“I promise to mow your lawn, but I don’t know whether I will.” Call promises of this form “Moorean,” based on their resemblance to Moore’s paradox. Moorean promises sound absurd. But why? In the literature on assertion, many have used Moore’s paradox to motivate a knowledge norm of assertion. I put forward an analogous norm on promising, according to which one should only make a promise if one knows that one will fulfill it. A knowledge norm explains why Moorean promises (...) are absurd, accounts for a variety of linguistic data, and sheds light on how promises generate obligations. (shrink)

Central to the ethics of harm is the project of developing a theory of when and why persons forfeit rights to not be harmed. I argue that standard accounts of forfeiture are too coarse-grained to make sense of a range of cases involving “merely apparent attackers.” Making sense of these cases requires that we distinguish between the forfeiture of rights and the forfeiture of the contingent, moral “perks” of those rights. Appreciating this distinction has various upshots for the theory of (...) forfeiture and may also bear fruit in other domains of moral philosophy. (shrink)

Some say that the AIDS epidemic is a Holocaust or that women’s oppression is a form of slavery. Others have critiqued such metaphors for, first, misrepresenting and, second, instrumentalizing their source. I develop a third critique: such metaphors distract from their source because they make general conversation about the Holocaust and slavery seemingly superfluous and so conversationally impermissible. As such, they discourage bringing up these topics. A metaphor may inappropriately distract from its source even when it doesn’t misrepresent or instrumentalize. (...) And such distraction is a good reason against using metaphors like those mentioned above. (shrink)

I argue that we have reasons to blame wrongdoers for their own sake. Then, I offer an account of the nature of these reasons. One of blame’s key functions, I suggest, is to express concern for wrongdoers’ quality of will—a form of concern I call contribution recognition. We can disrespect people by treating them as though the quality of will expressed in their moral contributions (specifically, their blameworthy actions) does not much matter. Conversely, we can affirm a person’s moral significance (...) or significance to us by expressing concern with her quality of will. (shrink)

David Estlund argues that theories of structural injustice have to show how victims can have warranted grievances, generally expressed through reactive attitudes. But he argues that no social structure can by itself be the target of warranted grievance. We argue that warrant for reactive attitudes is an inappropriate standard to hold theories of structural injustice to, because reactive attitudes are tightly connected to the mental states that motivate actions. This connection entails that reactive attitudes presuppose that agents are the perpetrators (...) of injustice. But the point of the idea of structural injustice is that this presupposition is often unwarranted. (shrink)

How should we understand the fundamental difference between objective and subjective theories of well-being? Authors typically presuppose some understanding of the divide but don’t do much to explain why that understanding is better than its rivals or gets at the heart of the distinction. We explicate criteria for a better account of the divide and use such criteria to critique extant understandings of the divide. We then propose and defend a new understanding of the divide, one that characterizes subjectivism in (...) terms of the normative role it grants to warrantless attitudes in grounding benefits to subjects. (shrink)

In the article “The Past 110 Years: Historical Data on the Underrepresentation of Women in Philosophy Journals,” Hassoun et al. claim that there is a connection between triple anonymous review and the proportion of women authors in interdisciplinary journals. However, the sample size of interdisciplinary journals using triple-blind review practice in the analysis is 1. In addition, the sole interdisciplinary journal claimed to be triple-blind, the Journal of Medical Ethics, is not and has not been triple-blind. The finding that interdisciplinary (...) journals publish the greatest proportion of women authorship when practicing triple anonymous review is thus unwarranted. (shrink)