The first part of this issue contains a special issue on ‘Everyday Reason Talk’, edited by Katrien Schaubroeck of the University of Antwerp. Psychological experiments have shown that judgements and actions are heavily influenced by unconscious and automatic processes.. These experiments raise the question whether we should be suspicious of reason talk in general. In everyday life we work with an image of human beings as rational agents. We constantly engage in the practice of giving and asking for reasons. We treat each other as reason-responsive beings, trusting that there is a connection between (conveyed) reasons and performed actions. Do the developments in experimental psychology urge us to revise this image, and abandon the practice? Taking up the challenge posed by psychology studies about confabulation and implicit motives, this special issue aspires to find out whether the reasons that people talk about on an everyday basis are illusory, or whether the fact that people talk about them is enough for them to be real. In her introduction, Schaubroeck presents us the individual contributions in more detail.

The regular issue opens with a contribution by Ashley Dressel. She aims to show that popular accounts of promissory obligation cannot accommodate an obligation to keep deathbed promises, promise made to a person who is dying, She focuses specifically on deathbed promises which will not, or even cannot, be fulfilled until after the promisee’s death. Ashley argues that neither right-based accounts nor harm accounts can accommodate deathbed promises.

The subject of Adam Kadlac’s article is hope. He argues that hope is a virtue insofar as it (1) leads to a more realistic view of the future than dispositions like optimism and pessimism, (2) promotes courage, and (3) encourages an important kind of solidarity with others. In light of this proposal, he considers the relationship between hope and our beliefs about what is good as well as the conditions under which hope may fail to be a virtue.

Neoclassical migration theory assumes an account of the human person as solely an autonomous rational agent which then leads to ethics of migration which overemphasize freedom and self-determination. According to Tisha M. Rajendra, this view underlies the migration ethical theories of political philosophers such as Joseph Carens, Michael Walzer, and David Miller. Migration ethics should start from a relationally embedded understanding of autonomy. Rajendra concludes by arguing that the central ethical category for an ethics of migration is not freedom or self-determination, but justice-in-relation.

Karin Jønch-Clausen and Klemens Kappel respond to an article in this journal by Robert B. Talisse (vol. 14:1). Talisse claims having proposed a justification for liberal democracy that crosses the boundaries of a wide range of religious, philosophical and moral worldviews. In this way the justification should be sufficiently pluralistic to overcome the challenges of reasonable pluralism familiar from Rawls. Talisse’s argument is that when cognitively functional individuals reflect on some of their most basic epistemic commitments they will come to see that, in virtue of these commitments, they are also committed to endorsing key liberal democratic institutions. Jønch-Clausen and Kappel argue that the socio-epistemic justification can be reasonably rejected on its own terms and thus fails as a public justification approach. This point is made by illustrating the significance of deep epistemic disagreements in liberal democracies.

Irina Meketa explores the nature of fair-play obligations within illicit cooperative schemes, specifically those with so-called negative externalities, or deleterious effects on non-members of the scheme. This a matter of great complexity and consequence with implications for, inter alia, global economic justice. She concludes that the willing beneficiaries of such schemes acquire a fair-play obligation to recognize and respond to their culpability. This reconceptualization of the fair play principle opens up new avenues for exploring the obligations of those who benefit from acts of collective wrongdoing.

According to Lasse Nielsen, health is always presumed as an important capability in Amartya Sen’s works. However, he never manages to fully explain why health is distinctively valuable. In his article, Nielsen aims to provide an explanation. It does this by firstly laying out the general capability-based argument for health justice. He then discusses two recent attempts to justify why health is distinctively valuable from within a capability framework: Sridhar Venkatapuram’s conception of health as the central human meta-capability and Norman Daniels’ embrace of the capability metric in his use of Rawls’ principle of fair equality of opportunity. Nielsen argues that none of these accounts succeed in providing a plausible justification of the value of health, and suggests an alternative justification.