There has recently been a focus on the question of statue removalism. This concerns what to do with public history statues that honour or otherwise celebrate ethically bad historical figures. The specific wrongs of these statues have been understood in terms of derogatory speech, inapt honours, or supporting bad ideologies. In this paper I understand these bad public history statues as history, and identify a distinctive class of public history-specific wrongs. Specifically, public history plays an important identity-shaping role, and bad (...) public history can commit specifically ontic injustice. Understanding bad public history in terms of ontic injustice helps understand not just to address bad public history statues, but also understand the value of public history more broadly. (shrink)

How can we make moral progress on factory farming? Part of the answer lies in human moral psychology. Meat consumption remains high, despite increased awareness of its negative impact on animal welfare. Weakness of will is part of the explanation: acceptance of the ethical arguments doesn’t always motivate changes in dietary habits. However, we draw on scientific evidence to argue that many consumers aren’t fully convinced that they morally ought to reduce their meat consumption. We then identify two key psychological (...) mechanisms—motivated reasoning and social proof—that lead people to resist the ethical reasons. Finally, we show how to harness these psychological mechanisms to encourage reductions in meat consumption. A central lesson for moral progress generally is that durable social change requires socially-embedded reasoning. (shrink)

Can we hold agents responsible for their implicitly biased behavior? The aim of this text is to show that, from the nurturing stance, holding subjects responsible for their implicitly biased behavior is justified, even though they are not blameworthy. First, I will introduce the nurturing stance as Daphne Brandenburg originally developed it. Second, I will specify what holding somebody responsible from the nurturing stance amounts to. Third, I show how and why holding responsible can help a subject develop an impaired (...) capacity. Fourth, I analyze empirical data about holding prejudiced subjects responsible and highlight that the internal motivation to control prejudiced reactions decreases implicit attitudes’ influences. Furthermore, the data show that in order to be appropriate moral demands have to acknowledge the target's autonomy and competence. In sum, from the nurturing stance, holding implicitly biased subjects responsible is appropriate if they can adequately respond to the moral demands. (shrink)

According to a standard view, paradoxes are arguments with plausible premises that entail an implausible conclusion. This is false. In many paradoxes the premises are not plausible precisely because they entail an implausible conclusion. Obvious responses to this problem—including that the premises are individually plausible and that they are plausible setting aside the fact that they entail an implausible conclusion—are shown to be inadequate. A very different view of paradox is then introduced. This is a functionalist view according to which (...) paradoxes are the kinds of things that puzzle people in characteristic ways. It is claimed that this view, too, fails and for the very same reason. The result is a new puzzle about the nature of paradoxes. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new theory in temporal ontology, ‘wave theory’, and argues for its attractions over and above existing tensed theories of time.

Landmark Supreme Court rulings determine American law by adjudicating among competing reasonable interpretations of basic political rights. Jeremy Waldron argues that this practice is democratically illegitimate because what determines the content of basic rights is a bare majority vote of an unelected, democratically unaccountable, elitist body of nine judges. I argue that Waldron's democratic critique of judicial review has implications for real-world reform, but not the implications he thinks it has. He argues that systems of legislative supremacy over the judiciary (...) are democratically preferable to the American one. I provide reasons why his argument is unsound and explain that, properly construed, Waldron's premises support implementing a system where ordinary citizens chosen by lottery participate in a deliberative mini-public to vote on which reasonable interpretation of a basic political right will become the law of the land. (shrink)

Orthodoxy holds that the difference between weakness of will and compulsion is a matter of the resistibility of an agent's effective motivation, which makes control-based views of agency especially well equipped to distinguish blameworthy weak-willed acts from non-blameworthy compulsive acts. I defend an alternative view that the difference between weakness and compulsion instead lies in the fact that agents would upon reflection give some conative weight to acting on their weak-willed desires for some aim other than to extinguish them, but (...) not to their compulsive desires. This view allows identificationist theorists of moral responsibility to explain why weak-willed actions, but not compulsive actions, are attributable to agents such that they can, in theory, be praised or blamed for them. After motivating and presenting the view in detail, I show how it has unique resources for explaining the ethics of managing one's compulsions. (shrink)

Quassim Cassam has argued that psychological and epistemological analyses of conspiracy theories threaten to overlook the political nature of such theories. According to Cassam, conspiracy theories are a form of political propaganda. I develop a limited critique of Cassam's analysis.This paper advances two core theses. First, acceptance of conspiracy theories requires a rejection of epistemic authority that renders conspiracy theorists susceptible to co-option by certain political programs while insulating such programs from criticism. I argue that the contrarian nature of conspiracy (...) theories partially accounts for the prominence of such theories in populist movements.Second, the contrarian nature of conspiracy theories partially accounts for their attractiveness, especially among those to whom populism already appeals. I argue that for those who resent what appears from their perspective as the shaping of the epistemic landscape by alien perspectives, conspiracy theorizing may facilitate the reassertion of epistemic autonomy. (shrink)

Frege argues that number is so unlike the things we accept as properties of external objects that it cannot be such a property. In particular, (1) number is arbitrary in a way that qualities are not, and (2) number is not predicated of its subjects in the way that qualities are. Most Aristotle scholars suppose either that Frege has refuted Aristotle's number theory or that Aristotle avoids Frege's objections by not making numbers properties of external objects. This has led some (...) to conclude that Aristotle's accounts of arithmetical and geometrical objects differ substantially. I close this supposed gap by showing that Aristotle's arithmetical objects, like geometrical objects, are just certain sensible things qua certain properties they in fact possess. Specifically, numbers are pluralities qua quantitative or relational properties like ten units or ten. I show that this view is resistant to the Fregean concerns about arbitrariness and numerical predication. (shrink)

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, and ‘homophobic’ are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation as well as responses to it are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how ‘racist’ and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...) how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. (shrink)

Near the end of 'Naming the Colours', Lewis (1997) makes an interesting claim about the relationship between linguistic and mental content; we are typically unable to read the content of a belief off the content of a sentence used to express that belief or vice versa. I call this view autonomism. I motivate and defend autonomism and discuss its importance in the philosophy of mind and language. In a nutshell, I argue that the different theoretical roles that mental and linguistic (...) content play suggest these kinds of content should be understood as sensitive to different things. (shrink)

In common treatments of deontic logic, the obligatory is what is true in all deontically ideal possible worlds. In this article, I offer a new semantics for Standard Deontic Logic with Leibnizian intensions rather than possible worlds. Even though the new semantics furnishes models that resemble Venn diagrams, the semantics captures the strong soundness and completeness of Standard Deontic Logic. Since, unlike possible worlds, many Leibnizian intensions are not maximally consistent entities, we can amend the semantics to invalidate the inference (...) rule which ensures that all tautologies are obligatory. I sketch this amended semantics to show how it invalidates the rule in a new way. (shrink)

Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Recent philosophical work assumes that people can often accurately identify instances of grandstanding. In contrast, we argue that people are generally unable to reliably recognize instances of grandstanding, and that we are typically unjustified in judging that others are grandstanding as a result. From there we argue that, under most circumstances, to judge others as grandstanders is to fail to act with proper intellectual humility. We then examine the significance of (...) these conclusions for moral discourse. More specifically, we propose that moral discourse should focus on others’ stated reasons and whether their actions manifest respect. (shrink)

Existing indexing systems used to arrange philosophical works have been shown to misrepresent the discipline in ways that reflect and perpetuate exclusionary attitudes within it. In recent years, there has been a great deal of effort to challenge those attitudes and to revise them. But as the discipline moves toward greater equality and inclusivity, the way it has indexed its work has unfortunately not. To course correct, we identify in this article some of the specific changes that are needed within (...) current indexing systems and propose a new model that could embody them. We use the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy as a case study and PhilPapers as a basis for comparison. The model we propose not only represents the discipline in a more inclusive and fair way, but it is also efficient, easy to use or implement, and adaptable for a variety of contexts. (shrink)

Fabienne Peter (2020) recently proposed a taxonomy of accounts of the meta-normative grounds of political legitimacy. In this article, I argue that there is an important distinction left out of that taxonomy that complicates the picture. This is the distinction between attitude-independent and attitude-dependent conceptions of normative truth. Through an examination of these conceptions of normative truth (and correlate interpretations of what counts as a normative reason) I argue that what Peter calls a fact-based conception of legitimacy may collapse into (...) a will-based conception. Further, the distinction has important implications for what Peter calls the belief-based conception. Finally, I defend the will-based conception against Peter's arbitrariness objection through an examination of ideally coherent eccentrics. (shrink)

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is afforded by (...) the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others. (shrink)