viebahn, inter alia, have initiated and responded to attempts to capture the core of presentism using a formal, logical machinery. We argue that such attempts are doomed to fail because there is no theoretical core to presentism. (...) There is no single view or family of views that is presentism. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists recommend that we get rid of moral discourse and moral judgement. At first glance this seems repugnant, but abolitionists think that we have overestimated the practical value of our moral framework and that eliminating it would be in our interests. I argue that abolitionism has a surprising amount going for it. Traditionally, abolitionism has been treated as an option available to moral error theorists. Error theorists say that moral discourse and judgement are committed to the existence of moral (...) properties, and that no such properties exist. After error theory is established, abolitionism is one potential way to proceed. However, many error theorists suggest that we retain moral discourse as a sort of fiction. I evaluate some attractions of both fictionalism and abolitionism, arguing that abolitionism is a plausible position. No one doubts that error theorists can be abolitionists. However, what has gone largely undiscussed is that it is open to others to be abolitionists as well. I argue that moral realists of a metaphysically robust sort can and perhaps should be abolitionists. ‘Realist abolitionism’ makes for a surprisingly neat theoretical package, and I conclude that it represents an interesting new option in the theoretical landscape. (shrink)

Robust Realists think that there are irreducible, non-natural, and mind-independent moral properties. Quasi-Realists and Relaxed Realists think the same, but interpret these commitments differently. Robust Realists interpret them as metaphysical commitments, to be defended by metaphysical argument. Quasi-Realists and Relaxed Realists say that they can only be interpreted as moral commitments. These theories thus pose a serious threat to Robust Realism, for they apparently undermine the very possibility of articulating the robust metaphysical commitments of this theory. I clarify and respond (...) to this threat, showing that there is in fact space to develop and defend a robust moral ontology. (shrink)

World Crisis and Underdevelopment examines the impact of poverty and other global crises in generating forms of structural coercion that cause agential and societal underdevelopment. It draws from discourse ethics and recognition theory in criticizing injustices and pathologies associated with underdevelopment. Its scope is comprehensive, encompassing discussions about development science, philosophical anthropology, global migration, global capitalism and economic markets, human rights, international legal institutions, democratic politics and legitimation, world religions and secularization, and moral philosophy in its many varieties.

In this paper, we defend Lucretian Presentism. Although the view faces many objections and has proven unpopular with presentists, we rehabilitate Lucretianism and argue that none of the objections stick.

I show that the Pinkerton rule in conspiracy law is doctrinally and morally flawed. Unlike past critics of the rule, I propose a statutory fix that preserves and reforms it rather than abolishing it entirely. As I will show, this accommodates authors like Neil Katyal who have defended the rule as an important crime fighting tool while also fixing most of the traditional problems with it identified by critics like Wayne LaFave. Pinkerton is a vicarious liability rule that makes conspirators (...) criminally responsible for the foreseeable crimes of their coconspirators committed in furtherance of the conspiracy. It has two big problems: (1) Doctrinally, it breaks the logic of the many state criminal codes that are based on the Model Penal Code. (2) Ethically, it infringes the culpability constraint on the criminal law by imposing excessive punishments on defendants who did not even consciously suspect that their coconspirators would commit additional crimes that were not the object of the conspiracy. These problems are most acute in Texas, where Pinkerton can be combined with capital murder charges to produce automatic life without parole sentences. The Texas example is an extreme illustration of the problem of unintended consequences when state legislators tinker with the carefully drafted, interlocking provisions of a model code. The new statute I propose would put the penal code back in order and respect the culpability constraint. In the latter aspect, it is informed by leading work in philosophical ethics on blameworthiness and culpability. (shrink)

The guilt left by immoral actions is why moral duties are more pressing and serious than other reasons like prudential considerations. Religions talk of sin and karma; the secular still speak of spots or stains. I argue that a moral staining view of guilt is in fact the best model. It accounts for guilt's reflexive character and for anxious, scrupulous worries about whether one has transgressed. To understand moral staining, I borrow Christine Korsgaard's view that we construct our identities as (...) agents through our actions. The contribution of immoral actions to self-constitution explains why moral obligations have priority and importance. (shrink)

Some philosophers object to moral error theory by arguing that there a parity between moral and epistemic normativity. They maintain that moral and epistemic error theory stand or fall together, that epistemic error theory falls, and that moral error theory thus falls too. This paper offers a response to this objection on behalf of moral error theorists. I defend the view that moral and epistemic error theory do not stand or fall together by arguing that moral error theory can be (...) sustained alongside epistemic expressivism. This unusual combination of theories can be underpinned by differences in the foundational norms that guide moral and epistemic inquiry. I conclude that the problem of epistemic normativity fails to show that it is compulsory for us to reject moral error theory. (shrink)

Most philosophers who discuss the value of forgiveness concentrate on its moral value. This paper focuses on the prudential value of forgiveness, which has been surprisingly neglected by moral philosophers. I suggest that this may be because part of the concept of forgiveness involves the forgiver being motivated by moral rather than prudential considerations. But this does not justify neglecting the prudential value of forgiveness, which is important even though forgivers should not be prudentially motivated. Forgiveness helps satisfy interests arising (...) from the need for co-operation in such areas as epistemic life, where humans are interdependent. Forgiveness can restore epistemic relationships, and this has the prudential value of helping agents navigate their way through their environment. While the prudential value of forgiveness may be supplementary to its moral value, it would be a mistake to ignore this area of the debate. Exploring the prudential value of forgiveness enriches our understanding of the role that this practice plays in human life, and may contribute to explaining the origin of forgiveness. (shrink)

Today, there is a family of celebrated police strategies that teach the importance of cracking down on petty crime and urban nuisance as the key to effective crime control. Under the “broken windows” appellation, this strategy is linked in the public mind with New York City and the alleged successes of its police department in reducing the rate of crime over the past two decades. This paper is critical of such order maintenance approaches to policing: I argue that infringements of (...) civil liberty by such departments could be reduced if the departments looked at law more as a good to be served for its own sake and less as an instrument for the promotion of order. In other words, a shot of legalism is the correct medicine to reduce police misconduct that pierces the law’s protections of citizen freedom. -/- This Article contributes to the critical literature on broken windows policing by reassessing the work of the famous Harvard scholar (James Q. Wilson) who fathered it. The Article takes Wilson’s work and turns it on its head, drawing very different prescriptive conclusions than he did himself. (shrink)

Plea bargains are the stock-in-trade of the modern American prosecutor’s office. The basic scenario, wherein a defendant agrees to plea guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence, is familiar to viewers of police procedurals. In an equally famous variation on the theme, the prosecutor requests something more than an admission of guilt: leniency will only be forthcoming if the defendant is willing to cooperate with the prosecutor in securing the conviction of another suspect. In some of these cases, the defendant (...) is a low-level criminal who has information on a high-level malefactor who is of more interest to the police. In others, the defendant and the person she is asked to testify against are of the same criminal rank, but evidentiary weaknesses induce the prosecutor to seek the aid of one suspect in order to convict the other. In this latter version, the classic tactic of film detectives is to offer the bargain to both defendants in the hopes that one will crack and agree to reveal what he knows about the other. The defendants could either be in custody for different crimes or be accomplices in the same offense. -/- The last variation (involving accomplices) is the subject of this Article. I take issue with the prosecutorial tactics in these cases because of the risk they create of punishing the comparatively virtuous person more than the comparatively vicious one for the same acts. As I will argue, it is the less honest person who is more likely to accept the prosecutor’s deal, leading the more honest person, who resisted temptation, to suffer greater penalties. -/- I contend that this scenario offends distributive justice, runs counter to the idea (accepted by some) that a proper goal of the state is the cultivation of good character in the citizenry, and is perverse insofar as a person will suffer more from the prosecutor's dilemma insofar as she is more or less a person of conscience. These negative considerations notwithstanding, I do not call for the abolition of accomplice plea bargaining but argue that the problems I raise should be considered when weighing its pros and cons. -/- This article was published in the company of a strong critical response by Guha Krishnamurthi, whose contribution I greatly appreciate. (shrink)

Mistakes are a fact of life, and the criminal law is sadly no exception to the rule. Wrongful convictions are rightfully abhorred, and false acquittals can likewise inspire outrage. In these cases, we implicitly draw a distinction between a court’s finding and a defendant’s actual guilt or innocence. These are intuitive concepts, but as this paper aims to show, contemporary use of the reasonable person standard in the law of self-defense muddles them. -/- Ordinarily, we can distinguish between a person's (...) material guilt or innocence and his juridical guilt or innocence. Someone is materially guilty if his actions in fact matched the conduct proscribed by the penal law. Someone is juridically guilty if he is found guilty by a tribunal, i.e., convicted by a judge or jury. When a tribunal convicts a innocent person or acquits a guilty person, the accuracy of its verdicts can be criticized. -/- There are three definitions of the reasonable person extant amongst courts and commentators: the reasonable person is either (1) a hypothetical ordinary, average person; (2) the embodiment of a community ideal; or (3) an embodiment of an objective ethical standard, i.e., ethical principles independent of community opinion. Nonetheless, after observing the circularity, vagueness, and lack of consistency in the definitions, wise courts and commentators have sometimes resorted to identifying the reasonable person with the judgment of the jury. -/- This piece argues that failure to settle on a fixed definition of the "reasonable person" in the criminal law of self-defense effectively conflates material guilt and innocence and juridical guilt and innocence at the doctrinal level. When courts do not clearly and consistently choose between standards one, two, and three, or when they expressly treat the reasonable person as a form of words standing in for the judgment of the jury, they make it conceptually impossible for observers outside the court system to apply a fixed, definite standard to assess the actual guilt of a person apart from the judgments of tribunals. -/- This paper's main purpose is to identify a conceptual knot rather than propose reforms. Still, it recommends two small changes meant to lift the confusion surrounding the reasonable person. First, it urges that courts expressly settle on one of the three definitions canvassed above. Second, it recommends that courts be mindful of the nature of the reasonable person standard and as such, be wary of treating conclusions about reasonableness as ordinary legal precedents, and wield the power of directed verdict aggressively to protect unpopular defendants from abuse by juries. (shrink)

One proposed way of preserving the link between criminal negligence and blameworthiness is to define criminal negligence in moral terms. On this view, a person can be held criminally responsible for a negligent act if her negligence reflects a deficit of moral concern. Some theorists are convinced that this definition restores the link between negligence and blameworthiness, while others insist that criminal negligence remains suspect. This article contributes to the discussion by applying the work of ethicist Nomy Arpaly to criminal (...) negligence. Although not interested in legal issues herself, Arpaly has a well-developed theory of moral agency that explains moral concern in terms of responsiveness to moral reasons. Introducing her work to the ongoing scholarly debate will be helpful for two reasons. First, while a definition of negligence in terms of moral concern is recognized as one proposed solution to the negligence–blameworthiness problem, authors promoting it have yet to give a systematic account of moral concern and its relation to blame. Borrowing Arpaly's account will help clarify the idea of moral concern so that both proponents and critics of a concern approach to negligence can have a better-defined debate. Second, her theory of blameworthiness is especially suited to defending the blameworthiness of negligent actions, because it does not have recourse to a special quality of choice or self-control that must be active to render conduct blameworthy. To make this second advantage clear, the article argues that reliance on choice or self-control problematizes blameworthiness for negligence. Those who wish to defend blameworthiness for negligent acts should base their work on an account of moral agency that does not rely on either choice or self-control to explain when an action is blameworthy. (shrink)

Presentists face a familiar problem. If only present objects exist, then what 'makes true' our true claims about the past? According to Ross Cameron, the 'truth-makers' for past and future tensed propositions are presently instantiated Temporal Distributional Properties. We present an argument against Cameron's view. There are two ways that we might understand the term 'distribute' as it appears. On one reading, the resulting properties are not up to the task of playing the truth-maker role; on the other, the properties (...) are incompatible with presentism. (shrink)

This chapter proposes a critical examination of ideological tendencies at work in two main democratic theories currently at play within the critical theory tradition: the deliberative theory advanced famously by Habermas and his acolytes, and the partisan theory advanced by Mouffe and others influenced by Gramsci and Schmitt. Explaining why these theories appeal to distinctive social groups on the Left, divided mainly by education and economic status, it argues that neither theory accounts for the possibility of a Left democratic, party-based (...) politics with broad appeal. Exhibiting tendencies that weaken party-based politics, each of these theories encourages populist forms of politics that obstruct democratic, emancipatory struggle. Their linkage being an essential condition for emancipatory struggle, I conclude that structural changes in capitalism, web-based communication, education, and working conditions offer limited opportunities to revitalize Left party politics with the popular support needed to reconnect working masses with party elites as both seek solutions to their precarity under global capitalism. (shrink)

Ross Cameron proposes to reconcile presentism and truth-maker theory by invoking temporal distributional properties, instantiated by present entities, as the truth-makers for truths about the past. This chapter argues that Cameron's proposal fails because objects can change which temporal distributional properties they instantiate and this entails that the truth-values of truths about the past can change in an objectionable way.

Clive Walter Ingram Pearson was an Australian Existentialist and Religious Studies philosopher who spent his entire profesional career in the University of Auckland Philosophy Department. He was an idiosyncratic teacher and thinker who had a major influence on several contemporary ANZAC philosophers, as well as many hundreds of his students. This article is a tribute to him.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the discipline of political economy, international political economy and their respective historical developments. The paper will then focus on globalization and evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the policy to globalize. Further analysis will be conducted to show the importance of the topic of globalization as it relates to public finance. Rosen & Gayer (2014), Sackery, Schneider & Knoedler (2016), Marlin-Bennett (2017), Ravenhill (2008) and Weingast & Witman (2006) will (...) provide insights into the development of the discipline and its modus operendi. The historical development of the discipline will be provided for by Ingram (1915) and the aforementioned authors will also provide insights into the weakness and strengths of the policy to globalize. Garett & Mitchell (2001) and Kumar (2006) will provide additional insights into the importance of globalization as it pertains to public finance. (shrink)

Recently, a group of researchers, led by Daniel J. Ingram (University of Stirling), has conducted a critical review of the literature and experts’ evaluations of the on-the-ground progress to gauge the progress toward 11 recommended research needs and actions in approximately the last two decades. According to the review, most areas of wild meat research and management showed limited progress toward sustainability. The most progressive aspect is understanding the drivers behind hunting and the demand for wild meat.

This year's book award committee reviewed thirty nominated books. We identified seven finalists, each well worth our special attention: Milton Fisk's impressive Towards a Healthy Society, Gary Francione's feisty Introduction to Animal Rights, Timothy Gaffaney's engaging Freedom for the Poor, David Ingram's historically insightful Group Rights, Rachel Roth's poignant Making Women Pay, Karen Warren's finely articulated Ecofeminist Philosophy, and the eventual winning entry, Phillip Cole's Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. We're here today to discuss this important (...) book. (shrink)