Wars are large-scale conflicts between organized groups of belligerents, which involve suffering, devastation, and brutality unlike almost anything else in human experience. Whatever one’s other beliefs about morality, all should agree that the horrors of war are all but unconscionable, and that warfare can be justified only if we have some compel- ling account of what is worth fighting for, which can justify contributing, as individu- als and as groups, to this calamitous endeavour. Although this question should obviously be central (...) to both philosophical and politi- cal discussion about war, it is at the forefront of neither. In recent years, philosophical discussion of warfare has bloomed, but the debate has focused on whom we may kill, on the assumption that our aims are justified.1 Political debate, meanwhile, is more concerned with matters of prudence, international law, and public justification, than with reassessing what is worth fighting for. For wars of intervention to halt or prevent massive humanitarian crises, this gap is not so troubling. When warfare is the only means to prevent the mass killing or enslavement of the innocent, the purposes of military force are clear enough (though undoubtedly many other problems remain). The problem is more pressing, how- ever, for the justification of national defence.3 Although common-sense morality and international law view national defence as the paradigm case of justified warfare, grounding this consensus is surprisingly difficult.4 We typically believe that any state is justified in using lethal force to protect its territory against any form of uninvited military incursion by any other state. And yet we lack a good argument to explain why this should be so. In this chapter, I explain why one familiar and otherwise plausible approach to the justification of killing in war cannot adequately ground common-sense views of permissible national defence.5 Reductionists believe that justified warfare reduces to an aggregation of acts that are justified under ordinary principles of interpersonal morality.6 The standard form of reductionism focuses on the principles governing killing in ordinary life, specifically those that justify intentional killing in self- and other-defence, and unintended but foreseen (for short, collateral) killing as a lesser evil. Justified warfare, on this view, is no more than the coextension of multiple acts justified under these two principles. Reductionism is the default philosophical approach to thinking through the ethics of killing in war. It makes perfect sense to ask what principles govern permissible kill- ing in general, before applying them to the particular context of war. If it cannot deliver a plausible set of conclusions about when national defence is permitted, then we must either revise our beliefs about which conclusions count as plausible, or else face the significant challenge of developing a different theoretical model for justifying war- fare—an exceptionalist model, which views war as an exception to the regular moral landscape, to which principles apply which apply to nothing else but war.7 We must show, in other words, that there is something worth fighting for in wars of national defence, which is not engaged when we use force in any other context. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2.2 sets out the argument against reduc- tionism.8 Section 2.3 considers and rebuts one common response to the argument, which has often been thought sufficient grounds to disregard its conclusion. Section 2.4 then asks whether a modified reductionism would survive unscathed by the argu- ment. Finally, section 2.5 sets out some desiderata on a plausible exceptionalist alterna- tive. Section 2.6 concludes. (shrink)

As a painfully outdated institution the school is accused of: being alienating, closing itself off to society and to the needs of young people; reproducing social inequality and consolidating existing power relations; demotivating youth; showing a lack of effectiveness and having great difficulty with employability. And last but not least, the school is considered redundant: the school, where learning is bound to time and place, is no longer needed in the digital era of virtual learning environments. The ultimate charge: the (...) school is a product of outdated ways of distributing knowledge and expertise, determined by primitive technologies of the past. Adieu school. This book advocates the acquittal of the school. It argues that many of the allegations against the school are motivated by an age-old fear and even hatred toward one of its radical but essential characteristics: that the school provides ‘free time' and transforms knowledge and skills into 'common goods', and therefore has the potential to give everyone, regardless of background, natural talent or aptitude, the time and space to leave their known environment, rise above themselves and renew (and thus change in unpredictable ways) the world. This defence of the school starts from an investigation of what makes a school a school and pinpoints why the school has value in and of itself. It reveals the various attempts to rob the school of its scholastic character, that is, to tame the school. The ultimate aim is to elaborate a touchstone that helps to defend as well as to re-invent school. -/- Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons are members of the Laboratory for Education and Society, KU Leuven. They share an interest in research on the public dimensions of education and are currently elaborating a philosophy of schooling. (shrink)

Recent years have seen growing interest in modifying interventionist accounts of causal explanation in order to characterise noncausal explanation. However, one surprising element of such accounts is that they have typically jettisoned the core feature of interventionism: interventions. Indeed, the prevailing opinion within the philosophy of science literature suggests that interventions exclusively demarcate causal relationships. This position is so prevalent that, until now, no one has even thought to name it. We call it “intervention puritanism” (I-puritanism, for short). In this (...) paper, we mount the first sustained defence of the idea that there are distinctively noncausal explanations which can be characterized in terms of possible interventions; a position we call “intervention liberalism” (I-liberalism, for short). While many have followed James Woodward (2003) in committing to I-puritanism, we trace support for I-liberalism back to the work of Jaegwon Kim (1974). Furthermore, we analyse two recent sources of scepticism regarding I-liberalism: debate surrounding mechanistic constitution; and attempts to provide a monistic account of explanation. We show that neither literature provides compelling reasons for adopting I-puritanism. Finally, we present a novel taxonomy of available positions upon the role of possible interventions in explanation: weak causal imperialism; strong causal imperialism; monist intervention puritanism; pluralist intervention puritanism; monist intervention liberalism; and finally, the specific position defended in this paper, pluralist intervention liberalism. (shrink)

This article offers an account and defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with references to the so-called maker's knowledge tradition. Its main thesis is that Plato's “user's knowledge” tradition should be complemented, if not replaced, by a constructionist approach to philosophical problems in general and to knowledge in particular. Epistemic agents know something when they are able to build (reproduce, simulate, model, construct, etc.) that something and plug the obtained information into the correct (...) network of relations that account for it. Their epistemic expertise increases with the scope and depth of the questions that they are able to ask and answer. Thus, constructionism deprioritises mimetic, passive, and declarative knowledge that something is the case, in favour of poietic, interactive, and practical knowledge of something being the case. Metaphilosophically, constructionism suggests adding conceptual engineering to conceptual analysis as a fundamental method. (shrink)

The availability of the defence of belief in consent under section 265(4) is a question of law, subject to review on appeal. The statutory provision is based on the common law rule that applies to all defences. Consideration of the defence when it is unavailable in law and failure to consider it when it is available are both incorrect. A judge is most likely to avoid error when ruling on availability of the defence if the ruling: (1) is grounded (...) on sound analysis of the substantive basis for the defence and its relationship to the principles of criminal responsibility; and (2) uses precise legal criteria to govern practical application of section 265(4) to the evidence in specific cases. The guidelines proposed in Part I are based on analyses of the substantive defence and culpable awareness and were developed to ensure that appropriate criteria are properly used when section 265(4) is applied. When a trial judge rules that the defence is available in law, the trier of fact must determine whether the defence is available on the facts as found, based on the evidence in the case. The model jury instructions proposed in Part II are designed to ensure that deliberations by the trier of fact are also guided and shaped by appropriate legal criteria. At both stages, the objective is to ground the deliberation process on fact, not fiction, and to regulate the exculpatory effect of the defence by using legal norms to exclude excuses based on extra-legal considerations such as sexual/racial fantasy, stereotype and myth, or community attitudes and custom. (shrink)

Common sense has it that animals matter considerably less than humans; the welfare and suffering of a cow, a chicken or a fish are important but not as much as the welfare and suffering of a human being. Most animal ethicists reject this “speciesist” view as mere prejudice. In their opinion, there is no difference between humans and other animals that could justify such unequal consideration. In the opposite camp, advocates of speciesism have long tried to identify a difference that (...) would fit the bill, but they have consistently seemed to fail. In light of this, some naturally began to appeal to Moorean arguments: the case against speciesism must be flawed somehow, these philosophers maintain, because speciesism is supported by a strong and widespread intuition. This chapter draws on recent findings in social psychology to criticize this defence of speciesism. It argues that the strong and widespread intuition that humans count more than animals is epistemically defective because it is causally shaped by a pair of irrelevant influences: cognitive dissonance and tribalism. Accordingly, it is no suitable basis for a Moorean argument. (shrink)

This paper offers a defence of metaphysical naturalism, in the context of the Fine Tuning argument. Theistic objections to the Multiverse (MV) hypothesis are considered, specifically the claim that the MV hypothesis commits the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy (IGF) and, as per the This Universe Objection (TUO), that it violates the Requirement of Total Evidence. It is argued that the IGF claim moved the goalposts when it comes to assessing the validity of the MV hypothesis. The Cosmic Slot Machine analogy will (...) be used to demonstrate how the This Universe Objection (TUO), fails to adequately account for the anthropic principle (or selection effect) and how the MV hyptothesis does satisfy the Requirement for Total Evidence. -/- With respect to the Naturalistic Single Universe (NSU), the implications of the ex-nihilonihil- fit principle, for evaluating the epistemic probability of a Life Permitting Universe (LPU)under the NSU hypothesis, are considered. It is argued that the ex nihilo nihil fit principle entails that an LPU is not improbable under the NSU hypothesis. (shrink)

The distinction between dimensions and units in physics is commonplace. But are dimensions a feature of reality? The most widely-held view is that they are no more than a tool for keeping track of the values of quantities under a change of units. This anti-realist position is supported by an argument from underdetermination: one can assign dimensions to quantities in many different ways, all of which are empirically equivalent. In contrast, I defend a form of dimensional realism, on which some (...) assignments of dimensions to quantities better describe reality than others. The argument I provide is a form of inference to the best explanation. In particular, the technique of dimensional analysis is explanatory, but it is only successful for certain systems of dimensions. Since these dimensional systems support scientific explanations, we have reason to believe that they are real. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical paternalism is the normative stance upheld by pharmaceutical regulatory agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration. These agencies prevent patients from accessing treatments declared safe and ineffective for the patient’s good without their consent. Libertarian critics of the FDA have shown a number of significant flaws in regulatory paternalism. Against these objections, I will argue that, in order to make an informed decision about treatments, a libertarian patient should request full disclosure of the uncertainty about an experimental treatment. (...) But pharmaceutical markets, on their own, are not a reliable source of information about such uncertainty. And companies have the power to capture any independent expert who may assess it. Therefore, the libertarian is better off deferring on an independent regulatory body the assessment of the pharmaceutical risks, constraining access to treatments until tested. (shrink)

Research in the psychology of deception detection implies that Fricker, in making her case for reductionism in the epistemology of testimony, overestimates both the epistemic demerits of the antireductionist policy of trusting speakers blindly and the epistemic merits of the reductionist policy of monitoring speakers for trustworthiness: folk psychological prejudices to the contrary notwithstanding, it turns out that monitoring is on a par (in terms both of the reliability of the process and of the sensitivity of the beliefs that it (...) produces) with blind trust. The consequence is that while (a version of) Fricker’s argument for the necessity of a reduction succeeds, her argument for the availability of reductions fails. This does not, however, condemn us to endorse standard pessimistic reductionism, according to which there is no testimonial knowledge, for recent research concerning the methods used by subjects to discover deception in non-laboratory settings suggests that only a more moderate form of pessimism is in order. (shrink)

Although few linguists currently embrace the empirical paradigm, there are increasing calls for the development of tools for studying language that resemble those in exact sciences. This trend can be observed even in top mainstream linguistic journals, such as the Journal of Pragmatics, as exemplified by Xiang (2017). Today, however, linguists who adapt the methodologies from more advanced sciences face isolation from the mainstream linguistic community. This is because the majority of linguists in philological and philosophical departments remain convinced that (...) the object of their studies is fundamentally different from those studied by physicists. Therefore, they argue that linguistic methodology cannot resemble that used in empirical sciences. As a result, linguistics is often seen as requiring interpretation rather than an explanation, and evaluation of linguistic research is based on acceptance within the scholarly community rather than empirical testing. (shrink)

Cartesians and Lichtenbergians have diverging views of the deliverances of introspection. According to the Cartesians, a rational subject, competent with the relevant concepts, can come to know that he or she thinks – hence, that he or she exists – on the sole basis of his or her introspective awareness of his or her conscious thinking. According to the Lichtenbergians, this is not possible. This paper offers a defence of the Lichtenbergian position using Peacocke and Campbell's recent exchange on Descartes'scogitoas (...) a framework for discussion. A thought-experiment will be presented involving two communities with radically different conceptions of the metaphysics of the self. The purpose of the thought-experiment is to suggest that a substantive metaphysical thesis, whose truth cannot be a priori known, is presupposed by any justified transition from one's introspective awareness of a certain mental activity to the self-ascription of that activity. (shrink)

Making an adequate aesthetic judgment about an object or an aesthetic property requires first-hand experience of that object or property. Many have suggested that this principle is a valid epistemic norm in the epistemology of the aesthetic. However, some recent philosophers have argued that certain works of conceptual art and other counterexamples disprove the principle in question, even suitably modified. In this paper, I argue that these philosophers are mistaken and that, when properly qualified, the acquaintance principle (in some of (...) its versions) is not threatened by their examples and arguments. (shrink)

I defend my ‘one-act’ interpretation of Kant’s account of judgments of beauty against recent criticisms by Paul Guyer. Guyer’s text-based arguments for his own ‘two-acts’ view rely on the assumption that a claim to the universal validity of one’s pleasure presupposes the prior existence of the pleasure. I argue that pleasure in the beautiful claims its own universal validity, thus obviating the need to distinguish two independent acts of judging. The resulting view, I argue, is closer to the text and (...) more phenomenologically plausible than Guyer’s two-acts alternative. (shrink)

In recent decades, plural logic has established itself as a well-respected member of the extensions of first-order classical logic. In the present paper, I draw attention to the fact that among the examples that are commonly given in order to motivate the need for this new logical system, there are some in which the elements of the plurality in question are internally singularized (e.g. ‘Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica’), while in others they are not (e.g. ‘Some philosophers wrote Principia (...) Mathematica’). Then, building on previous work, I point to a subsystem of plural logic in which inferences concerning examples of the first type can be adequately dealt with. I notice that such a subsystem (here called ‘discrete plural logic’) is in reality a mere variant of first-order logic as standardly formulated, and highlight the fact that it is axiomatizable while full plural logic is not. Finally, I urge that greater attention be paid to discrete plural logic and that discrete plurals are not used in order to motivate the introduction of full-fledged plural logic—or, at least, not without remarking that they can also be adequately dealt with in a considerably simpler system. (shrink)

I defend the 'Repugnant' Conclusion that for any possible population of happy people, a population containing a sufficient number of people with lives barely worth living would be better. Four lines of argument converge on this conclusion, and the conclusion has a simple, natural theoretical explanation. The opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion rests on a bare appeal to intuition. This intuition is open to charges of being influenced by multiple distorting factors. Several theories of population ethics have been devised to (...) avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, but each generates even more counterintuitive consequences. The intuition opposing the Repugnant Conclusion is thus among the best candidates for an intuition that should be revised. (shrink)

Harrison Frye claims that socialist republicanism may be unable to reduce domination due to efficiency costs and accountability deficits imposed by public ownership. I argue that the empirical and theoretical grounds for expecting such a decline in economic efficiency are weak. Moreover, the egalitarian distributive effects of public ownership are likely to be more important for insulating people from domination. So too, workers, consumers, and citizens are not well-protected from domination by the accountability of managers to profit-seeking shareholders. I conclude (...) that the investor-owned firm will do far more to exacerbate dominating power than to constrain it. (shrink)

According to philosophical orthodoxy, there are informative criteria of identity over time. Anti-criterialism rejects this orthodoxy and claims that there are no such criteria. This paper examines anti-criterialism in the light of recent attacks on the thesis by Matt Duncan, Sydney Shoemaker and Dean Zimmerman. It is argued that those attacks are not successful. Along the way, a novel strategy to defend anti-criterialism against the critics’ most challenging objection is developed. Under-appreciated difficulties for criterialism are also raised which, I claim, (...) there is no obvious way to solve. It is concluded that anti-criterialism may be a much stronger rival to criterialism than is often supposed. (shrink)

Hybrid contingentism combines first-order contingentism, the view that it is contingent what individuals there are, with higher-order necessitism, the view that it is non-contingent what properties and propositions there are (where these are conceived as entities in the range of appropriate higher-order quantifiers). This combination of views avoids the most delicate problems afflicting alternative contingentist positions while preserving the central contingentist claim that ordinary, concrete entities exist contingently. Despite these attractive features, hybrid contingentism is usually faced with rejection. The main (...) reason for this is an objection that crucially involves haecceitistic properties, properties such as being identical to Plato or being identical to Aristotle. The objection alleges that by accepting the necessary existence of such haecceities, hybrid contingentists incur an explanatory commitment that they are unable to discharge, namely that of explaining how it is that certain haecceities ‘lock onto’ their target individuals even when those individuals are absent. To defend hybrid contingentism against this charge, I first clarify the haecceities objection in several respects and consider, in particular, what notion of explanation the objection is operating with. After arguing that it can be fruitfully understood as a challenge to provide metaphysical grounds for certain haecceity facts, I develop a contingentist response to the objection that draws on recent work on the connection between ground and essence. (shrink)

I suggest that the theories of remembering one finds in the philosophy of memory literature are best characterised as theories principally operating at three different levels of inquiry. Simulationist views are theories of the psychofunctional process type remembering. Causalist views are theories of referential remembering. Epistemic views are theories of successful remembering. Insofar as there is conflict between these theories, it is a conflict of integration rather than—as widely presented—head‐on disagreement. Viewed in this way, we can see the previous awareness (...) condition and preservationism as principles applying at only some of the corresponding levels of inquiry. Where either principle has been rejected, it is, I claim, due to arguments which slip between these different levels. While the view of the landscape I offer does not dissolve ongoing disputes about the nature of remembering, it clarifies the dialectical rules of engagement, helping to clear the path for future, collaborative progress to be made. The view enables us to see less conflict in the recent philosophy of memory literature than there seems at face value to be. (shrink)

Mixed feelings occur when a same subject experience both pleasure and displeasure at the same time. I argued that mixed feelings are not only possible, but that they constitute a widespread phenomenon. In the first part, I answer to three objections against the possibility of mixed feelings, the most important one being that mixed feelings contradict the view that pleasure and displeasure are contraries. In the second part, I argue that pleasure in effort, the pleasure we take in doing things, (...) is a widespread phenomenon that constitutes a case of mixed feeling of a special sort: a case where the displeasure grounds or explains the pleasure. I argue that none of the usual strategies of the enemies of mixed feelings for dealing with putative cases of mixed feelings (oscillation between pleasure and displeasure, rejection of one of the two feelings) achieves to deal with pleasure in effort. (shrink)

I defend a weak version of the Pigou-Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot accommodate. However, the principle can be justified (...) by the same reasoning that has recently been used to defend the core axiom of ex post prioritarianism and egalitarianism, namely, Pigou-Dalton for well-being. The arguably biggest challenge for proponents of Pigou-Dalton for chances is that it violates State Dominance for social prospects. However, I argue that we have independent reason for rejecting State Dominance for social prospects, since it prevents a social planner from properly respecting people's preferences. (shrink)

This article argues that access to meaningful sexual experience should be included within the set of the goods that are subject to principles of distributive justice. It argues that some people are currently unjustly excluded from meaningful sexual experience and it is not implausible to suggest that they might thereby have certain claim rights to sexual inclusion. This does not entail that anyone has a right to sex with another person, but it does entail that duties may be imposed on (...) society to foster greater sexual inclusion. This is a controversial thesis and this article addresses this controversy by engaging with four major objections to it: the misogyny objection; the impossibility objection; the stigmatisation objection; and the unjust social engineering objection. (shrink)

The idea that humans should abandon their individuality and use technology to bind themselves together into hivemind societies seems both farfetched and frightening – something that is redolent of the worst dystopias from science fiction. In this article, we argue that these common reactions to the ideal of a hivemind society are mistaken. The idea that humans could form hiveminds is sufficiently plausible for its axiological consequences to be taken seriously. Furthermore, far from being a dystopian nightmare, the hivemind society (...) could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing. Consequently, we should not be so quick to deny it. We provide two arguments in support of this claim – the axiological openness argument and the desirability argument – and then defend it against three major objections. (shrink)

In Francesco Berto’s words, the term “Serious Actualism” is used for the position “that any object must exist in every circumstance in which it has any property – the thesis that predication, or the having of properties as such, entails existence.” (“Modal Meinongianism and Fiction: The Best of Three Worlds”, Philosophical Studies 152, 2011, 324f.) Berto agrees with Nathan Salmon that Serious Actualism is “a confused and misguided prejudice” (Salmon, “Nonexistence”, Noûs 32, 1998, 290). The aim of this paper is (...) to defend the doctrine of Serious Actualism against this verdict. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a novel defence of political cosmopolitanism grounded in a familiar principle: universal moral equality. Critics of cosmopolitanism generally agree to universal moral equality, but disagree about what moral equality means politically. According to my argument, if we accept that all people are morally equal, then we ought to accept their equal moral standing. We should therefore prefer socio-political arrangements that reflect the equal moral standing of all people over those that reflect differentiated moral standing. A (...) reasonable cosmopolitanism need not preclude partialist attachment to co-nationals, or undermine the significance of self-determination, so long as political arrangements do not produce differentiated moral standing. As the political application of an uncontroversial moral principle, I defend reasonable cosmopolitanism against nationalism and statism. Neither of these, I argue, are suitable foundations for global justice in migration because they each conceive of justice as a local concern for insiders. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers rate error theories poorly. We identify the arguments these philosophers invoke, and expose their deficiencies. We thereby show that the prospects for error theory have been systematically underestimated. By undermining general arguments against all error theories, we leave it open whether any more particular arguments against particular error theories are more successful. The merits of error theories need to be settled on a case-by-case basis: there is no good general argument against error theories.

When I say that my conception of metaphysics is Aristotelian, or neo-Aristotelian, this may have more to do with Aristotle’s philosophical methodology than his metaphysics, but, as I see it, the core of this Aristotelian conception of metaphysics is the idea that metaphysics is the first philosophy . In what follows I will attempt to clarify what this conception of metaphysics amounts to in the context of some recent discussion on the methodology of metaphysics (e.g. Chalmers et al . (2009), (...) Ladyman and Ross (2007)). There is a lot of hostility towards the Aristotelian conception of metaphysics in this literature: for instance, the majority of the contributors to the Metametaphysics volume assume a rather more deflationary, Quinean approach towards metaphysics. In the process of replying to the criticisms towards Aristotelian metaphysics put forward in recent literature I will also identify some methodological points which deserve more attention and ought to be addressed in future research. (shrink)

This is the revised version of an invited keynote lecture delivered at the "1st Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference". The paper is divided into two parts. The first part defends an informational approach to structural realism. It does so in three steps. First, it is shown that, within the debate about structural realism, epistemic and ontic structural realism are reconcilable. It follows that a version of OSR is defensible from a structuralist-friendly position. Second, it is argued that a version of (...) OSR is also plausible, because not all relata are logically prior to relations. Third, it is shown that a version of OSR is also applicable to both sub-observable and observable entities, by developing its ontology of structural objects in terms of informational objects. The outcome is informational structural realism, a version of OSR supporting the ontological commitment to a view of the world as the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other. The paper has been discussed by several colleagues and, in the second half, ten objections that have been moved to the proposal are answered in order to clarify it further. (shrink)

Intentionalism about demonstratives is the view that the referent of a demonstrative is determined solely by the speaker's intentions. Intentionalists can disagree about the nature of these intentions, but are united in rejecting the relevance of other factors, such as the speaker's gestures, her gaze, and any facts about the addressee or the audience. In this paper, I formulate a particular version of this view, and I defend it against six objections, old and new.

The austere view of nonsense says that the source of nonsense is not a violation of the rules of logical syntax, but nonsense is always due to a lack of meaning in one of the components of a sentence. In other words, the necessary and sufficient condition for nonsensicality is that no meaning has been assigned to a constituent in a sentence. The austere conception is the key ingredient of the resolute reading of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that presents a therapeutical interpretation (...) of the work, and rejects a possibility of conveying some ineffable truths by means of nonsensical sentences. In this paper, I defend the austere view against the most important objections. Firstly, I discuss textual sources for ascribing to Wittgenstein the austere view that have not been sufficiently thoroughly discussed yet. Next, I indicate that the apparent occurrence of words out of the context of a sentence on lists of verbs and in definitions is not in conflict with the version of the context principle recommended by austere theorists, since this argument does not sufficiently take into account the distinction between sign and symbol. Furthermore, I argue that the austere conception and the principle of compositionality are jointly tenable, for the former view does not exclude the existence of syntactic and semantic rules, but only shows that they are recognizable conditionally. Finally, I indicate that the austere view of nonsense should be seen as a viable option by a contemporary theorist of nonsense, for it helps us to avoid making controversial assumptions about the nature of meaning and content. (shrink)

Adversarial philosophy is under attack (!), but I speculate that it is useful for working out the level of a philosopher and sometimes for increasing the respect awarded to some individuals and groups. There may be no alternative to it when you have an excess of philosophers of around the same level.

What, if anything, can justify public shaming? Philosophers who have written on this topic have pointed out the role of public shaming in enforcing valuable social norms. In this paper, I defend an alternate, supplementary justification for public shaming: as a form of moral self-defence. Moral self-defence is the defence of one’s moral standing – being recognized as an equal in the eyes of oneself and others – rather than the defence of one’s physical body or rights. Agents can engage (...) in moral self-defence by publicly criticizing, blaming, or expressing other negative feelings towards wrongdoers, which sometimes constitutes contributions to public shaming. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of religion has resurrected Leibniz’s idea that there is a best possible world, perhaps ours. In particular, Klaas Kraay’s [2010] construction of a theistic multiverse and Nevin Climenhaga’s [2018] argument from infinite value theory are novel defenses of a best possible world. I do not think that there is a best world, and show how both Kraay and Climenhaga may be resisted. First, I argue that Kraay’s construction of a theistic multiverse can be resisted from (...) plausible assumptions about set theory. Next, I argue against the value-theoretic assumptions that underlie Climenhaga’s argument and show how to give an infinite value theory where there is no best world. (shrink)

Business ethics is often understood as a variety of professional ethics, and thus distinct from ordinary morality in an important way. This article seeks to challenge two ways of defending this claim: first, from the nature of business practice, and second, from the contribution of business. The former argument fails because it undermines our ability to rule out a professional-ethics approach to a number of disreputable practices. The latter argument fails because the contribution of business is extrinsic to business in (...) a way that distinguishes from the established professions. The article ultimately suggests we adopt a more aspirational approach to business ethics, which retains an appeal even in the face of charges of anti-capitalist irrelevance. (shrink)

The evidential value of moral intuitions has been challenged by psychological work showing that the intuitions of ordinary people are affected by distorting factors. One reply to this challenge, the expertise defence, claims that training in philosophical thinking confers enhanced reliability on the intuitions of professional philosophers. This defence is often expressed through analogy: since we do not allow doubts about folk judgments in domains like mathematics or physics to undermine the plausibility of judgments by experts in these domains, we (...) also should not do so in philosophy. In this paper I clarify the logic of the analogy strategy, and defend it against recent challenges by Jesper Ryberg. The discussion exposes an interesting divide: while Ryberg’s challenges may weaken analogies between morality and domains like mathematics, they do not affect analogies to other domains, such as physics. I conclude that the expertise defence can be supported by analogical means, though care is required in selecting an appropriate analog. I discuss implications of this conclusion for the expertise defence debate and for study of the moral domain itself. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for art historians and philosophers of art to deride the kinds of aesthetic experiences tourists seek out by characterizing them as bowing to the will of the herd, succumbing to peer pressure, or simply seeking out what is popular. Two charges, in particular, tend to be levelled against tourists. The first, which I call the motivation problem, contends that tourists are motivated to seek out aesthetic experiences for the wrong kinds of reasons. The second, which I (...) call the appreciation problem, maintains that tourist tastes are aesthetically uninformed and are thus the inauthentic product of aesthetic luck. But there is a better way of thinking about aesthetic tourism, one that can capture both the tourist’s motivations and the role of aesthetic luck. I argue that aesthetic tourists, like many experts, subscribe to the acquaintance principle, and that doing so generates aesthetic obligations to their practical identity. The tourist, in the end, is no more – and no less – a product of aesthetic luck than the expert connoisseur. (shrink)

In this paper I outline a theory of legitimacy that grounds the state’s right to rule on a natural duty not to harm others. I argue that by refusing to enter the state, anarchists expose those living next to them to the dangers of the state of nature, thereby posing an unjust threat. Since we have a duty not to pose unjust threats to others, anarchists have a duty to leave the state of nature and enter the state. This duty (...) correlates to a claim-right possessed by those living next to them, who also have a right to act in self-defence to enforce this obligation. This argument, if successful, would be particularly attractive, as it provides an account of state legitimacy without importing any normative premises that libertarians would reject. (shrink)

According to Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, when you have an experience with content p, you often have prima facie justification for believing p that doesn’t rest on your independent justification for believing any proposition. Although dogmatism has an intuitive appeal and seems to have an antisceptical bite, it has been targeted by various objections. This paper principally aims to answer the objections by Roger White according to which dogmatism is inconsistent with the Bayesian account of how evidence affects our rational credences. (...) If this were true, the rational acceptability of dogmatism would be seriously questionable. I respond that these objections don’t get off the ground because they assume that our experiences and our introspective beliefs that we have experiences have the same evidential force, whereas the dogmatist is uncommitted to this assumption. I also consider the question whether dogmatism has an antisceptical bite. I suggest that the answer turns on whether or not the Bayesian can determine the priors of hypotheses and conjectures on the grounds of their extra-empirical virtues. If the Bayesian can do so, the thesis that dogmatism has an antisceptical bite is probably false. (shrink)

Divine command theories come in several different forms but at their core all of these theories claim that certain moral statuses exist in virtue of the fact that God has commanded them to exist. Several authors argue that this core version of the DCT is vulnerable to an epistemological objection. According to this objection, DCT is deficient because certain groups of moral agents lack epistemic access to God’s commands. But there is confusion as to the precise nature and significance of (...) this objection, and critiques of its key premises. In this article, I try to clear up this confusion and address these critiques. I do so in three ways. First, I offer a simplified general version of the objection. Second, I address the leading criticisms of the premises of this objection, focusing in particular on the role of moral risk/uncertainty in our understanding of God’s commands. And third, I outline four possible interpretations of the argument, each with a differing degree of significance for the proponent of the DCT. (shrink)

Here I reply to the main points raised by the commentators on the arguments put forward in my Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (OUP, 2009). My response is aimed at defending a modest doxastic account of clinical delusions, and is articulated in three sections. First, I consider the view that delusions are inbetween perceptual and doxastic states, defended by Jacob Hohwy and Vivek Rajan, and the view that delusions are failed attempts at believing or not-quitebeliefs, proposed by Eric Schwitzgebel and (...) Maura Tumulty. Then, I address the relationship between the doxastic account of delusions and the role, nature, and prospects of folk psychology, which is discussed by Dominic Murphy, Keith Frankish, and Maura Tumulty in their contributions. In the final remarks, I turn to the continuity thesis and suggest that, although there are important differences between clinical delusions and non-pathological beliefs, these differences cannot be characterised satisfactorily in epistemic terms. (shrink)

Many worry about the over-medicalisation of mental illness, and some even argue that we should abandon the term mental illness altogether. Yet, this is a commonly used term in popular discourse, in policy making, and in research. In this paper I argue that if we distinguish between disease, illness, and sickness (where illness refers to the first-personal, subjective experience of the sufferer), then the concept of mental illness is a useful way of understanding a type of human experience, inasmuch as (...) the term is (i) apt or accurate, (ii) a useful hermeneutical resource for interpreting and communicating experience, and (iii) can be a good way for at least some of us to establish a liveable personal identity within our culture. (shrink)

Recently, I argued that subjects inside of artificial wombs—termed ‘gestatelings’ by Romanis—share the same legal and moral status as newborns (neonates). Gestatelings, on my view, are persons in both a legal and moral sense. Kingma challenges these claims. Specifically, Kingma argues that my previous argument is invalid, as it equivocates on the term ‘newborn’. Kingma concludes that questions about the legal and moral status of gestatelings remain ‘unanswered’. I am grateful to Kingma for raising potential concerns with the view I (...) have presented. In this essay, however, I argue that (most) of Kingma’s objections are unpersuasive. First, my original argument does not equivocate on terms like ‘newborn’ or ‘neonate’. The terms denote human beings that have been born recently; that is what matters to the argument. Charges of equivocation, I suspect, rest on a confusion between the denotation and connotations of ‘newborn’ (or ‘neonate’). Next, I show that, contra Kingma, it is clear that—under current law in the USA and UK—gestatelings would count as legal persons. Moral personhood is more difficult. On that subject, Kingma’s criticisms have merit. In response, however, I show that my original claim—that gestatelings should count as moral persons—remains true on several (common) philosophical accounts of personhood. Regarding those accounts that imply gestatelings are not moral persons, I argue that advocates face a troubling dilemma. I conclude that regardless of which view of moral personhood one adopts, questions about the moral status of gestatelings are not ‘unanswered’. (shrink)

I confront Feyerabend's position and critical rationalism in order to have a foundation or starting point for my (historical) investigation. The main difference of his position towards falsificationism is the belief that different theories cannot be discussed rationally. Feyerabend is convinced that Galilei's observations with the telescope in the historical context of the Copernican revolution supports his criticism. In particular, he argues that the Copernican theory was supported by deficient hypotheses, and falsifications were disposed by ad hoc hypotheses and propaganda. (...) Furthermore, he claims that his philosophy of science reconstructs Galilei's defence of the Copernican theory. He introduces a central principle of his position (the principle of tenacity) in order to justify a research strategy of not eliminating falsified theories. He tries to show that the tenacious defence of a theory corresponds to Galilei's defence of the Copernican theory. Remarkably, Feyerabend's approach to explain the development of science earns an important support from his interpretation of Galilei's observations. On this basis I give a falsificationist interpretation of Galilei's observations with the telescope, and oppose this interpretation to Feyerabend's. From a falsificationist perspective, auxiliary hypotheses compete during the Copernican revolution which can (with some effort) be critically discussed. Then I analyse the historical case in order to test Feyerabend's interpretation of the Copernican revolution. Inter alias I investigate thoroughly whether Galilei, as Feyerabend claims, immunised falsifications of the Copernican theory by the introduction of ad hoc hypotheses. The investigation considers Galilei's explanation of Venus' phases, his establishment of the irradiation hypothesis, the explanation of the telescope's functionality, and the role of the reproducibility of the observations with the telescope. Finally I provide a rational reconstruction of Galilei's falsification of the Ptolemaic theory. The formalisation shows that Galilei was not a cautious critical rationalist, but a very confident scientist using the method of falsification. (shrink)

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.

In domains like stock brokerage, clinical psychiatry, and long‐term political forecasting, experts generally fail to outperform novices. Empirical researchers agree on why this is: experts must receive direct or environmental learning feedback during training to develop reliable expertise, and these domains are deficient in this type of feedback. A growing number of philosophers resource this consensus view to argue that, given the absence of direct or environmental philosophical feedback, we should not give the philosophical intuitions or theories of expert philosophers (...) greater credence than those of novice philosophers. This article has three objectives. The first is to explore several overlooked issues concerning the strategy of generalizing from empirical studies of non‐philosophical expertise to the epistemic status of philosophical expertise. The second is to explain why empirical research into a causal relationship between direct learning feedback and enhanced expert performance does not provide good grounds for abandoning a default optimism about the epistemic superiority of expert philosophical theories. The third is to sketch a positive characterization of learning feedback that addresses developmental concerns made salient by the empirical literature on expert performance for specifically theory‐driven or “armchair” domains like philosophy. (shrink)

In ‘Moral case for legal age change’, I argue that sometimes people should be allowed to change their age. I refute six immediate objections against the view that age change is permissible. I argue that the objections cannot show that legal age change should always be prohibited. In this paper, I consider some further objections against legal age change raised by Iain Brassington, Toni Saad and William Simkulet. I argue that the objections fail to show that age change should never (...) be allowed. (shrink)

Transhumanism is a challenging movement that invites us to rethink what defines humanity, including what we value and regret the most about our existence. Vulnerability is a key concept that require thorough philosophical scrutiny concerning transhumanist proposals. Vulnerability can refer to a universal condition of human life or, rather, to the specific exposure to certain harms due to particular situations. Even if we are all vulnerable in the first sense, there are also different sources and levels of vulnerability depending on (...) concrete social circumstances. Recently, Michael Hauskeller argued about a fundamental incompatibility between transhumanism and vulnerability. He understands vulnerability as an existential category, linked to woundability and mortality. This idea is akin to ontological vulnerability, but it does not notice some important features of social vulnerability. On the other side, transhumanism is a complex and non-homogeneous movement. Here we distinguish between a strong and a weak version of transhumanism. We will propose that the salience of vulnerability is only diminished in the radical one, while a moderate version can reconcile vulnerability with human enhancement. Thus, vulnerability, a concept that has recently gained much importance as an anthropological category in contemporary ethics, is not necessarily at odds with any transhumanist project. (shrink)

Many including Judith Jarvis Thomson, Philippa Foot, Peter Geach, Richard Kraut, and Paul Ziff have argued for good simpliciter skepticism. According to good simpliciter skepticism, we should hold that there is no concept of being good simpliciter or that there is no property of being good simpliciter. I first show that prima facie we should not accept either form of good simpliciter skepticism. I then show that all of the arguments that good simpliciter skeptics have proposed for their view fail (...) to show that we have good reason to accept good simpliciter skepticism. So, I show that we do not have good reason to accept good simpliciter skepticism. (shrink)

Pereboom’s Four-Case Argument was once considered to be the most powerful of the manipulation arguments against compatibilism. However, because of Demetriou’s :595–617, 2010) response, Pereboom has significantly weakened his argument. Manipulation arguments in general have also been challenged by King : 65–83, 2013). In this paper, I argue that the Four-Case Argument resists both these challenges. One upshot is that Pereboom doesn’t need weaken his argument. Another is that compatibilists still need a response the Four-Case Argument. And another is that (...) we get a much better understanding of the Four-Case Argument, and of manipulation arguments more generally, than is currently available in the literature. (shrink)