Harry Chalmers argues that monogamy involves restricting one’s partner’s access to goods in a morally troubling way that is analogous to an agreement between partners to have no additional friends. Chalmers finds the traditional defenses of monogamy wanting, since they would also justify a friendship-restricting agreement. I show why three traditional defenses of monogamy hold up quite well and why they don’t, for the most part, also justify friendship-restricting agreements. In many cases, monogamy can be justified on grounds of practicality, (...) specialness, or jealousy. (shrink)

Recent work by philosophers such as Harry Chalmers and Hallie Liberto has called into question the moral permissibility of monogamy. In this article, I defend monogamy on a number of grounds, including practical reasons and reasons relating to commitment, specialness, and jealousy. I also attempt to reframe the debate about monogamy as not just relating to the permissibility of restricting one’s partner but as equally about one’s freedom to leave a relationship. Finally, I make a case against Liberto’s claim that (...) monogamous agreements are over-extensive. (shrink)

My aim is to propose a better way to understand moral demandingness: a counterfactual view that requires us to consider the demands that moral theories make across other possible worlds. Seemingly, the demandingness of any moral theory or principle should be evaluated in terms of that theory’s general demandingness. This, in turn, implies that we ought to be concerned about the possible demandingness of moral theories and not just about how demanding they actually are. This counterfactual view might also have (...) some surprising implications about how demanding commonsense morality really is. After all, commonsense morality might be extremely demanding in many possible worlds. This consideration, in turn, risks undermining the commonsense moral theorist's ability to make purely cost-based demandingness objections against consequentialism, giving us strong reasons to worry about the purely cost-based demandingness objection’s viability in general. (shrink)

It is normal to think that philosophers’ first dedication is to the truth. Publishers and writers consider ideas and papers according to criteria such as originality, eloquence, interestingness, soundness, and plausibility. I suggest that moral consequence should play a greater role in our choices to publish when serious harm is at stake. One’s credence in a particular idea should be weighed against the potential consequences of the publication of one’s ideas both if one turns out to be right and if (...) one turns out to be wrong. This activist approach to philosophical writing combines moral concern with epistemic humility. (shrink)

Explore the Resistance to Death, and Awaken More Fully to Life Death is simply one more aspect of being a human being, but in our culture, we've made it a taboo. As a result, most of us walk through life with conscious or unconscious fears that prevent us from experiencing true contentment. Embracing the End of Life invites you to lean into your beliefs and questions about death and dying, helping you release tense or fearful energy and awaken to a (...) more vital life now. Preparing mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for this inevitable transition provides improved clarity and strength. This book shares the idea of death as a journey of three steps—resistance, letting go, and transcendence. With dozens of exercises, practices, and meditations, author Patt Lind-Kyle helps you experience your truest, most expansive self. Exploring multiple aspects of life and death—with everything from chakras and the Enneagram to living wills and health care directives—this book is meant to help you unwind the challenge of death and discover the truth of your own path to inner freedom. Praise: "The fear of dying keeps countless people from living fully—as well as keeping countless others trapped in endless suffering. Embracing the End of Life will help all of us prepare joyously for the inevitable."—Christiane Northrup, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Goddesses Never Age Winner of a 2018 Gold IPPY Award. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

Research misconduct remains an important problem in health research despite decades of local, national, regional, and international efforts to eliminate it. The ultimate goal of every health research project, irrespective of setting, is to produce trustworthy findings to address local as well as global health issues. To be able to lead or participate meaningfully in international research collaborations, individual and institutional capacities for research integrity are paramount. Accordingly, this paper concerns itself not only with individuals’ research skills but also with (...) institutional and national policies and governance. Such policies and governance provide an ethical scaffold for the production of knowledge and structure incentives. This paper’s operational definition of research therefore draws from Institute of Medicine’s articulation of health research as an inquiry that aims to produce knowledge about the structure, processes, or effects of personal health services; and from an existing health systems framework. The paper reviews the research regulatory environment and the ethics apparatus in Ghana, and describes a project jointly undertaken by Ghanaian researchers in collaboration with New York University to assess the perceived adequacy of current institutional practices, opportunities, and incentives for promoting RI. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait (omniscience). But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain kind of sacrifice: God can (...) never make tradeoffs that diminish God’s overall greatness, even when those diminishments are relatively small (like forgetting a particular proposition) and the (altruistic) rewards of making the tradeoff substantial. I argue that God’s inability to make such tradeoffs is not a trivial cost for traditional perfect-being theologians who also believe that God is in loving relationships with creatures. Along the way, I explore the prospects for a less traditional form of perfect being theology, perfect being kenoticism, and different models for divine forgetting. (shrink)

For the first time, this book brings Kierkegaard into a dialogue with various postmodern forms of Christianity, on topics like revelation and the Bible, the atonement and moralism, and the church as an apologetic of witness.

The incredible achievements of modern scientific theories lead most of us to embrace scientific realism: the view that our best theories offer us at least roughly accurate descriptions of otherwise inaccessible parts of the world like genes, atoms, and the big bang. In Exceeding Our Grasp, Stanford argues that careful attention to the history of scientific investigation invites a challenge to this view that is not well represented in contemporary debates about the nature of the scientific enterprise. The historical record (...) of scientific inquiry, Stanford suggests, is characterized by what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives. Past scientists have routinely failed even to conceive of alternatives to their own theories and lines of theoretical investigation, alternatives that were both well-confirmed by the evidence available at the time and sufficiently serious as to be ultimately accepted by later scientific communities. Stanford supports this claim with a detailed investigation of the mid-to-late 19th century theories of inheritance and generation proposed in turn by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and August Weismann. He goes on to argue that this historical pattern strongly suggests that there are equally well-confirmed and scientifically serious alternatives to our own best theories that remain currently unconceived. Moreover, this challenge is more serious than those rooted in either the so-called pessimistic induction or the underdetermination of theories by evidence, in part because existing realist responses to these latter challenges offer no relief from the problem of unconceived alternatives itself. Stanford concludes by investigating what positive account of the spectacularly successful edifice of modern theoretical science remains open to us if we accept that our best scientific theories are powerful conceptual tools for accomplishing our practical goals, but abandon the view that the descriptions of the world around us that they offer are therefore even probably or approximately true. (shrink)

Don't pray for war -- Is democracy worth it? -- Taking speech seriously -- In recognition of limits -- The limits of politics.

Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth traces the historical development of the ethics of authenticity in relation to the rise of social freedom and individualism. Traversing the German Idealists, Habermas, Foucault, and MacIntyre, Shuttleworth proposes a socio-existential account of ethical authenticity, using Taylor and Sartre. Moving beyond virtue ethics, discourse ethics and Foucauldian notions of self-care, The History and Ethics of Authenticity constructs a practical ethics of authenticity which makes use of contemporary reference points, including the rise of social media, capitalist (...) branding, and competing appeals to identity, resulting in a presentation of the ethics of authenticity as an achievable ethical ideal. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Hegel's Absolute must be understood to be transcendent in the sense of being both immanent within the world and exceeding it. This account of transcendence invariably turns on Hegel's inheritance of the Christian tradition and, in particular, the metaphysics espoused through Christian Platonism. To support my argument I will examine the methodological immanentism of Hegel's phenomenology to show that such immanentism, while demanded by any phenomenology, is not necessarily imported into his metaphysics. I will (...) then examine Hegel's Logic to show that the dialectic which his thought relies upon compels the finite subject to recognise that all finite things, including themselves, are grounded within the Absolute Idea. I will then examine whether we must understand the Absolute Idea as immanent or whether there is room to conceive of it as transcendent. I conclude the essay by showing that the sense of transcendence as found within Nicene Christianity provides an understanding of transcendence that is not only compatible with Hegel's thought but actually allows us to make better sense of his system than the immanentist interpretation of it. (shrink)

I argue that popular understandings of white nationalist double speak strategies do not fully represent the practice of these strategies, and identify a linguistic tactic used by white nationalists that I call sugar-coating. Sugar-coating works by packing an otherwise unacceptable utterance together with some kind of reward, thereby promoting uptake. I contrast this with existing notions of double speak, such as figleaves (Saul 2017, 2021), dogwhistles (Haney-López 2014), and bullshit (Kenyon and Saul 2022). I argue that sugar-coating more accurately reflects (...) the practice of white nationalist recruitment rhetoric, as described in the Daily Stormer Style Guide. (shrink)

In this chapter, Kyle Ferguson argues for an individualist account of Sellarsian we-intentions. According to the individualist account, we-intentions’ intersubjective form renders them shareable rather than requiring that they be shared. Contrary to collectivist accounts, one may we-intend independently of whether and without presupposing that one's community shares one's we-intentions. After providing textual support, Ferguson proposes and implements a strategy of reportorial ascent, which strengthens the case for the individualist account. Reportorial ascent involves reflecting on the sentences one would (...) use to report or self-ascribe we-intentions. As Ferguson argues, we-intention-reporting sentences have ‘I’ as their subjects, which reveals that their truth conditions, like the performance conditions of their expressive counterparts, are satisfied by the individual who reports or expresses those intentions rather than by the host community. We-intention-reporting sentences, which make explicit both dimensions of independence and shareability, also reveal that intersubjective form is a feature of we-intentions qua mental states rather than a feature of their contents. Ferguson concludes that although the individualist account needs further development, the sketch provided in this chapter is compelling enough to demand that individualism and independence be moved from the periphery to the core of our study of we-intentions in Sellars's practical philosophy. (shrink)

The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect (...) to a question if the question is sound. (shrink)

Digital and social media have transformed how much and how fast we communicate, but they have also altered the palette of expressive strategies: the cultural forms that shape how citizens, activists, and artists speak and interact. In A Theory of Assembly, Kyle Parry argues that one of the most powerful and pervasive cultural forms in the digital era is assembly.

The analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S wants p’. In this paper, we turn from want reports to a closely related but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S hopes p’. We present two contrasts involving hope reports and show that existing approaches to desire (...) fail to explain these contrasts. We then develop a novel account that combines some of the central insights in the literature. We argue that our theory provides an elegant account of our contrasts and yields a promising analysis of hoping. (shrink)

The Ideal Worlds Account of Desire says that S wants p just in case all of S’s most highly preferred doxastic possibilities make p true. The account predicts that a desire report ⌜S wants p⌝ should be true so long as there is some doxastic p-possibility that is most preferred. But we present a novel argument showing that this prediction is incorrect. More positively, we take our examples to support alternative analyses of desire, and close by briefly considering what our (...) cases suggest about the logic of desire. (shrink)

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort. This observation explains the famous finding that the most frequent words in a language tend to be short. A related prediction is that, even within words of the same length, the most frequent word forms should be the ones that are easiest to produce and understand. Using orthographics as a proxy for phonetics, we test (...) this hypothesis using corpora of 96 languages from Wikipedia. We find that, across a variety of languages and language families and controlling for length, the most frequent forms in a language tend to be more orthographically well‐formed and have more orthographic neighbors than less frequent forms. We interpret this result as evidence that lexicons are structured by language usage pressures to facilitate efficient communication. (shrink)

This paper defends a new norm of assertion: Assert that p only if you are in a position to know that p. We test the norm by judging its performance in explaining three phenomena that appear jointly inexplicable at first: Moorean paradoxes, lottery propositions, and selfless assertions. The norm succeeds by tethering unassertability to unknowability while untethering belief from assertion. The PtK‐norm foregrounds the public nature of assertion as a practice that can be other‐regarding, allowing asserters to act in the (...) best interests of their audience when psychological pressures would otherwise prevent them from communicating the knowable truth. (shrink)

This paper is about two requirements on wish reports whose interaction motivates a novel semantics for these ascriptions. The first requirement concerns the ambiguities that arise when determiner phrases, such as definite descriptions, interact with ‘wish’. More specifically, several theorists have recently argued that attitude ascriptions featuring counterfactual attitude verbs license interpretations on which the determiner phrase is interpreted relative to the subject’s beliefs. The second requirement involves the fact that desire reports in general require decision-theoretic notions for their analysis. (...) The current study is motivated by the fact that no existing account captures both of these aspects of wishing. I develop a semantics for wish reports that makes available belief-relative readings but also allows decision-theoretic notions to play a role in shaping the truth conditions of these ascriptions. The general idea is that we can analyze wishing in terms of a two-dimensional notion of expected utility. (shrink)

Hypocrites are often thought to lack the standing to blame others for faults similar to their own. Although this claim is widely accepted, it is seldom argued for. We offer an argument for the claim that nonhypocrisy is a necessary condition on the standing to blame. We first offer a novel, dispositional account of hypocrisy. Our account captures the commonsense view that hypocrisy involves making an unjustified exception of oneself. This exception-making involves a rejection of the impartiality of morality and (...) thereby a rejection of the equality of persons, which we argue grounds the standing to blame others. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint that ties the content of restrictions (...) to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two puzzles involving desire reports concerning series of events. What does a person want to happen in the first event – is it the event with the highest expected return, or the event that is the initial part of the best series? We show that existing approaches fail to resolve the puzzles around this question and develop a novel account of our own. Our semantics is built around three ideas. First, we propose that desire ascriptions (...) are evaluated relative to a contextually supplied set of propositions, or alternatives. The semantic value of an ascription ‘S wants p’ is determined by S's preference ordering over these alternatives. Second, we propose that desire reports carry a requirement to the effect that the prejacent of the ascription must be suitably related to the background set of alternatives. Finally, we suggest that desire reports carry a dominance condition concerning the subject's ranking of the alternatives. Overall, we argue that our theory provides us with an elegant resolution of our puzzles, and yields a promising approach to desire. (shrink)