This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.

Recently four different papers have suggested that the supervaluational solution to the Problem of the Many is flawed. Stephen Schiffer has argued that the theory cannot account for reports of speech involving vague singular terms. Vann McGee and Brian McLaughlin say that theory cannot, yet, account for vague singular beliefs. Neil McKinnon has argued that we cannot provide a plausible theory of when precisifications are acceptable, which the supervaluational theory needs. And Roy Sorensen argues that supervaluationism is inconsistent (...) with a directly referential theory of names. McGee and McLaughlin see the problem they raise as a cause for further research, but the other authors all take the problems they raise to provide sufficient reasons to jettison supervaluationism. I will argue that none of these problems provide such a reason, though the arguments are valuable critiques. In many cases, we must make some adjustments to the supervaluational theory to meet the posed challenges. The goal of this paper is to make those adjustments, and meet the challenges. (shrink)

The following is a transcript of the interview I (Yasuko Kitano) conducted with Neil Levy (The Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, CAPPE) on the 23rd in July 2009, while he was in Tokyo to give a series of lectures on neuroethics at The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy. I edited his words for publication with his approval.

The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious being in question has. We experimentally (...) investigate whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. Our findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question. (shrink)

A number of concerns have been raised about the possible future use of pharmaceuticals designed to enhance cognitive, affective, and motivational processes, particularly where the aim is to produce morally better decisions or behavior. In this article, we draw attention to what is arguably a more worrying possibility: that pharmaceuticals currently in widespread therapeutic use are already having unintended effects on these processes, and thus on moral decision making and morally significant behavior. We review current evidence on the moral effects (...) of three widely used drugs or drug types: propranolol, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and drugs that effect oxytocin physiology. This evidence suggests that the alterations to moral decision making and behavior caused by these agents may have important and difficult-to-evaluate consequences, at least at the population level. We argue that the moral effects of these and other widely used pharmaceuticals warrant further empirical research and ethical analysis. (shrink)

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

Response to commentary. We are grateful to Crockett and Craigie for their interesting remarks on our paper. We accept Crockett’s claim that there is a need for caution in drawing inferences about patient groups from work on healthy volunteers in the laboratory. However, we believe that the evidence we cited established a strong presumption that many of the patients who are routinely taking a medication, including many people properly prescribed the medication for a medical condition, have morally significant aspects of (...) their cognition and behavior modified in a way that is unintended and may sometimes be unwelcome. Crockett notes that in some cases the effects of long-term drug use may differ, sometimes markedly, from the effects of short-term use. However, if acute use of a drug affects a neural system involved in mediating moral cognition or behavior, this nevertheless provides some evidence that chronic use of the drug may affect that same system and thus have morally significant effects. It is also plausible, in some cases, that an acute moral effect would give rise to a chronic moral effect via cognitive mechanisms. ... (shrink)

This chapter considers the nature of imagination and belief, exploring how deeply these two states of mind differ. It first addresses a range of cognitive and motivational differences between imagination and belief which suggest that they're fundamentally different states of mind. Then it addresses imaginative immersion, delusions, and the different norms we apply to the two mental states, which some theorists regard as providing support for a more unified picture of imagination and belief.

We explain and explore class-theoretic potentialism—the view that one can always individuate more classes over a set-theoretic universe. We examine some motivations for class-theoretic potentialism, before proving some results concerning the relevant potentialist systems (in particular exhibiting failures of the $\mathsf {.2}$ and $\mathsf {.3}$ axioms). We then discuss the significance of these results for the different kinds of class-theoretic potentialists.

Bayesian models of legal arguments generally aim to produce a single integrated model, combining each of the legal arguments under consideration. This combined approach implicitly assumes that variables and their relationships can be represented without any contradiction or misalignment, and in a way that makes sense with respect to the competing argument narratives. This paper describes a novel approach to compare and ‘average’ Bayesian models of legal arguments that have been built independently and with no attempt to make them consistent (...) in terms of variables, causal assumptions or parameterization. The approach involves assessing whether competing models of legal arguments are explained or predict facts uncovered before or during the trial process. Those models that are more heavily disconfirmed by the facts are given lower weight, as model plausibility measures, in the Bayesian model comparison and averaging framework adopted. In this way a plurality of arguments is allowed yet a single judgement based on all arguments is possible and rational. (shrink)

Consider two deeply appealing thoughts: first, that we experience external particulars, and second, that what it’s like to have an experience – the phenomenal character of an experience – is somehow independent of external particulars. The first thought is readily captured by phenomenal particularism, the view that external particulars are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of experience. The second thought is readily captured by phenomenal generalism, the view that external particulars are never part of phenomenal character. -/- Here I (...) show that a novel version of phenomenal generalism can capture both thoughts in a satisfying fashion. Along the way, I reveal severe problems facing phenomenal particularism and also shed light on the mental kinds under which experiences fall. (shrink)

The rightness and wrongness of actions fits on a continuous scale. This fits the way we evaluate actions chosen among a diverse range of options, even though English speakers don’t use the words “righter” and “wronger”. I outline and defend a version of scalar consequentialism, according to which rightness is a matter of degree, determined by how good the consequences are. Linguistic resources are available to let us truly describe actions simply as right. Some deontological theories face problems in accounting (...) for degrees of rightness, as they don't invoke continuous parameters among the right-making features of action. (shrink)

This paper explores connections between theories of morality and theories of properties. It argues that (1) moral realism is in tension with predicate, class and mereological nominalism; (2) moral non-naturalism is incompatible with standard versions of resemblance nominalism, immanent realism and trope theory; and (3) the standard semantic arguments for property realism do not support moral realism. I also raise doubts about trope-theoretic explanations of moral supervenience and argue against one version of the principle that we should accept theories that (...) maintain neutrality. (shrink)

This paper advances three necessary conditions on a successful account of sentential negation. First, the ability to explain the constancy of sentential meaning across negated and unnegated contexts (the Fregean Condition). Second, the ability to explain why sentences and their negations are inconsistent, and inconsistent in virtue of the meaning of negation (the Semantic Condition). Third, the ability of the account to generalize regardless of the topic of the negated sentence (the Generality Condition). The paper discusses three accounts of negation (...) available to moral expressivists. The first—the dominant commitment account—fails to meet the Fregean Condition. The two remaining accounts—commitment semantics and the expression account—satisfy all three conditions. A recent argument that the dominant commitment account is the only option available to expressivists is considered and rejected. (shrink)

The moral belief problem is that of reconciling expressivism in ethics with both minimalism in the philosophy of language and the syntactic discipline of moral sentences. It is argued that the problem can be solved by distinguishing minimal and robust senses of belief, where a minimal belief is any state of mind expressed by sincere assertoric use of a syntactically disciplined sentence and a robust belief is a minimal belief with some additional property R. Two attempts to specify R are (...) discussed, both based on the thought that beliefs are states that aim at truth. According to the first, robust beliefs are criticisable to the extent that their content fails to match the state of the world. This sense fails to distinguish robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. According to the second, robust beliefs function to have their content match the state of the world. This sense succeeds in distinguishing robust beliefs from minimal beliefs. The conclusion is that the debate concerning the cognitive status of moral convictions needs to address the issue of the function of moral convictions. Evolutionary theorising may be relevant, but will not be decisive, in answering this question. (shrink)

What is it for an event not to occur? This is an urgent, yet under explored, question for counterfactual analyses of causation quite generally. In this paper I take a lead from Lewis in identifying two different possible standards of non-occurrence that we might adopt and I argue that we need to apply them asymmetrically: one standard for the cause, another for the effect. This is a surprising result. I then offer a contextualist refinement of the Lewis approach in light (...) of initial problems, and discuss how the asymmetry remained hidden until now. I then relate the non-occurrence problem to issues of transitivity and proportionality in causation, before showing that a parallel problem exists for contrastivist and interventionist approaches to causation too. (shrink)

This paper argues that qualia share their physical correlates' locations. The first premise comes from the theory of relativity: If something shares a time with a physical event in all reference frames, it shares that physical event’s location. The second premise is that qualia share times with their correlates in all reference frames. Having qualia and correlates share locations makes relations between them easier to explain, improving both physicalist and dualist theories.

In this paper we sketch a new version of aesthetic expressivism. We argue that one advantage of this view is that it explains various putative norms on the formation and revision of aesthetic judgement. We begin by setting out our proposed explananda and a sense in which they can be understood as governing the correct response to putative higher-order evidence in aesthetics. We then summarise some existing discussions of expressivist attempts to explain these norms, and objections raised to them. This (...) will allow us to identify the pitfalls that a good expressivist explanation needs to avoid. Finally, we sketch our preferred version of aesthetic expressivism which includes as a crucial part a hypothesis concerning the distinctive expressive function of aesthetic practice. We then consider how this theory can explain the putative aesthetic norms whilst avoiding the previous objections. (shrink)

Recent work in neuroimaging suggests that some patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state are actually conscious. In this paper, we critically examine this new evidence. We argue that though it remains open to alternative interpretations, it strongly suggests the presence of consciousness in some patients. However, we argue that its ethical significance is less than many people seem to think. There are several different kinds of consciousness, and though all kinds of consciousness have some ethical significance, different (...) kinds underwrite different kinds of moral value. Demonstrating that patients have phenomenal consciousness — conscious states with some kind of qualitative feel to them — shows that they are moral patients, whose welfare must be taken into consideration. But only if they are subjects of a sophisticated kind of access consciousness — where access consciousness entails global availability of information to cognitive systems — are they persons, in the technical sense of the word employed by philosophers. In this sense, being a person is having the full moral status of ordinary human beings. We call for further research which might settle whether patients who manifest signs of consciousness possess the sophisticated kind of access consciousness required for personhood. (shrink)

Actions performed in a state of automatism are not subject to moral evaluation, while automatic actions often are. Is the asymmetry between automatistic and automatic agency justified? In order to answer this question we need a model or moral accountability that does justice to our intuitions about a range of modes of agency, both pathological and non-pathological. Our aim in this paper is to lay the foundations for such an account.

What is the connection between reasons and motives? According to Reasons Internalism there is a non-trivial conceptual connection between normative reasons and the possibility of rationally accessing relevant motivation. Reasons Internalism is attractive insofar as it captures the thought that reasons are for reasoning with and repulsive insofar as it fails to generate sufficient critical distance between reasons and motives. Rather than directly adjudicate this dispute, I extract from it two generally accepted desiderata on theories of normative reasons and argue (...) that a new theory can satisfy both. The new theory locates part of the meaning of normative reason statements in their role in normative discussion. It generates a view of the connection between reasons and motives that is distinct from Reasons Internalism, yet distinctively in its spirit. (shrink)

Causal exclusion arguments are taken to threaten the autonomy of the special sciences, and the causal efficacy of mental properties. A recent line of response to these arguments has appealed to “independently plausible” and “well grounded” theories of causation to rebut key premises. In this paper I consider two papers which proceed in this vein and show that they share a common feature: they both require causes to be proportional to their effects. I argue that this feature is a bug, (...) and one that generalises: any attempt to rescue the autonomy of the special sciences, or the efficacy of the mental, from exclusion worries had better not look to proportionality for help. (shrink)

In this chapter, we argue for three theses: (1) we lack the power to form beliefs at will (i.e., directly); at very least, we lack the power to form at will beliefs of the kind that proponents of doxastic voluntarism have in mind; but (2) we possess a propensity to form beliefs for non-epistemic reasons; and (3) these propensities—once we come to know we have them—entail that we have obligations similar to those we would have were doxastic voluntarism true. Specifically, (...) we will argue that we have obligations to avoid triggering these propensities to form beliefs that are unwarranted or even immoral. (shrink)

There are at least two different concepts that philosophers might target when analyzing causation: a pre-selective notion and a selective notion. This paper argues that these two distinct conceptions have been conflated to date, citing the puzzles of overdetermination, extensionality, and transitivity as evidence. The primary aim of the paper is to help reset the methodological scene concerning analyses of causation.

Heidegger’s ontological views, his observations about liberalism and fascism, and his evaluative commitments are three premises of an argument for fascism. The ontological premise is that integrated wholes and objects of a creator or user’s will are ontologically superior, as Being and Time suggests in discussing Being-a-whole, creating art, and using equipment. The social premise is that fascist societies are wholes integrated by dictatorial will, while liberal societies are looser aggregates of free individuals, as Heidegger describes in his 1930s seminars. (...) The evaluative premise, shared with the medieval tradition and expressed in his notebook remarks about war, is that ontological superiority makes things better. The conclusion that fascism is better than liberalism should be rejected along with the evaluative premise. (shrink)

This essay defends a strong version of the Humean theory of motivation on which desire is necessary both for motivation and for reasoning that changes our desires. Those who hold that moral judgments are beliefs with intrinsic motivational force need to oppose this view, and many of them have proposed counterexamples to it. Using a novel account of desire, this essay handles the proposed counterexamples in a way that shows the superiority of the Humean theory. The essay addresses the classic (...) objection that the Humean theory cannot explain the feeling of obligation, Stephen Darwall's example of motivationally potent reasoning that is not based on preexisting desires, Thomas Scanlon's criticism that the Humean theory fails to account for the structure and phenomenology of deliberation, and the phenomenon of akrasia as discussed by John Searle. In each case a Humean account explains the data at least as thoroughly as opposing views can, while fitting within a simpler total account of how we deliberate and act. (shrink)

This essay presents an ideal for modern Western romantic love.The basic ideas are the following: people want to form a distinctive sort of plural subject with another, what Nozick has called a "We", they want to be loved for properties of certain kinds, and they want this love to establish and sustain a special sort of commitment to them over time.

ABSTRACTMohan Matthen's ‘The Pleasure of Art’ considers a rich variety of psychological phenomena surrounding our experience of pleasure in aesthetic appreciation. I explain many of these phenomena in terms of desire. Often my explanations support and complement Matthen's account; but sometimes I account for the same phenomena in terms of different causal structures than he invokes, seeking a more unified psychological theory.

We can infer moral conclusions from nonmoral evidence using a three-step procedure. First, we distinguish the processes generating belief so that their reliability in generating true belief is statistically predictable. Second, we assess the processes’ reliability, perhaps by observing how frequently they generate true nonmoral belief or logically inconsistent beliefs. Third, we adjust our credence in moral propositions in light of the truth ratios of the processes generating beliefs in them. This inferential route involves empirically discovering truths of the form (...) “Process P, which generates belief in moral proposition M, has truth ratio T", and using them to discover probabilities for moral propositions. The inferential route is noncircular, and progress along it is driven fundamentally by induction. (shrink)

This paper presents the Universality Argument that pleasure is goodness. The first premise defines goodness as what should please all. The second premise reduces 'should' to perceptual accuracy. The third premise invokes a universal standard of accuracy: qualitative identity. Since the pleasure of all is accurate solely about pleasure, pleasure is goodness, or universal moral value. The argument proceeds from a moral sense theory that analyzes moral concepts as concerned with what all should hope for, feel guilty about, and admire. (...) This requires rejecting practical anti-empiricism, the view that moral judgment concerns empirically inaccessible norms governing action. (shrink)

In “The Evolutionary Debunking of Quasi-Realism,” Neil Sinclair and James Chamberlain present a novel answer that quasi-realists can pro-vide to a version of the reliability challenge in ethics—which asks for an explanation of why our moral beliefs are generally true—and in so doing, they examine whether evolutionary arguments can debunk quasi-realism. Although reliability challenges differ from EDAs in several respects, there may well be a connection between them. For the explanatory premise of an EDA may state that a particular (...) theory of beliefs of a certain kind does not, or cannot, provide a plausible account of why those beliefs might be generally true, and its epistemic premise may state that, if that is the case, then the beliefs in question have a negative epistemic status or the theory is false inasmuch as, if it were true, it would lead to those beliefs having such a negative epistemic status. The quasi-realist can answer the reli-ability challenge by claiming that, when we form our moral beliefs through a process of well-informed impartial reflection, we form them in response to the non-moral features of things on which depend the moral features they have. Hence, when we form beliefs by means of such a process, we are most likely forming true moral beliefs. (shrink)

I argue that one intends that ϕ if one has a desire that ϕ and an appropriately related means-end belief. Opponents, including Setiya and Bratman, charge that this view can't explain three things. First, intentional action is accompanied by knowledge of what we are doing. Second, we can choose our reasons for action. Third, forming an intention settles a deliberative question about what to do, disposing us to cease deliberating about it. I show how the desire- belief view can explain (...) why these phenomena occur when they occur, and why they don't when they don't. (shrink)

Epistemic akrasia can be rational. I consider a lonely pragmatist who believes that her imaginary friend doesn’t exist, and also believes on pragmatic grounds that she should believe in him. She rationally believes that her imaginary friend doesn’t exist, rationally follows various sources of evidence to the view that she should believe in him to end her loneliness, and rationally holds these attitudes simultaneously. Evidentialism suggests that her ambivalent epistemic state is rational, as considerations grounded in the value of truth (...) justify her beliefs. (shrink)

Moral discourse is propositionally clothed, that is, it exhibits those features – such as the ability of its sentences to intelligibly embed in conditionals and other unasserted contexts – that have been taken by some philosophers to be constitutive of discourses that express propositions. If there is nothing more to a mental state being a belief than it being characteristically expressed by sentences that are propositionally clothed then the version of expressivism which accepts that moral discourse is propositionally clothed (‘quasi-realism’) (...) is self-refuting. Fortunately for quasi-realists, this view of belief, which I label ‘minimalism’, is false. I present three arguments against it and dismiss two possible defences (the first drawn from the work of Wright, the second given by Harcourt). The conclusion is that the issue between expressivists and their opponents cannot be settled by the mere fact that moral discourse wears propositional clothing. (shrink)

Propositionalism is the view that the contents of intentional attitudes have a propositional structure. Objectualism opposes propositionalism in allowing the contents of these attitudes to be ordinary objects or properties. Philosophers including Talbot Brewer, Paul Thagard, Michelle Montague, and Alex Grzankowski attack propositionalism about such attitudes as desire, liking, and fearing. This article defends propositionalism, mainly on grounds that it better supports psychological explanations.

Christine Korsgaard argues that Humean views of both action and rationality jointly imply the impossibility of irrational action, allowing us only to perform actions that we deem rational. Humeans can answer Korsgaard’s objection if their views of action and rationality measure agents’ actual desires differently. What determines what the agent does are the motivational forces that desires produce in the agent at the moment when she decides to act, as these cause action. What determines what it is rational to do (...) should be the agent’s dispositional desire strengths, as our normative intuitions respond to these. (shrink)

The report describes an application of ontologies to the analysis of wind turbine manufacturing data. We show how applying ontologies to composite materials data may facilitate the discovery of optimum composite material designs that will deliver maximum wind turbine blade performance within environmental constraints.

In this paper I argue that the common practice of employing moral predicates as explaining phrases can be accommodated on an expressivist account of moral practice. This account does not treat moral explanations as in any way second-rate or derivative, since it subsumes moral explanations under the general theory of program explanations (as defended by Jackson and Pettit). It follows that the phenomenon of moral explanations cannot be used to adjudicate the debate between expressivism and its rivals.

Often philosophers, logicians, and mathematicians employ a notion of intended structure when talking about a branch of mathematics. In addition, we know that there are foundational mathematical theories that can find representatives for the objects of informal mathematics. In this paper, we examine how faithfully foundational theories can represent intended structures, and show that this question is closely linked to the decidability of the theory of the intended structure. We argue that this sheds light on the trade-off between expressive power (...) and meta-theoretic properties when comparing first-order and second-order logic. (shrink)

Ethical reductionism is the best version of naturalistic moral realism. Reductionists regard moral properties as identical to properties appearing in successful scientific theories. Nonreductionists, including many of the Cornell Realists, argue that moral properties instead supervene on scientific properties without identity. I respond to two arguments for nonreductionism. First, nonreductionists argue that the multiple realizability of moral properties defeats reductionism. Multiple realizability can be addressed in ethics by identifying moral properties uniquely or disjunctively with properties of the special sciences. Second, (...) nonreductionists argue that irreducible moral properties explain empirical phenomena, just as irreducible special-science properties do. But since irreducible moral properties don't successfully explain additional regularities, they run the risk of being pseudoscientific properties. Reductionism has all the benefits of nonreductionism, while also being more secure against anti-realist objections because of its ontological simplicity. (shrink)

A central area of current philosophical debate in the foundations of mathematics concerns whether or not there is a single, maximal, universe of set theory. Universists maintain that there is such a universe, while Multiversists argue that there are many universes, no one of which is ontologically privileged. Often forcing constructions that add subsets to models are cited as evidence in favour of the latter. This paper informs this debate by analysing ways the Universist might interpret this discourse that seems (...) to necessitate the addition of subsets to V. We argue that despite the prima facie incoherence of such talk for the Universist, she nonetheless has reason to try and provide interpretation of this discourse. We analyse extant interpretations of such talk, and analyse various tradeoffs in naturality that might be made. We conclude that the Universist has promising options for interpreting different forcing constructions. (shrink)

Let's suppose you think that there are no uncountable sets. Have you adopted a restrictive position? It is certainly tempting to say yes---you've prohibited the existence of certain kinds of large set. This paper argues that this intuition can be challenged. Instead, I argue that there are some considerations based on a formal notion of restrictiveness which suggest that it is restrictive to hold that there are uncountable sets.

This paper argues that a counterpart-theoretic treatment of events, combined with a counterfactual theory of causation, can help resolve three puzzles from the causation literature. First, CCT traces the apparent contextual shifts in our causal attributions to shifts in the counterpart relation which obtains in those contexts. Second, being sensitive to shifts in the counterpart relation can help diagnose what goes wrong in certain prominent examples where the transitivity of causation appears to fail. Third, CCT can help us resurrect the (...) much-maligned fragility response to the problems of late pre-emption by understanding fragility in counterpart-theoretic terms. Some reasons to prefer this CCT approach to rivals are discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines the prospects for a conceptual or functional role theory of moral concepts. It is argued that such an account is well-placed to explain both the irreducibility and practicality of moral concepts. Several versions of conceptual role semantics for moral concepts are distinguished, depending on whether the concept-constitutive conceptual roles are wide or narrow normative or non-normative and purely doxastic or conative. It is argued that the most plausible version of conceptual role semantics for moral concepts involves only (...) ‘narrow’ conceptual roles, where these include connections to motivational, desire-like, states. In the penultimate section it is argued, contrary to what Wedgwood, Enoch and others have claimed, that such an account of moral concepts cannot plausibly be combined with the claim that moral concepts refer to robust properties. (Published with Open Access.). (shrink)

Some philosophers (including Urmson, Humberstone, Shah, and Velleman) hold that believing that p distinctively involves applying a norm according to which the truth of p is a criterion for the success or correctness of the attitude. On this view, imagining and assuming differ from believing in that no such norm is applied. I argue against this view with counterexamples showing that applying the norm of truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for distinguishing believing from imagining and assuming. Then I argue (...) that the different functional properties of these mental states are enough to distinguish them, and that norm-application doesn't help us draw the functional distinctions. (shrink)

Awarding rights to rivers, forests, and other environmental entities (EEs) is a new and increasingly popular approach to environmental protection. The distinctive feature of such rights of nature (RoN) legislation is that direct duties are owed to the EEs. This paper presents a novel rebuttal of the strongest argument against RoN: the no interest argument. The crux of this argument is that because EEs are not sentient, they cannot possess the kinds of interests necessary to ground direct duties. Therefore, they (...) cannot be legitimate rights-bearers. After considering and rejecting standard responses to this argument, the paper challenges its fundamental assumption: that rights-correlative duties must be grounded in the interests of the rights-bearer. The paper then presents the RoN critic with a dilemma. The critic must either accept that EEs are legitimate rights-bearers, or delegitimise many well-established rights-bearers along with EEs. Either way, the no interest argument loses its force. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that causation is transitive and in this paper I aim to reconcile this widely-held assumption with apparent evidence to the contrary. I will discuss a familiar approach to certain well-known counterexamples, before introducing a more resistant sort of case of my own. I will then offer a novel solution, based on Yablo’s proportionality principle, that succeeds in even these more resistant cases. There is a catch, however. Either proportionality is a constraint on which causal claims are (...) true, and the solution works, or it is not and causation is not transitive after all. I will argue that the first horn has unacceptable consequences and should be rejected, but that the second horn is less costly than it might initially appear. (shrink)

It is standard in set theory to assume that Cantor's Theorem establishes that the continuum is an uncountable set. A challenge for this position comes from the observation that through forcing one can collapse any cardinal to the countable and that the continuum can be made arbitrarily large. In this paper, we present a different take on the relationship between Cantor's Theorem and extensions of universes, arguing that they can be seen as showing that every set is countable and that (...) the continuum is a proper class. We examine several principles based on maximality considerations in this framework, and show how some (namely Ordinal Inner Model Hypotheses) enable us to incorporate standard set theories (including ZFC with large cardinals added). We conclude that the systems considered raise questions concerning the foundational purposes of set theory. (shrink)