Many philosophers have suggested that claims of need play a special normative role in ethical thought and talk. But what do such claims mean? What does this special role amount to? Progress on these questions can be made by attending to a puzzle concerning some linguistic differences between two types of 'need' sentence: one where 'need' occurs as a verb, and where it occurs as a noun. I argue that the resources developed to solve the puzzle advance our understanding of (...) the metaphysics of need, the meaning of 'need' sentences, and the function of claims of need in ethical discourse. (shrink)

The main philosophical contribution of this review is its critical discussion of luck egalitarianism’s Boring Problem. Luck egalitarians want to draw a distinction between inequalities that are due to luck and inequalities that are controlled by the worse-off party. More specifically, they want to say that the former are unjust while the latter are just. This allows them to maintain that a person who imprudently wastes her resources and ends up worse off than another as a result is not the (...) victim of injustice and is, thus, not entitled to equalizing transfers. The Boring Problem threatens to collapse this distinction. It contends that all inequalities are due to luck because any given inequality is not merely a function of the worse-off party’s will but also the better-off party’s will: had the latter also made some imprudent choice, then there would be no inequality (as both parties would be equally badly off). If this is right, luck egalitarians lose their ability to declare some inequalities controlled and, therefore, just. Against this conclusion, the review argues that there are two senses in which a person might control an outcome. She weakly controls the outcome if it is a function of her will. By contrast, she strongly controls the outcome if she both weakly controls it and also weakly controls every other state of affairs on which that outcome depends. The review then notes that all inequalities are due to luck only if one takes luck to be the absence of strong control. However, it argues that luck egalitarians have three good reasons to insist that luck is merely the absence of weak control. Thus, the Boring Problem fails to undermine their posited distinction between just, controlled inequalities and unjust, luck-based inequalities. (shrink)

A common worry regarding normative supervenience theses is that they are easily trivialized unless we somehow restrict the set of descriptive base properties on which the normative properties supervene. The idea is that if all descriptive properties are included in the base, any two individuals that share all their base properties must be the same individual in the same world, from which it follows that they have the same normative properties. We argue that this trivial explanation for unrestricted normative supervenience (...) fails. Moreover, we argue that even if it succeeded, this wouldn’t undermine the explanation challenges associated with normative supervenience. (shrink)

What is objectionable about “blacking up” or other comparable acts of imagining involving unethical attitudes? Can such imaginings be wrong, even if there are no harmful consequences and imaginers are not meant to apply these attitudes beyond the fiction? In this article, we argue that blackface—and imagining in general—can be ethically flawed in virtue of being oppressive, in virtue of either its content or what imaginers do with it, where both depend on how the imagined attitudes interact with the imagining’s (...) context. We explain and demonstrate this using speech act theory alongside a detailed case study of blackface. (shrink)

Although we are morally responsible for things of various kinds, what we bear direct responsibility for are certain exercises of our agency (and perhaps some omissions of these). Theorists disagree about what kind of agency is in this respect the source of our responsibility. Some hold that it is agency the exercises of which are actions. Others say that it is agency exercised in forming reasons-responsive attitudes on the basis of our take on reasons (or value). With attention to the (...) relation of moral responsibility to moral obligation, I argue for the first of these views. (shrink)