Joseph Mendola argues that internalism is true, and that there are no good arguments that support externalism. Anti-Externalism has three parts.

In Goodness and Justice, Joseph Mendola develops a unified moral theory that defends the hedonism of classical utilitarianism, while evading utilitarianism's familiar difficulties by adopting two modifications. His theory incorporates a developed form of consequentialism. When, as is common, someone is engaged in conflicting group acts, it requires that one perform one's role in that group act that is most beneficent. The theory also holds that overall value is distribution-sensitive, ceding maximum weight to the well-being of the worst-off (...) sections of sentient lives. It is properly congruent with commonsense intuition and required by the true metaphysics of value, by the unconstituted natural good found in our world. (shrink)

Its relentless pursuit of the good provides act-consequentialism with one sort of intuitive ethical rationale. But more indirect forms of consequentialism promise more intuitive normative implications, for instance the evil of even beneficent murders. I favor a middle way which combines the intuitive rationale of act-consequentialism and the intuitive normative implications of the best indirect forms. Multiple-Act Consequentialism or ‘MAC’ requires direct consequentialist evaluation of the options of group agents. It holds that one should only defect from a group act (...) with good consequences if one can achieve better consequences by the defecting act alone than the entire group act achieves, and that when different beneficent group acts of which one is part specify roles which conflict, one should follow the role in the group act with better consequences. This paper develops MAC as a solution to the Trolley Problem. Section 1 concerns the relative advantages of direct and indirect consequentialisms. Section 2 develops MAC by a focus on competing conceptions of group agency. Section 3 applies MAC to the Trolley Problem. (shrink)

‘Simple desire-based accounts’ of individual good or well-being identify an individual’s good with the satisfaction of their actual desires. I will defend one version.

Joseph Mendola defends an original ethical theory in the consequentialist tradition, which also incorporates contractarian and deontological elements. He argues that this theory is required by physical reality and the correct metaethics, and focuses in particular on the moral significance of group acts, and indeterminacies of morally relevant fact.

Accounts of mental content rooted in asymmetric dependence hold, crudely speaking, that the content of a mental representation is the cause of that representation on which all its other causes depend.1 To speak somewhat less crudely, such accounts, hereafter.

Mendola spends little time distinguishing human thought from horse sense and any possible ruminations of other creatures. Nor does he acknowledge an distinction between conscious experience and thought content. He develops a theory of content for human thought that delineates the things human can think, constructs an account of the realization of such thought, explains how thoughts with such a range of context might be constituted and how there might be people with such thoughts, and argues that no coherent (...) and humanly conceivable account of the realization of our thought is plausible because we cannot plausibly explain our experience. He concludes that how we think we think what we think is not how we do in fact think we think. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Teleosemantics holds that the contents of psychological states depend crucially on the functions of such states. Etiological accounts of function hold that the functions of things depend on their histories, especially their evolutionary or learning histories. Etiological teleosemantics combines these two features. Consider the case of beliefs. Since selection rests on the stable effects of things, since beliefs have no obvious effects independent of unstable desires, and since desires themselves have mental content, beliefs may seem a hard case for etiological (...) teleosemantics. But David Papineau deploys the effects of beliefs mediated by conation in an artful way to evade these difficulties. I argue that accounts with such an architecture are false. (shrink)

Ontology concerns the general nature of the different categories of beings, for instance objects like cars and people, and properties like colors and shapes. Modality concerns what is possible and what is necessary. Experience and Possibility explores the surprising ways in which modality is involved in the ontology of the things we experience.

Fred Feldman is known for the view that consequentialists should admit a fundamental role for desert in moral evaluation. But this book sketches a different desertism. It is a theory of what Feldman calls “political-economic distributive justice,” according to which such justice is a matter of getting what one deserves. The view, briefly stated in Feldman’s theoretical vocabulary, is this: First, there is perfect political-economic distributive justice in a country if and only if, and in virtue of the fact that, (...) in every case in which a citizen of that country deserves a political-economic desert, he or she receives that desert from the appropriate political-economic distributor. Second, there is greater political-economic distributive justice in one imperfectly just group than another when the situation of the first more closely approximates perfect political economic justice than does the situation of the second. These claims require unpacking. I will focus, with Feldman, on the first and central claim. What does it mean? Perhaps the best way to capture the basic idea behind Feldman’s view is to cite the case used to motivate it: a hurricane causes enormous damage to a farm, which the farm family needs some assistance to repair. Feldman says that they “need to get some help from someone—presumably their community, and they deserve it because they need it”. Many people do not have devastated farms. But, Feldman says, they “are like the farmers in this somewhat more abstract respect: since they are vulnerable to natural disasters... and since they are individually unable to protect themselves against these natural disasters, they deserve to be embedded in a community that will do its best to ensure that help will be provided to members who are adversely affected by such things”. Everyone is vulnerable to natural disasters, and on Feldman’s view, everyone deserves for that very reason assurance of assistance, guaranteed by their community. (shrink)

One standard objection to familiar utilitarian consequentialism queries its troubling commitment to the maximization of overall value irrespective of distribution, for instance among the well and badly off. Call this ‘the objection from distribution.’.

Prudence--the maximization of one’s own welfare irrespective of temporal propinquity--seems to many obviously rational. Special, controversial, and often difficult argument seems necessary to show that an equivalent concern with the welfare of others is rational. But Henry Sidgwick asked an important question about this distribution of the burden of proof.

Recent arguments for normative realism have centered on attempts to meet a demand on normative facts articulated by harman, That they be required for explanations of uncontroversial phenomena. This paper argues that another argument for normative realism should take precedence, An argument suggested by williams's skeptical discussion of moral objectivity in "ethics and the limits of philosophy".

This paper argues that social and political philosophy should evaluate how groups justify, the reasons they accept. This conception arises out of a critical examination of Rawls’s notion of the basic structure of society.

This paper argues that social and political philosophy should evaluate how groups justify, the reasons they accept. This conception arises out of a critical examination of Rawls’s notion of the basic structure of society.

The theses and arguments with which Jaegwon Kim was most identified all crucially involve properties. Events are said to be exemplification of properties by objects at times. Supervenience, despite its many varieties, is a relation between families of properties, such that there is no difference in supervening properties without a difference in subvening, base properties. The so-called ‘supervenience’ or ‘causal exclusion’ argument is directed against nonreductive physicalism, which denies the identity of physical and mental properties. It concludes that if physicalism (...) is true, then mental properties are only causally efficacious when they are identical to physical properties. But despite all the work properties do for Kim, there is little in his writing regarding traditional ontological views about properties, and he sometimes makes claims about property identity that are puzzling and hard to square with other claims he makes. This paper probes this neglected corner of his work, especially in regard to the supervenience argument and the fate of nonreductive physicalism. (shrink)

Bhargava's goal is to reinvigorate the debate about methodological individualism in the philosophy of social science, by identifying a clear and controversial form of that doctrine and by sketching a plausible nonindividualist alternative. He identifies several strands in traditional characterizations of methodological individualism, and focuses on two. The "ontological" strand insists that all social entities and their properties are constituted by individuals and their properties. The "explanatory" strand insists that all social phenomena are to be explained by reference to individuals (...) and their properties. Bhargava focuses on a form of methodological individualism that is modelled on Elster's work, and which Bhargava calls "intentionalism.". (shrink)

Michael Stocker believes that philosophers idealize reason and demonize emotion, and that this is a bad thing. Valuing Emotions was written with Elizabeth Hegeman, a psychoanalyst and anthropologist who collaborated on four of the book’s ten major chapters, but four of Stocker’s previously published papers are also incorporated in the book. Its central theme is that emotions are more positively important than contemporary ethicists customarily grant: having proper emotions is a crucial part of being a good person and living a (...) good life, and is also crucial for evaluative knowledge. The book develops no overarching theory of the emotions, however, consisting instead of a number of relatively distinct and diverse sections. (shrink)