This paper aims to provide autonomy-based reasons in favour of limitarianism. Limitarianism affirms it is of primary moral importance that no one gets too much. The paper challenges the standard assumption that having more material resources always increases autonomy. It expounds five mechanisms through which having too much material wealth might undermine autonomy. If these hypotheses are true, a theory of justice guided by a concern for autonomy will support a limitarian distribution of wealth. Finally, the paper discusses two issues (...) autonomy-based limitarianism would raise. First, insofar as coercion invades autonomy, do autonomy-based reasons legitimate coercive measures to secure a limitarian distribution of wealth? Second, is a limitarian ethos consistent with the incentive to produce enough wealth to secure distributive justice? (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate the general and special obligations of parents with respect to the shaping of consumption habits, from a liberal egalitarian perspective. The article argues that, in virtue of them being well placed to shape the next generation's consumption habits, parents have a duty of justice to prevent their children from developing expensive consumption habits in order to enable them to leave their fair share to others. In virtue of the special relationship they have (...) with their children, parents have a duty of care, and this may also require parents to prevent their children from developing expensive consumption habits. Then the article discusses whether and under which conditions these duties hold in unjust circumstances, where a consumerist ethos is predominant and where other parents and educational agents do not collaborate effectively. (shrink)

According to Agenda 21, the United Nation’s action plan for sustainable development, ‘Governments and private sector organisations should promote more positive attitudes towards sustainable consumption through education, public awareness programmes and other means’. But some could wonder whether the cultivation of frugal consumption habits in schools is compatible with basic liberal principles. This article argues that, in societies like ours, liberal egalitarian theories of justice should permit and even advocate teaching frugality in educational institutions. Liberal egalitarianism expects educational institutions to (...) equip children with the abilities and virtues needed to live well by their own judgment and in compliance with just institutions. The article examines how frugality could be one of these virtues. First, frugality is conducive to better compliance with our distributive obligations towards the current poor and future generations. Second, frugality enables prospective adults to live well with their fair share of scarce resources, and even with less. Third, frugality increases autonomy and facilitates its exercise. The article thus concludes that liberal egalitarian institutions should encourage schools to teach frugality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to determine whether the present generation should preserve non-human living things for future generations, even if in the future all the contributions these organisms currently make to human survival in decent conditions were performed by adequate technology and future people's preferences were satisfied by this state of affairs. The paper argues it would be wrong to leave a world without non-human living plants, animals and other organisms to future generations, because such a world would (...) fail to secure one of the conditions of future people’s autonomy, that is, availability of adequate options. Building upon Joseph Raz’s account of autonomy, the paper shows that the presence of non-human living organisms is part of an adequate range of options insofar as, to be adequate, options must meet a test of variety. According to Raz, options pass this test if they enable human agents to exercise a set of physical, affective, imaginative and cognitive capacities humans normally have an innate drive to exercise. The paper discusses empirical findings as well as psychological theories that provide support to the hypothesis that interactions with non-human living organisms enable human beings to develop and exercise these capacities by shaping these capacities in a special way, different from the way interactions with other environments do. (shrink)

This chapter aims to present a theoretical survey of political representation of future generations. The chapter focuses on two main normative justifications of representation of future generations. The first appeals to intergenerational justice and the second to democratic legitimacy. Then, the chapter addresses possible objections to the representation of future generations. These objections are: first, we should prevent the inflation of representation; second, representation of future people is not really political representation; third, representation of future people is unnecessary. The next (...) part discusses theoretical proposals to represent future generations in existing institutions. An appendix provides an overview of past and present real-world experiments, including the Finnish Committee for the Future, the Israeli Knesset Commissioner for Future Generations (2001–2006) and the Hungarian Ombudsman for Future Generations. (shrink)

Curren and Metzger develop a normative account of sustainability without prejudging the relationships between sustainability and global justice. This commentary propounds an alternative methodology...

This article examines whether autonomy as an educational aim should be defended at the global scale. It begins by identifying the normative issues at stake in global autonomy education by distinguishing them from the problems of autonomy education in multicultural nation-states. The article then explains why a planet-wide expansion of the ideal of autonomy is conceivable on the condition that the concept of autonomy is widened in a way that renders its precise meaning flexibly adjustable to a variety of distinct (...) social and cultural contexts. A context-transcendent, core meaning of autonomy remains in place, however, according to which a person is only autonomous if she relates to the values and goals that direct her life in a way so that she sees them as her own and is able to identify and critically assess her principal reasons for action. Finally, the article addresses two challenges to the global expansion of autonomy education: the objection that autonomy is presently not the most important educational aim and the objection that global autonomy education is a form of cultural imperialism. It finds both objections wanting. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate the general and special obligations of parents with respect to the shaping of consumption habits, from a liberal egalitarian perspective. The article argues that, in virtue of them being well placed to shape the next generation's consumption habits, parents have a duty of justice to prevent their children from developing expensive consumption habits in order to enable them to leave their fair share to others. In virtue of the special relationship they have (...) with their children, parents have a duty of care, and this may also require parents to prevent their children from developing expensive consumption habits. Then the article discusses whether and under which conditions these duties hold in unjust circumstances, where a consumerist ethos is predominant and where other parents and educational agents do not collaborate effectively. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a specific challenge for welfarist theories of intergenerational justice. Subjective welfarism permits and even requires that a generation, G1, inculcates cheap preferences in the next generation, G2. This would allow G1 to deplete resources instead of saving them, which seems to contradict the ideal of sustainability. The aim of the paper is to show that, even if subjective welfarism requires the cultivation of cheap preferences among future generations, it can accommodate two major objections to cheap preferences (...) engineering, the Autonomy Objection and the Fairness Objection. The paper argues that teaching autonomy-related abilities is compatible with cheap preferences engineering insofar as autonomy is understood as an end-state and not as a precondition. Furthermore, teaching autonomy-related abilities could even be required in order to improve G2’s prospects for well-being. However, since being autonomous renders G2 able to revise their initially cheap preferences, G1 should also save enough resources to enable members of G2 to do so. Therefore, cultivating cheap preferences among G2 does not allow G1 to deplete the available resources. (shrink)

Reconstruction théorique magistrale de nos intuitions communes à propos de la justice sociale, la Théorie de la Justice de John Rawls se devait de prendre en compte les plus défavorisés : c’est chose faite avec le principe de différence qui répartit les biens à l’avantage de ces derniers. Mais qui sont-ils exactement ? Comment les définir objectivement ? Pour Rawls, l’objectivité morale est garantie par l’expérience de pensée de la position originelle, caractérisée par le voile d’ignorance qui masque les intérêts (...) particuliers. Mais cet outil méthodologique du jugement désintéressé en philosophie politique ne constitue-t-il pas un obstacle à la caractérisation de la variété empirique des situations de pauvreté ? Ces questions, c’est un économiste, et un économiste lui-même originaire d’un pays « pauvre » qui les soulève : Amartya Sen, prix Nobel d’Économie en 1998 pour ses travaux sur le développement humain, la pauvreté et l’économie du bien-être, a critiqué de manière virulente l’indice des biens premiers dont la privation constitue le critère de définition des plus défavorisés dans la théorie rawlsienne. En effet, l’homogénéité des besoins des individus engagés dans la position originelle exclut la prise en compte de la diversité réelle des êtres humains. Les différences de capacités mises en évidence par les indicateurs économiques élaborés avec la participation d’A. Sen n’apparaissent pas derrière le voile d’ignorance or, une théorie de la justice peut-elle se passer d’une analyse des obstacles réels posés aux libertés positives des individus, tels que l’état de santé, le niveau d’éducation et les discriminations dues au genre, à la couleur de peau ou à la classe sociale ? Ce livre explicite les enjeux de cette discussion et les apports de l’approche par les capacités (capability approach) à la réflexion contemporaine sur les inégalités économiques et sociales. (shrink)

Résumé: Ce chapitre porte sur les théories de la justice distributive entre générations. La première partie discute trois défis à la possibilité même de parler d’obligations de justice intergénérationnelle : le problème de la non-existence, le problème de la non-identité, la conclusion répugnante. La deuxième partie discute la justification et la définition des obligations de justice à l’égard des générations futures, à partir de trois théories : le suffisantisme, le welfarisme, le principe de juste épargne de Rawls. Cette discussion conclut (...) que : (i) la version la plus plausible du suffisantisme prôné par le célèbre rapport Brundtland est un suffisantisme multiniveaux, qui permet de prioriser la satisfaction des besoins de base des différentes générations tout en reconnaissant l’importance de garantir les aspirations dans un second temps. (ii) Le problème de la malléabilité des préférences futures semble de prime abord une objection décisive contre le welfarisme intergénérationnel : même si nous leur léguions très peu de ressources et un environnement dégradé, nous pourrions apprendre aux générations suivantes à adapter leurs préférences à cette situation. Nous montrons que le welfarisme peut répondre à cette objection. (iii) Une interprétation à la fois suffisantiste et limitiste du principe de juste épargne rawlsien est proposée : l’épargne intergénérationnelle est requise jusqu’à ce que le capital accumulé suffise à maintenir les institutions justes ; sous la forme de croissance des richesses matérielles, l’épargne intergénérationnelle est prohibée au-delà d’une certaine limite car elle érode le sens de la justice. La troisième partie aborde la question de la mise en œuvre de la justice intergénérationnelle en contexte non-idéal. -/- Abstract This chapter is about distributive justice between generations. The first part discusses three challenges to the meaningfulness of talking about obligations of intergenerational justice: the non-existence problem, the non-identity problem, the repugnant conclusion. The second part discusses the justification and definition of justice obligations towards future generations, according to three theories: sufficientarianism, welfarism, Rawls’s just savings principle. This discussion reaches three conclusions. (i) The most plausible version of Brundtland’s sufficientarianism is multilevels sufficientarianism, which enables us to prioritize meeting the basic needs of each generation over the fulfilment of their aspirations, without denying the importance of realizing these aspirations once needs are being met. (ii) At a first glance, the fact that future preferences are malleable seems a problem for intergenereational welfarism and a decisive objection against it. Even if we bequeathed very little resources and a degraded environment to the next generation, we could teach them to adapt their preferences to this situation. We argue that welfarism can answer this objection. (iii) We propose an interpretation of Rawls’s just savings principle that is both sufficientarian and limitarian. Intergenerational savings are required until enough capital is accumulated to maintain just institutions over time. Intergenerational savings in the form of material wealth growth is prohibited beyond a certain limit because it erodes the sense of justice. The third part addresses how to implement intergenerational justice in a non-ideal context. (shrink)

Si l’apport d’Amartya Sen à la critique de la rationalité économique est reconnu, la relation entre sa contribution formelle et le raisonnement informel qu’elle sous-tend est parfois mal comprise. Dans cet article, nous proposons une analyse de la propre interprétation que donne Sen de ses travaux formels sur l’incomplétude des préférences. Cette réflexion sur les propriétés mathématiques de la relation de préférence en théorie du choix social met en évidence la volonté de Sen d’enrichir la représentation formelle des activités humaines (...) d’évaluation, de classement et de choix. En un sens, cela peut être compris comme une simple amélioration de cette représentation ; mais l’interprétation de l’incomplétude comme « incomplétude affirmée » montre que Sen vise également à enrichir la structure du cadre conceptuel welfariste afin de détacher ce dernier de l’interprétation utilitariste qui lui est généralement associée. (shrink)

If bioethics should care about the environment, this could be, among other ways, by reflecting on certain radical solutions, such as biomedical human engineering. In a recent article, Liao, Sandberg and Roache consider reducing human size through biomedical treatments in order to mitigate climate change. In this viewpoint, we point out that the various methods used to reduce human height, be they sophisticated tech­ nologies or mere undernutrition, seem all subject to highly undesirable consequences. This is to show that one (...) of the problems with Liao et al.’s account is that it does not provide us with an ethical framework com­ prehensive enough to balance these consequences with the problematic effects of climate change. In sum, we wish to draw from the discussion of this specific example a more general claim. This claim is that, even if we accept that human engineering per se is not problematic, we nevertheless need a more comprehensive ethical theory than the mere claim that climate change should be mitigated in order to assess the desirability of human engineering. (shrink)

This essay discusses two contributions of the principle of sufficient autonomy to educational justice. In Just Enough, Liam Shields criticizes instrumental accounts of autonomy. According to these accounts, autonomy is valuable insofar as it contributes to well-being. Shields argues that instrumental arguments fail to support mandatory autonomy education in all cases, while his non-instrumental principle of sufficient autonomy does support this. This essay develops a version of the instrumental argument and argues this version can do the work of supporting mandatory (...) autonomy education. Another contribution of the principle of sufficient autonomy is the requirement of talents discovery. According to Shields, the requirement of talents discovery renders Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity more plausible, since one’s chances of accessing a given economic position depend on one’s opportunities to discover one’s innate talents. This essay argues that Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity does not have the same implications as the principle of sufficient autonomy as to which types of talents should be discovered and to what extent. (shrink)

This introduction expounds educational problems that arise from transnational migration. It argues that it is high time to critically analyze normative issues of and in education under conditions of globalization because dominant approaches in normative philosophy of education tend to suffer from both a nationalist bias and a sedentary bias. The contributions to this special issue address normative problems pertaining to migration-related education from a variety of ethical and philosophical perspectives, including analytic applied ethics, continental philosophy, care ethics, Hegelian philosophy, (...) the capability approach and theories of distributive justice. They discuss the education of both citizens and migrants in the receiving society as well as in the country of origin, focusing on ethical issues pertaining to access to education as well as to the content of educational programs. (shrink)

This collected volume addresses issues pertaining to education and migration from a variety of philosophical and ethical perspectives. -/- It is high time to critically analyze ethical issues in education under conditions of globalization, not only because migration and globalization are topical issues, but also because dominant academic approaches in the ethics and political philosophy of education have a tendency to narrow their focus on the education of sedentary citizens. However, many learners and educators experience high levels of both voluntary (...) and constrained mobility. The contributions to Education and Migration address issues pertaining to migration-related education from a variety of ethical and philosophical perspectives, including analytic applied ethics, continental philosophy, care ethics, Hegelian philosophy, the capability approach and theories of distributive justice. Distinguished scholars, as well as younger researchers, from a variety of disciplines (educational scholars, lawyers, philosophers, psychologists and sociologists) tackle in these eight essays core issues in the ethics and political philosophy of education, such as citizenship education or justice in access to education, from a perspective that takes human mobilities into account. -/- The collection puts a special emphasis on the diversity of migratory experiences, on the significance of education for citizens and non-citizen migrants, long-term residents and undocumented children, immigrants and return migrants. (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

The _Physics_ is a foundational work of western philosophy, and the crucial one for understanding Aristotle's views on matter, form, essence, causation, movement, space, and time. This richly annotated, scrupulously accurate, and consistent translation makes it available to a contemporary English reader as no other does—in part because it fits together seamlessly with other closely associated works in the New Hackett Aristotle series, such as the _Metaphysics_, _De Anima_, and forthcoming _De Caelo_ and _On Coming to Be and Passing Away_. (...) Eventually the series will include all of Aristotle's works. Sequentially numbered endnotes provide the information most needed at each juncture, while a detailed Index of Terms indicates places where focused discussion of key notions occurs. An illuminating general Introduction describes the book that lies ahead, explaining what sort of work it is and what sorts of evidence it relies on. (shrink)

Sometimes, learning about the origins of a belief can make it irrational to continue to hold that belief—a phenomenon we call ‘genealogical defeat’. According to explanationist accounts, genealogical defeat occurs when one learns that there is no appropriate explanatory connection between one’s belief and the truth. Flatfooted versions of explanationism have been widely and rightly rejected on the grounds that they would disallow beliefs about the future and other inductively-formed beliefs. After motivating the need for some explanationist account, we raise (...) some problems for recent versions of explanationism. Learning from their failures, we then produce and defend a more resilient explanationism. (shrink)

Examines the lived experience of social encounters drawing on phenomenological insights.

Infallibilism is the view that a belief cannot be at once warranted and false. In this essay we assess three nonpartisan arguments for infallibilism, arguments that do not depend on a prior commitment to some substantive theory of warrant. Three premises, one from each argument, are most significant: if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then the Gettier Problem cannot be solved; if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then its warrant can be transferred (...) to an accidentally true belief; if a belief can be at once warranted and false, then it can be warranted and accidentally true. We argue that each of these is either false or no more plausible than its denial. Along the way, we offer a solution to the Gettier Problem that is compatible with fallibilism. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts—good deeds “beyond the call of duty”—are a part of moral common sense, but conceptually puzzling. I propose a unified solution to three of the most infamous puzzles: the classic Paradox of Supererogation (if it’s so good, why isn’t it just obligatory?), Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. I conclude that supererogation makes sense if, and only if, the grounds of rightness are multi-dimensional and comparative.

In Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, Daniel Andrés López reassembles Lukács’s philosophy of praxis on a Hegelian basis, as a conceptual-historical totality, both defending him and proposing an unprecedented, immanent critique that raises problems for Marxian philosophy as a whole.

" Qualia " is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the (...) moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia ; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them. (shrink)

The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly one must talk in the plural about uses of dif ferent modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In some cases, (...) the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the find ings and the policy is easy to see. In other cases, perhaps most, its influence is indirect-one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise. Occasionally the findings of social scientific studies are explicitly drawn upon by policymakers in the formation, implementation, or evaluation of particular policies. More often, the categories and theoretical models of social science provide a general background orientation within which policymakers concep tualize problems and frame policy options. At times, the in fluence of social scientific work is cognitive and informational in nature; in other instances, policymakers use social science primarily for symbolic and political purposes in order to le gitimate preestablished goals and strategies. Nonetheless, amid this diversity and variety, troubling general questions persistently arise. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts are those that lie “beyond the call of duty.” There are two standard ways to define this idea more precisely. Although the definitions are often seen as equivalent, I argue that they can diverge when options are infinite, or when there are cycles of better options; moreover, each definition is acceptable in only one case. I consider two ways out of this dilemma.

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

Public discussions of political and social issues are often characterized by deep and persistent polarization. In social psychology, it’s standard to treat belief polarization as the product of epistemic irrationality. In contrast, we argue that the persistent disagreement that grounds political and social polarization can be produced by epistemically rational agents, when those agents have limited cognitive resources. Using an agent-based model of group deliberation, we show that groups of deliberating agents using coherence-based strategies for managing their limited resources tend (...) to polarize into different subgroups. We argue that using that strategy is epistemically rational for limited agents. So even though group polarization looks like it must be the product of human irrationality, polarization can be the result of fully rational deliberation with natural human limitations. (shrink)

From an early age, humans know a surprising amount about basic physical principles, such as gravity, force, mass, and shape. We can see this in the way that young children play, and manipulate objects around them. The same behaviour has long been observed in primates - chimpanzees have been shown to possess a remarkable ability to make and use simple tools. But what does this tell us about their inner mental state - do they therefore share the same understanding to (...) that of a young child? Do they understand the simple, underlying physical principles involved? Though some people would say that they do, this book reports groundbreaking research that questions whether this really is the case. -/- Folk Physics for Apes challenges the assumptions so often made about apes. It offers us a rare glimpse into the workings of another mind, examining how apes perceive and understand the physical world - an understanding that appears to be both similar to, and yet profoundly different from our own. The book will have broad appeal to evolutionary psychologists, developmental psychologists, and those interested in the sub-disciplines of cognitive science (philosophy, anthropology). The book additionally offers for developmental psychologists some valuable new non-verbal techniques for assessing causal understanding in young children. (shrink)

Sometimes it takes years of debate for philosophers to discover what it is they really disagree about. Sometimes they talk past each other in long series of books and articles, never guessing at the root disagreement that divides them. But occasionally a day comes when something happens to coax the cat out of the bag. "Aha!" one philosopher exclaims to another, "so that's why you've been disagreeing with me, misunderstanding me, resisting my conclusions, puzzling me all these years!".

A remarkable number of Nietzsche's substantive moral psychological views have been borne out by evidence from the empirical sciences. Moral judgments are products of affects on Nietzsche's view, but the latter are in turn causally dependent upon more fundamental features of the individual. Nietzsche accepts a doctrine of types. The path is short from the acceptance of the Doctrine of Types to the acceptance of epiphenomenalism, as Leiter, and more recently, Riccardi argue. This chapter explains Nietzsche's phenomenological account of willing, (...) which serves as independent motivation for the view that Nietzsche denies the causal efficacy of conscious acts of willing. It also explores that in spite of an absence of volitional freedom, self‐control can be usefully understood on a strength‐model of motivational resources. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how Nietzsche, without employing the contemporary methods of empirical psychology, could nonetheless be such a prescient moral psychologist. (shrink)

Philosophers have found postulating possible worlds to be very useful in a number of areas, including philosophy of language and mind, logic, and metaphysics. Impossible worlds are a natural extension to this use of possible worlds, and can help resolve a number of difficulties thrown up by possible‐worlds frameworks.

It has become customary to conceptualize the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This familiar understanding grounds the conviction that a cell's organization can be explained reductionistically, as well as the idea that its molecular pathways can be construed as deterministic circuits. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methods traditionally used in molecular biology. However, the recent introduction (...) of novel experimental techniques capable of tracking individual molecules within cells in real time is leading to the rapid accumulation of data that are inconsistent with an engineering view of the cell. This paper examines four major domains of current research in which the challenges to the machine conception of the cell are particularly pronounced: cellular architecture, protein complexes, intracellular transport, and cellular behaviour. It argues that a new theoretical understanding of the cell is emerging from the study of these phenomena which emphasizes the dynamic, self-organizing nature of its constitution, the fluidity and plasticity of its components, and the stochasticity and non-linearity of its underlying processes. (shrink)

Realists about possible worlds typically identify possible worlds with abstract objects, such as propositions or properties. However, they face a significant objection due to Lewis (1986), to the effect that there is no way to explain how possible worlds-as-abstract objects represent possibilities. In this paper, I describe a response to this objection on behalf of realists. The response is to identify possible worlds with propositions, but to deny that propositions are abstract objects, or indeed objects at all. Instead, I argue (...) that realists should follow Prior (1971) and others in treating higher-order quantification (e.g. quantification into predicate or sentence position) as a genuine form of quantification in its own right, and so in particular, not to be analysed in terms of first-order quantification over abstract objects. I argue that from this ‘higher-orderist’ perspective, there is a relatively straightforward answer to the question of how possible worlds-as-propositions succeed in representing possibilities. (shrink)