Relational egalitarians claim that a situation is just only if everyone it involves relates to one another as equals. It implies that relational egalitarians believe the ideal of “living as equals” (for short) is desirable, and furthermore, necessary for justice. In this paper, I distinguish three accounts of the desirability of the ideal: the instrumental value account, the non‐instrumental value account, and the non‐consequentialist account. I argue that the former two accounts cannot provide satisfying reasons for being a relational egalitarian. (...) Instead, the ideal of “living as equals” ought to be understood as fundamentally a moral requirement in a non‐consequentialist sense. In addition, a pluralist (though fundamentally non‐consequentialist) approach is welcome. (shrink)

According to some pessimists, trusting moral testimony is an action in which the agent does not think about moral questions by herself, and thus it is unacceptable. I argue for optimism by giving some reasons to display moral agents are still depending upon their own in many cases of moral testimony. Specifically, I argue that testimony is a form of social cooperation: the division of epistemic labor. My strategy is as follows: First, I give a principle to show when an (...) agent could reasonably trust moral testimony. Specifically, an agent could reasonably accept the testimony, when she can reasonably expect she would make the same or similar judgment with the testifier. Second, I show how moral testimony could work as a form of social cooperation. Given the principle of the same judgment, it is reasonable for the agent to form a moral belief and act with moral testimony. And it provides us higher efficiency in moral knowledge and shows respect for each moral agent. After that, I provide explanations for the problem of moral disagreement and moral understanding with such a principle for moral testimony. Finally, I respond to some possible objections and give some clarifications of my argument. (shrink)

Presentism usually holds that only present entities exist. In contrast to presentism, eternalism holds that past, present, and future entities all exist. According to some philosophers, presentism is intuitively incompatible with time travel. In this paper, I defend the compatibility between presentism and time travel by arguing for a plausible account of causation in the presentist framework. To achieve my goal, I respond to an objection to presentist time travel that is based on the nonexistence of the past: the Causation (...) Objection. According to the Causation Objection, causal relations between objects at different times are necessary for time travel, but these are impossible for presentists. I evaluate a possible reply based on a non-relational account of causation and show that this reply is not satisfying. Subsequently, I put forward a fact-based account of causal relation. I argue that presentists could accept facts instead of events as causal relata, thus establishing causal relations. As all facts about the past, the present, and the future exist in the present, we could explain how backward causation works and describe the discrepancy between personal time and external time in presentist time travel; in this way, I argue, we could vindicate the compatibility between presentism and time travel. (shrink)