Philosophers have described the human perspective on climate change as a perfect moral storm. I take a new angle on that storm: I argue that our relevant desires feature a particularly problematic case of seemingly consistent but genuinely inconsistent desires. We have, first, non‐indexical desires such as a desire to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our environment at some point. We have, second, indexical desires such as a desire not to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our (...) environment this year. Our indexical and non‐indexical desires are inconsistent. Such inconsistency is obvious in most short‐term, individual cases such as when we need to make a dentist appointment. But when it comes to climate change, that inconsistency is masked by factors such as longevity and bitter divisions. This is, unfortunately, why humanity may continue putting off the collective action required to address climate change. (shrink)

Wittgenstein characterises ‘necessary truths’ as rules of representation that do not answer to reality. The invocation of rules of representation has led many to compare his work with Kant's. This comparison is illuminating, but it can also be misleading. Some go as far as casting Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a specie of transcendental idealism, an interpretation that continues to gather support despite scholars pointing to its limitations. To understand the temptation of this interpretation, attention must be paid to a distinction (...) Bernard Williams (1981) makes, echoing Kant, between empirical and transcendental idealism. Williams claims that the move to transcendental idealism is an effort to block empirical idealism. The latter, in this context, amounts to a scepticism regarding necessity and a denial of its objectivity. To show what is wrong with the transcendental interpretation, it is important to challenge the mistaken presumption that Wittgenstein's philosophy would otherwise lead to empirical idealism. The fundamental mistake common to both attributions is that they misunderstand the relation that obtains between our rules of representation and the contingent facts that condition those rules of representation. Once this relation has been clarified, Wittgenstein's philosophy can be understood as providing a genuine alternative to realism and idealism. (shrink)

Wittgenstein characterises ‘necessary truths’ as rules of representation that do not answer to reality. The invocation of rules of representation has led many to compare his work with Kant's. This comparison is illuminating, but it can also be misleading. Some go as far as casting Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a specie of transcendental idealism, an interpretation that continues to gather support despite scholars pointing to its limitations. To understand the temptation of this interpretation, attention must be paid to a distinction (...) Bernard Williams (1981) makes, echoing Kant, between empirical and transcendental idealism. Williams claims that the move to transcendental idealism is an effort to block empirical idealism. The latter, in this context, amounts to a scepticism regarding necessity and a denial of its objectivity. To show what is wrong with the transcendental interpretation, it is important to challenge the mistaken presumption that Wittgenstein's philosophy would otherwise lead to empirical idealism. The fundamental mistake common to both attributions is that they misunderstand the relation that obtains between our rules of representation and the contingent facts that condition those rules of representation. Once this relation has been clarified, Wittgenstein's philosophy can be understood as providing a genuine alternative to realism and idealism. (shrink)

What distinguishes deception from manipulation? Cohen (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96, 483 and 2018) proposes a new answer and explores its ethical implications. Appealing to new cases of “non‐deceptive manipulation” that involve intentionally causing a false belief, he offers a new definition of deception in terms of communication that rules out these counterexamples to the traditional definition. And, he leverages this definition in support of the claim that deception “carries heavier moral weight” than manipulation. In this paper, I argue that (...) these cases of “non‐deceptive manipulation” are even more prevalent than Cohen suggests—especially in the digital world. Thus, if his moral claim were correct, a lot of what is happening on the internet these days would constitute moral improvement over old‐fashioned deception. Fortunately, we are not forced to accept this counterintuitive conclusion. Cohen's definition must be rejected because it incorrectly rules out clear instances of deception. In this paper, I defend a definition of deception in terms of evidence that does correctly distinguish between deception and non‐deceptive manipulation. Moreover, it does not support Cohen's claim that deception is morally worse than other forms of manipulation. (shrink)

Matti Eklund (2017) has argued that ardent realists face a serious dilemma. Ardent realists believe that there is a mind-independent fact as to which normative concepts we are to use. Eklund claims that the ardent realist cannot explain why this is so without plumping in favor of their own normative concepts or changing the topic. The paper first advances the discussion by clarifying two ways of understanding the question of which normative concepts to choose: a theoretical question about which concepts (...) have the abstract property of being normatively privileged and a further practical question of which concepts we are to choose even granting some concepts are thus privileged. I argue that the ardent realist’s best bet for answering the theoretical question while avoiding Eklund’s dilemma is to provide a real definition of this property. I point out the difficulties for providing such a definition. I then argue that even with an answer to the theoretical question, the ardent realist faces a further dilemma in answering the practical question. In sum, though I see no knock-down argument against ardent realism, it may nonetheless die a death by a thousand cuts. I close by considering a deeper reason for why ardent realism is so difficult to defend: every argument starts somewhere. It is unclear how there can be an Archimedean point that makes no reference to any normative concepts that can nonetheless be employed to convince everyone to adopt ours. I then briefly propose two options for someone still inclined towards realism: (i) accept that our normative concepts are normatively privileged without attempting to explain why this is so, or (ii) be less ardent and accept a perspective-dependent account of normativity. (shrink)

Largely thanks to Mill’s influence, the suggestion that the state ought to restrict the distribution of misinformation will strike most philosophers as implausible. Two of Mill’s influential assumptions are particularly relevant here: first, that free speech debates should focus on moral considerations such as the harm that certain forms of expression might cause; second, that false information causes minimal harm due to the fact that human beings are psychologically well equipped to distinguish truth and falsehood. However, in addition to our (...) moral obligations, we also have a distinct set of epistemic obligations—and even when a false belief doesn’t harm anyone, it constitutes an epistemically bad outcome. Moreover, Mill was profoundly mistaken about human psychology: human beings are vulnerable to the influence of a wide variety of false claims via a wide variety of psychological mechanisms. Consequently, there is a purely epistemic justification for restricting the distribution of misinformation: because each of us has an individual epistemic obligation to avoid unnecessary exposure to misinformation, and because avoiding such exposure is simply too difficult when acting alone, we all have a shared epistemic obligation to establish laws or regulations restricting the widespread distribution of misinformation. (shrink)

According to the received view in metaethics, a Neo-Humean theory of rationality entails that there cannot be any objective moral reasons, i.e. moral reasons that are independent of actual desires. In this paper, I argue that there is a version of this theory that is compatible with the existence of objective moral reasons. The key is to distinguish between (i) the process of rational deliberation that starts off in an agent's actual desires, and (ii) the rational principle that an agent (...) employs in such a process. I maintain that it is the latter which explains why it is rational for an agent to have a certain desire, not the former. As a result, there might be two types of principles. The second type of principle leaves room for objective moral reasons. (shrink)

In the contemporary landscape about temporal experience, debates concerning the “hard question” of the experience of the flow—as opposed to debates concerning more qualitative aspects of temporality, such as change, movement, succession and duration—are gaining more and more attention. The overall dialectics can be thought of in terms of a debate between the realists (who take the phenomenology of the flow of time seriously, and propose various account of it) and deflationists (who take our description of temporal phenomenology as “flowy” (...) to be spurious, and propose various explanation of this spuriousness). In this paper we look inside the realist side. We distinguish primitivist realism, according to which the feeling of time flowing is an irreducible sui generis phenomenology, and various forms of reductionist realism, according to which the experience of the flow is ultimately explainable in terms of a more basic phenomenology. We present reasons to be sceptical against the various reductionist proposals. The conclusion is thus disjunctive: either primitivism or deflationism is the correct account of the purported experience of the flow of time. (shrink)

William P. Alston argues in “Expressing” (1965) that there is no important difference between expressing a feeling in language and asserting that one has that feeling. My aims in this paper are (1) to show that Alston's arguments ought to have led him to a different conclusion—that “asserting” and “expressing” individuate speech acts at different levels of analysis (the illocutionary and the locutionary, respectively)—and (2) to argue that this conclusion can solve a problem facing contemporary analyses of expressing: the “no (...) show tell” problem, or the problem of accounting for utterances that report feelings truly without expressing them. Alston's paper made an important contribution 50 years ago, and a reimagining of it can make another important contribution today. (shrink)

In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I consider the trade-offs they make between these two dimensions. I find that pure negative freedom is (...) clearly possible. Republican freedom might also be possible, though its protection requirement is too vague for a definitive verdict. Finally, the recently proposed ‘freedom as independence’ is impossible since it is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable trade-off. (shrink)

Advocates of Causal Decision Theory (CDT) argue that Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) is inadequate because it gives the wrong result in Newcomb problems. Egan (2007) provides a recipe for converting Newcomb problems to counterexamples to CDT, arguing that CDT is inadequate too. Proposed by Edgington (2011), the Conditional Causal Decision Theory (CCDT) is widely taken uncritically in the recent literature as a version of CDT that conforms to the supposedly correct pre-theoretic judgments about the rationality of acts in Newcomb problems (...) and Egan cases. While the renewed attention to the debate between EDT and CDT is mostly focused on how various theories treat Egan cases, this paper scrutinizes Edgington’s treatment of Newcomb problems and argues that, despite Edgington’s promise, CCDT actually fails in Newcomb problems. This, I assume, shows that CCDT is superior neither to the classic visions of CDT nor to EDT. The paper concludes by arguing, in general, that CCDT is systematically bound to deliver the same results as does EDT in any decision problem. Despite being formulated in terms of causal notions, therefore, it collapses back into the classic EDT. (shrink)

An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in (...) how the social world is constructed. (shrink)

In “The Open Future” (2021) Patrick Todd argues that the future is open, and that as a consequence all future contingents are false (as opposed to the more common view that they are neither true nor false). Very roughly, this latter claim is motivated by the idea that (a) presentism is true, and so future (and indeed past) things do not exist and (b) if future things do not exist, then the only thing that could ground there being future tensed (...) facts, and hence make those future tensed claims true, is the present and the laws of nature. But (c) the present and the laws of nature cannot ground there being future tensed facts because they do not necessitate there being any such fact. Hence future tensed claims are all false. Todd then goes on to present a semantics for his version of the open future on which all future contingents are false. In what follows we take up two strands of Todd’s view. First, we begin, in Section 2, by outlining Todd’s argument that future contingents are all false. We suggest that the considerations that Todd adduces for this conclusion do not support this being so. Then in Section 3 we consider the semantics that Todd offers, and argue that it yields implausible consequences. (shrink)