Texts and contexts: premodern dissemination and transmission -- The image and function of the Kuzari in the late Middle Ages -- The Kuzari in Renaissance Italy -- Judah Moscato's project and the making of an authoritative work -- The image and function of the Kuzari in early modern Europe -- The creation of an Enlightenment Kuzari -- Continuity and change in the nineteenth century -- Conclusion: The emergence of late modern dichotomies.

1. A particle moves back and forth along a line, increasing in speed. Graph. 2. How many equivalence classes in Galilean spacetime are there for a particle that is at rest? A particle that is moving at a constant speed? Why are the previous two questions trick questions? 3. In Galilean spacetime, there is no such thing as absolute velocity. Is there such a thing as absolute acceleration? If not, why not? If so, describe a spacetime in which there is (...) no notion of absolute acceleration. Hint: to move from Aristotelian spacetime to Galilean spacetime, we got rid of the notion of absolute velocity by counting two graphs as equivalent if they differed by a shear transformation. Perhaps we can get rid of absolute acceleration with an analogous move? 4. Draw a two-dimensional Cartesian grid. Label the axes x and t, and mark a scale on these axes. Make the x axis the horizontal axis, and the t axis the vertical one. Pick two points that are not on the same vertical line. Name them Ann and Bob. Label each point with its x and t coordinates. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper identifies a number of questions that any plausible theory of epistemic blame ought to answer. What is epistemic blame? When is someone an appropriate target of epistemic blame? And what justifies engaging in epistemic blame? I argue that a number of problems arise when we try to answer these questions by using existing conceptions of moral blame. I then consider and reject Brown’s [2020] belief-desire model of epistemic blame. Finally, I argue that an agency-cultivation model of moral (...) responsibility is not only able to help us to develop a plausible theory of epistemic blame; it is particularly well-placed to do so. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack (...) of capacity back to an earlier culpable wrongdoing will often fail, due to there being no point at which these perpetrators knowingly chose to develop their prejudices. Attempts to ground culpability under Talbert’s (2008) Attributionist account of moral responsibility will also fail. This is because perpetrators’ lack of awareness of what they are doing makes it the case that they are not expressing objectionable evaluative judgments in the way required for blameworthiness. Finally, I argue that our temptation to blame agents who commit testimonial injustice is not completely unfounded. Appealing to Watson’s (1996) attributability/accountability distinction allows us to make sense of how some responses to the jurors are appropriate, despite their being excused. (shrink)

Philosophers have argued that subjects who act wrongly in the situationist psychology experiments are morally responsible for their actions. This paper argues that though the obedient subjects in Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments are blameworthy, since most of us would have acted in the same manner they did, it is inappropriate for most of us to blame them. On Todd’s ([2019]. “A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame.” Noûs 53 (2): 347–374.) recent account of standing to blame, agents (...) lack the standing to blame others for a wrong when they are not sufficiently committed to the moral values which would condemn that wrong. I argue that the obedient subjects lack sufficient commitment to the kinds of values which would condemn their wrongdoing. This is evidenced by the fact that the wrongdoing was severe, that the subjects had the capacity to avoid wrongdoing, and that there was very little cost to avoiding wrongdoing. Since these studies are very well-replicated, most of us in the moral community would have acted as they did for similar reasons. At least 80% of us therefore lack the standing to blame the obedient subjects. (shrink)

This paper identifies why hypocrites lack the standing to blame others for certain wrongs. I first examine previous analyses of 'standing', and note these attempts all centre around the idea of entitlement. I then argue that thinking of standing to blame as a purely moral entitlement faces numerous problems. By examining how the concept of standing is used in other contexts, I argue that we should think of standing to blame in partly metaphysical terms. That is, we should think of (...) it as a status which grants agents the ability to do certain things. Using Darwall's (2006) account of second-personal obligations, I argue that we should think of blame as expressing demands. For these demands to impose obligations on others, however, we must first have the authority to make these demands. I argue that agents who lack standing to blame lack the authority to blame, and thus lack the ability to impose second-personal obligations on others by making these demands. They lack this authority because they fail to accept other people's second-personal authority to make similar demands on them. (shrink)

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people's behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects' responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability (...) of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded capacities when this is the best explanation of a change in patterns of responses. With this approach in hand, I then argue that subjects in many of the situationist experiments are (mostly) excused for their actions. (shrink)

Proponents of epistocracy worry that high levels of voter ignorance can harm democracies. To combat such ignorance, they recommend allocating comparatively more political power to more politically knowledgeable citizens. In response, some recent critics of epistocracy contend that epistocratic institutions risk causing even more harm, since much evidence from political psychology indicates that more politically knowledgeable citizens are typically more biased, less open-minded, and more prone to motivated reasoning about political matters than their less knowledgeable counterparts. If so, perhaps epistocratic (...) institutions will perform worse epistemically than corresponding democratic institutions. Call this 'the problem of epistocratic irrationality'. This paper argues that the problem of epistocratic irrationality can be overcome. First, I argue that critics of epistocracy have overlooked several complications regarding the psychological data they claim shows that more knowledgeable citizens are less politically rational. Second, I argue that appropriately designed epistocratic institutions could overcome the problem of epistocratic irrationality even if such critics have interpreted the data correctly. I first explore whether refined selection mechanisms could allow epistocrats to avoid empowering less rational citizens, before assessing the prospects of implementing only those epistocratic institutions with a solid track record of reliable performance. (shrink)

This paper introduces three new concepts: epistemic health, epistemic immunity, and epistemic inoculation. Epistemic health is a measure of how well an entity (e.g. person, community, nation) is functioning with regard to various epistemic goods or ideals. It is constituted by many different factors (e.g. possessing true beliefs, being disposed to make reliable inferences), is improved or degraded by many different things (e.g. research funding, social trust), and many different kinds of inquiry are relevant to its study. Epistemic immunity is (...) the robustness with which an entity is resistant to performing certain kinds of epistemic activity, such as questioning certain ideas, believing certain sources, or making certain inferences. Epistemic inoculation occurs when social, political or cultural processes cause an entity to become immune to engaging in certain epistemic activities. After outlining each of these concepts, we close by considering some of the risks associated with attempts to improve others’ epistemic health. (shrink)

There seem to be many kinds of moral duties. We should keep our promises; we should pay our debts of gratitude; we should compensate those we’ve wronged; we should avoid doing or intending harm; we should help those in need. These constitute, some worry, an unconnected heap of duties: the realm of commonsense morality is a disorganized mess. In this paper, we outline a strategy for unifying commonsense moral duties. We argue that they can be understood in terms of contact (...) with value. You are in contact with a value when you are manifest in it or when it is manifest in you. You have reason to get in contact with the good and avoid contact with evil. And when you’re in contact with a value, the weight of the reasons it grounds are amplified for you. These ideas, we argue, can bring order to the chaos of commonsense morality. (shrink)

Politics is full of people who don’t care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes literally. After first outlining an account (...) of bullshit (Section 1), I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters (Section 2). I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives (Section 3). I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable (Section 4). (shrink)

Smilansky notes that wrongdoers seem to lack any entitlement to complain about being treated in the ways that they have treated others. However, it also seems impermissible to treat agents in certain ways, and this impermissibility would give wrongdoers who are themselves wronged grounds for complaint. This article solves this apparent paradox by arguing that what is at issue is not the right simply to make complaints, but the right to have one's demands respected. Agents must accept the authority of (...) others to make second-personal demands on them before they can expect others to treat their own demands as legitimate. Wrongdoers’ previous wrongdoing shows they do not treat others’ demands as authoritative. However, as they are still beings with dignity, which acts as a source of moral reasons for others, wronging them remains impermissible. (shrink)

Vice epistemology studies how character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles systematically get in the way of knowledge, while doxastic responsibility is concerned with what kinds of responses are appropriate towards agents who believe badly. This paper identifies a new connection between these two fields, arguing that our propensity to take responsibility for our doxastic failures is directly relevant for vice epistemology, and in particular, understanding the social obstacles to knowledge that epistemic vices can create. This is because responses to norm (...) violations are an important mechanism by which norms are upheld, and maintaining epistemic norms is crucial for our collective epistemic successes. This paper then identifies a new kind of vice, one which is bad precisely because of the way it undermines the epistemic norms that our blaming practices help maintain, and thus the benefits that said norms create. I call this vice epistemic evasiveness, and it concerns the attitude that one takes towards their own performance as an epistemic agent. Evasiveness is bad because it creates uncertainty about which agents are reliable, it prevents holders of this attitude from learning from their mistakes, and it signals to third parties that the norm is not being upheld, making them less likely to follow the norm. (shrink)

What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of (...) it which is impervious to this objection. At the core of our account is the idea of joint authorship. You are a joint author of something when that thing expresses your joint intentions. Democracy may not make any one of us sole author of our political affairs, but it can make us their joint authors. It is in such joint authorship, we claim, that the intrinsic value of democratic self-government consists. (shrink)

Despite their many virtues, democracies suffer from well-known problems with high levels of voter ignorance. Such ignorance, one might think, leads democracies to occasionally produce bad outcomes. Proponents of epistocracy claim that allocating comparatively greater amounts of political power to citizens who possess more politically relevant knowledge may help us to mitigate the bad effects of voter ignorance. An important challenge to epistocracy rejects the claim that we can reliably identify a subset of citizens who possess more politically relevant knowledge (...) than others. Roughly put, such knowledge should involve knowledge of various politically relevant social-scientific facts. But since the social sciences are mired in controversy, it’s not clear what the politically relevant facts are. Accordingly, we cannot definitively say of some citizens that they possess more politically relevant knowledge than others. Call this the Argument from Political Disagreement. In this paper I respond to the Argument from Political Disagreement. First, I argue that it conflates social-scientific knowledge with politically relevant knowledge. Even if there were no uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge, there is much uncontroversial politically relevant knowledge. Second, I establish the importance of such non-social-scientific knowledge for political decision-making. I conclude that this knowledge constitutes the minimal body of knowledge which epistocrats need to make their case. (shrink)

Klein’s account of epistemic justification, infinitism, supplies a novel solution to the regress problem. We argue that concentrating on the normative aspect of justification exposes a number of unpalatable consequences for infinitism, all of which warrant rejecting the position. As an intermediary step, we develop a stronger version of the ‘finite minds’ objection.

Many contemporary democratic theorists are democratic egalitarians. They think that the distinctive value of democracy lies in equality. Yet this position faces a serious problem. All contemporary democracies are representative democracies. Such democracies are highly unequal: representatives have much more power than do ordinary citizens. So, it seems that democratic egalitarians must condemn representative democracies. In this paper, I present a solution to this problem. My solution invokes popular control. If representatives are under popular control, then their extra power is (...) not objectionable. Unfortunately, so I argue, in the United States representatives are under loose popular control. (shrink)

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they (...) improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new theory of the nature of hypocritical blame and why it is objectionable, arguing that hypocritical blame is a form of dishonest signaling. Blaming provides very important benefits: through its ability to signal our commitments to norms and unwillingness to tolerate norm violations, it greatly contributes to valuable norm-following. Hypocritical blamers, however, are insufficiently committed to the norms or values they blame others for violating. As allowing their blame to pass unchecked threatens the signaling system, our (...) strong interest in maintaining valuable norm-following by tracking who has what commitments justifies objecting to hypocritical blame. This theory has a number of strengths over competing accounts: it delivers intuitive verdicts about when blame is objectionable across a range of cases, it is a naturalistic explanation, it is consistent with a leading theory of the nature of blame, it explains why hypocritical pronouncements that don’t feature blame are similiarly objectionable, it does not rely on contentious analyses of the nature of ‘standing’, and it preserves the common intuition that hypocrites are in some way dishonest. (shrink)

The resemblance is plain to see between Kripke’s Wittgenstein introducing bizarre rules such as quaddition (in illustrating the sceptical paradox against theories of meaning) and Goodman’s introducing the equally bizarre grue (in generating the new riddle of induction). But the two sorts of bizarre cases also differ in interesting respects. For those familiar with Goodman’s case, this similarity sparks a strong temptation to enlist to the meaning sceptic’s cause key elements of Goodman’s new riddle, which are missing from Kripke’s case. (...) In this essay, I characterize a natural way of doing just this, which targets dispositionalist solutions to the sceptical paradox. I also show that, despite initial appearances, this new objection to dispositionalism (the symmetry problem) is not nearly as worrisome as originally thought. The solution offered on behalf of semantic dispositionalists does require a trade-off, though, from the severe form of indeterminacy advanced by the meaning sceptic to a much milder thesis. (shrink)

Conceptual engineers endeavor to improve our concepts. But their endeavors face serious practical difficulties. One such difficulty – rational conceptual conflict - concerns the degree to which agents are incentivized to impede the efforts of conceptual engineers, especially in many of the contexts within which conceptual engineering is viewed as a worthwhile pursuit. Under such conditions, the already difficult task of conceptual engineering becomes even more difficult. Consequently, if they want to increase their chances of success, conceptual engineers should pay (...) closer attention to – and devise strategies to mitigate – rational conceptual conflict. After outlining the phenomenon at greater length and mapping its connections to other similar practical problems (Section 1), I explore the dynamics of such conflict by way of several detailed case studies (Section 2). In particular, I focus on cases driven by material, social, and moral incentives. I then consider some important methodological implications of rational conceptual conflict (Section 3). Among other things, I argue that conceptual engineers should focus more heavily on cultivating settings that modify the payoffs and penalties associated with conceptual conflict. By such indirect means, they can incentivize conceptual cooperation rather than conflict, thus making it easier to achieve success in conceptual engineering. Section 4 concludes. (shrink)

Politics abounds with bad language: lying and bullshitting, grandstanding and virtue signaling, code words and dogwhistles, and more. But why is there so much bad language in politics? And what, if anything, can we do about it? In this paper I show how these two questions are connected. Politics is full of bad language because existing social and political institutions are structured in such a way that the production of bad language becomes rational. In principle, by modifying these institutions we (...) can reduce the prevalence of bad language. However, as I show, such practical efforts are fraught with difficulties. After first outlining an account of bad language (Section 1), I examine the rationality of three different types of bad language: inaccurate language, insincere language, and unclear language (Section 2). Next, I discuss the possibility of implementing institutional reforms to improve the quality of political discourse (Section 3). However, I then outline and discuss two serious complications for institutional reforms—namely, they create risk of abuse, and they could preclude instances of seemingly bad language that, in fact, are socially beneficial (Section 4). I conclude with some thoughts about how to pursue institutional reform in an appropriately circumspect manner (Section 5). (shrink)

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

I outline and provide a solution to some paradoxes of ground.

This paper considers the possibility that ‘epistemic hypocrisy’ could be relevant to our blaming practices. It argues that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, and the different ways some norms can bear on the legitimacy of our blame, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand our objections to (...) epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the epistemic norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral and epistemic standing. (shrink)

In a recent paper, María Pía Méndez (2022) offers an epistemic critique of epistocracy according to which the sort of politically well-informed but homogenous groups of citizens that would be empowered under epistocracy would lack reliable access to information about the preferences of less informed citizens. Specifically, they would lack access to such citizens’ preferences regarding the form that policies ought to take—that is, how these policies ought to be implemented. Arguing that this so-called Information Gap Problem militates against epistocracy, (...) Méndez instead recommends that we respond to problems created by widespread voter ignorance by improving the flow of information between political actors by adopting some participatory democratic institutions. In this paper I argue that the severity of the Information Gap Problem for epistocracy is overstated. After first sketching some background (Section 1), I argue that it is hard to see why information about citizens’ preferences for the form that policies ought to take is important enough that the expected costs of epistocracy outweigh its expected benefits if it selectively empowers people who lack access to such information (Section 2). Moreover, different forms of epistocracy are less threatened by the Information Gap Problem, assuming it is indeed a problem. For some forms of epistocracy, it may be no problem whatsoever. However, I conclude by suggesting that Méndez touches upon some more serious problems for epistocracy (Section 3). First, even setting aside the Information Gap Problem, there are open questions about the possible epistemic inferiority of epistocracy relative to democracy. Second, more comprehensive accounts of political competence that move beyond the possession of sufficient levels of political information are much harder to reliably test for, thus complicating the task of devising effective epistocratic selection mechanisms. Lastly, epistocracy arguably creates a serious risk of abuse that may outweigh any other benefits it brings. More research is needed to determine how (and whether) epistocrats can respond to such challenges. (shrink)

According to certain kinds of semantic dispositionalism, what an agent means by her words is grounded by her dispositions to complete simple tasks. This sort of position is often thought to avoid the finitude problem raised by Kripke against simpler forms of dispositionalism. The traditional objection is that, since words possess indefinite (or infinite) extensions, and our dispositions to use words are only finite, those dispositions prove inadequate to serve as ground for what we mean by our words. I argue (...) that, even if such positions (emphasizing simple tasks) avoid the traditional form of Kripke's charge, they still succumb to special cases of the finitude problem. Furthermore, I show how such positions can be augmented so as to avoid even these special cases. Doing so requires qualifying the dispositions of interest as those possessed by the abstracted version of an actual agent (in contrast to, say, an idealized version of the agent). In addition to avoiding the finitude problem in its various forms, the position that results provides new materials for appreciating the role that abstracting models can play for a dispositionalist theory of meaning. (shrink)

Recent work by Peijnenburg, Atkinson, and Herzberg suggests that infinitists who accept a probabilistic construal of justification can overcome significant challenges to their position by attending to mathematical treatments of infinite probabilistic regresses. In this essay, it is argued that care must be taken when assessing the significance of these formal results. Though valuable lessons can be drawn from these mathematical exercises (many of which are not disputed here), the essay argues that it is entirely unclear that the form of (...) infinitism that results meets a basic requirement: namely, providing an account of infinite chains of propositions qua reasons made available to agents. (shrink)

Who owns your genes? What does climate science imply for policy? Do corporations conduct honest research? Should we teach intelligent design? Humans are creating a new world through science. The kind of world we are creating will not simply be decided by expanding scientific knowledge, but will depend on views about good and bad, right and wrong. These visions, in turn, depend on critical thinking, cogent argument and informed judgement. In this book, Adam Briggle and Carl Mitcham help readers (...) to cultivate these skills. They first introduce ethics and the normative structure of science and then consider the 'society of science' and its norms for the responsible conduct of research and the treatment of human and animal research subjects. Later chapters examine 'science in society' - exploring ethical issues at the interfaces of science, policy, religion, culture and technology. Each chapter features case studies and research questions to stimulate further reflection. (shrink)

Abstract: According to certain dispositional accounts of meaning, an agent's meaning is determined by the dispositions that an idealized version of this agent has in optimal conditions. We argue that such attempts cannot properly fix meaning. For even if there is a way to determine which features of an agent should be idealized without appealing to what the agent means, there is no non-circular way to determine how those features should be idealized. We sketch an alternative dispositional account that avoids (...) this problem, according to which an agent's meaning is determined by the dispositions that an abstract version of this agent has in optimal conditions. (shrink)

Mission-oriented climate change research is often unverifiable. Therefore, many stakeholders look to peer-reviewed climate change research for trustworthy information about deeply uncertain and impactful phenomena. This is because peer-review signals that research has been vetted for scientific standards like reproducibility and replicability. Here we evaluate the transparency of research methodologies in mission-oriented computational climate research. We find that only five percent of our sample meets the minimal standard of fully open data and code required for reproducibility and replicability. The widespread (...) lack of minimal openness standards in peer-reviewed climate change research jeopardizes scientific credibility and risks poor societal outcomes as we manage growing climate risks. The scientific community can and must do better. We, the authors, outline necessary openness standards that we commit to as researchers, reviewers, and readers. We invite you to join us. (shrink)

Many people think there is something objectionable about ‘selective outrage’. After investigating how to best characterise what selective outrage is and what these objections target, this paper argues that many cases of supposedly selective outrage actually have important positive effects. Because we often have limited resources with which to enforce norms, it can be collectively prudent to prioritise enforcing norms that are well-established or collectively recognisable over those that are not. This will sometimes require responding to individual wrongs that seem (...) less immoral, outrageous or in need of attention than others. We argue that when we encounter agents who are outraged about a violation of a genuinely valuable norm but not another relevantly similar violation, we should generally refrain from objecting unless we have good independent evidence the agent’s outrage stems from objectionable motives. (shrink)

The problem of unwelcome epistemic company refers to the problem of encountering agreement with your beliefs from an unwelcome source, such as someone who is known to form unreliable beliefs or have values you reject. Blanchard (2023) and Levy (2023) argue that when we encounter unwelcome agreement, we may have reason to reduce our confidence in our matching beliefs. I argue that unwelcome epistemic company rarely provides reasons to reduce our confidence, and apparent successes at improving our beliefs using unwelcome (...) company are explained by extraneous factors. Seeing why unwelcome agents are rarely evidence our belief is false requires making a distinction between two kinds of agents who regularly form false beliefs: unreliable agents and anti-reliable agents. While unreliable agents are common, they are uninformative. While anti-reliable agents would be informative, they are incredibly rare. Unwelcome agents are also rarely evidence that we have formed our own beliefs via an unreliable process, unless we have independent evidence that we are relevantly similar to them. This is hard to obtain given that unwelcome agents, by definition, have values and methods of forming beliefs that we do not find appealing. Moreover, attempts to use unwelcome company to improve our beliefs are likely to make our beliefs worse off in a number of ways. I argue we should adopt a policy of ignoring unwelcome company, letting them have little impact on our confidence in our beliefs. (shrink)

Unpleasant dreams occur much more frequently than many people realise. If one is a hedonistic utilitarian – or, at least, one thinks that dreams have positive or negative moral value in virtue of their experiential quality – then one has considerable reason to try to make such dreams more positive. Given it is possible to improve the quality of our dreams, we ought to be promoting and implementing currently available interventions that improve our dream experiences, and conducting research to find (...) new, more effective interventions. (shrink)

I consider Glimcher's claim to have given an account of mental functioning that is at once neurological and decision-theoretical. I am skeptical, but remark on some good ideas of Glimcher's.

I explore the logic of ground. I first develop a logic of weak ground. This logic strengthens the logic of weak ground presented by Fine in his ‘Guide to Ground.’ This logic, I argue, generates many plausible principles which Fine’s system leaves out. I then derive from this a logic of strict ground. I argue that there is a strong abductive case for adopting this logic. It’s elegant, parsimonious and explanatorily powerful. Yet, so I suggest, adopting it has important consequences. (...) First, it means we should think of ground as a type of identity. Second, it means we should reject much of Fine’s logic of strict ground. I also show how the logic I develop connects to other systems in the literature. It is definitionally equivalent both to Angell’s logic of analytic containment and to Correia’s system G. (shrink)

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...) it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

Political liberalism views a public policy as justified when reasonable citizens subject to it have sufficient reasons to endorse it. But this endorsement condition does not specify how reasonable citizens in democracies are to exercise their equal say in deciding which policies to support prior to enactment. Citizens may regard many policy options as reasonable but only one as truly just. The dominant view among political liberals, which I call _agnosticism_, takes no stand on how citizens ought to rank these (...) reasonable alternatives to determine which to support. Agnostics see all criteria for comparing reasonable policies as on a par, whether they be theories of justice or coin flips. I show how Quong’s (2011) analysis of reasonableness leads to agnosticism. I then develop the pluralist alternative, which holds that citizens should support the reasonable policy they regard as most just. What I call _pluralism_ sees multiple conceptions of justice as correct, or “most reasonable.” I show that pluralism offers a compelling alternative to agnosticism in that it can _both_ make sense of an individual citizen’s duty to support what they regard as just policy _and_ respect the fact that citizens reasonably disagree about what the most just policy is. (shrink)

Some people think that grounding is a type of identity. And some people think that grounding connections hold necessarily. I show that, under plausible assumptions, if grounding is a type of identity, then grounding connections hold necessarily.

The Implementation Problem for conceptual engineering is, roughly, the problem conceptual engineers face when attempting to bring about the conceptual change they support. An important aspect of this problem concerns the extent to which attempting to implement concepts can lead to unintended negative consequences. Not only can conceptual engineers fail to implement their proposals, but their interventions can produce outcomes directly counter to their goals. It is therefore important to think carefully about the prospect of attempted implementation leading to unintended (...) negative consequences: what sort of negative consequences can conceptual engineers expect? Are some forms of conceptual engineering more likely than others to lead to such consequences? And is conceptual engineering still viable even given the risk of such consequences? This paper addresses such questions. I begin by outlining different forms of conceptual engineering (Section 1), before examining how they can produce unintended negative consequences (Section 2). I then discuss some implications of the fact that attempted implementation can produce unintended negative consequences, suggesting that, among other things, some forms of conceptual engineering are less viable than others (Section 3). I conclude, though, by considering some of the ways in which conceptual engineering is nonetheless a worthwhile pursuit (Section 4). (shrink)

Decision-makers increasingly invoke equity to motivate, design, implement, and evaluate strategies for managing flood risks. But there is no objective definition of equity. This pluralistic setting calls for transparency about underlying values, but this practice is uncommon. Here, we review how equity is measured by surveying peer-reviewed publications that explicitly state an interest in equity in the context of flood-risk management. We develop a simple taxonomy for how transparent measurements can be defined. We map reviewed measurements to this taxonomy. Finally, (...) we offer guidance on how the pursuit of a clear and consistent quantitative evidence base about equity can become more widespread in flood-risk research and beyond. (shrink)

From the dictum "ought implies can", it has been argued that no account of belief's normativity can avoid the unpalatable result that, for unbelievable propositions such as "It is raining and nobody believes that it is raining", one ought not to believe them even if true. In this article, I argue that this move only succeeds on a faulty assumption about the conjunction of doxastic "oughts.".

A widely held picture in political science emphasizes the cognitive shortcomings of us citizens. We’re ignorant. We don’t know much about politics. We’re irrational. We bend the evidence to show our side in the best possible light. And we’re malleable. We let political elites determine our political opinions. This paper is about why these shortcomings matter to democratic values. Some think that democracy’s value consists entirely in its connection to equality. But the import of these shortcomings, I argue, cannot be (...) explained in purely egalitarian terms. To explain it, we must instead think of democracy’s value partly in terms of collective autonomy. Our ignorance and irrationality undermine the epistemic conditions for realizing this kind of autonomy. They stop us knowing the outcomes of our political choices. Our irrationality and malleability undermine the independence conditions for realizing such autonomy. They mean our political choices are subject to problematic kinds of interpersonal influence. Thus, at root, the import of the widely held picture is that, if accurate, it closes off this critical aspect of democracy’s value. (shrink)

It is commonly held that political ignorance is rational, a response to the high costs and low benefits of acquiring political information. But many recent critics of the claim that political ignorance is rational instead urge that it is a simple consequence of agents not concerning themselves with the acquisition of political information whatsoever. According to such critics, political ignorance is inadvertent radical ignorance rather than a rational response to the incentives faced by agents in democracies. And since political ignorance (...) is not a response to incentives, these critics urge, it cannot be ameliorated by incentivizing the acquisition of political information. This paper has two goals. First, I show that these seemingly competing accounts of political ignorance are in fact complementary, together explaining much political ignorance. Indeed, there is a sense in which political ignorance can be both rational and radical at the same time. Second, I more closely examine the relationship between incentives, kinds of political ignorance, and the acquisition of political information. On the one hand, from the fact that political ignorance is rational it does not follow that it can be overcome by incentivizing the acquisition of information. On the other hand, from the fact that political ignorance is radical it does not follow that it cannot be overcome by incentivizing the acquisition of information. Lastly, the complexity of the information in question is more relevant to determining whether ignorance can be overcome than whether such ignorance is rational or radical. (shrink)

A semantic theory is committed to semantic monism just in case every particular semantic property posited by the theory is a member of the same kind. The commitment to semantic monism appears to draw some support from the need to provide a compositional semantics, since taking a single kind of semantic property as key to a semantic theory affords a uniform pattern on the basis of which the meaning of any given sentence can be compositionally determined. This line of support (...) highlights a tension between the principle of compositionality and taking a more pluralistic approach to semantic theorizing. In this essay, that tension is relieved, leaving open the prospect of a pluralistic semantic theory that observes the principle of compositionality. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that group agents can be morally responsible for their actions in virtue of having a certain kind of structured decision-making procedure which is responsive to reasons. However, accounts of group agent blameworthiness face some objections. One is that group agents cannot be responsible for wrongdoing because they are unable to experience certain kinds of emotional responses (Thompson, 2018). Another is that group agents who regularly commit wrongdoing due to certain structural impediments will always (...) be excused for their wrongdoing. This paper demonstrates such problems can be avoided by adopting an Attributionist theory of group moral responsibility. On this approach, though group agents lack certain capacities, their ability to deny that certain facts provide moral reasons to act in certain ways is sufficient to mean they hold objectionable attitudes towards us, and those attitudes are sufficient to make group agents blameworthy. (shrink)

Formula One isn’t very important. You can't care about it too much. The refugee crisis is more important. You can care about it much more. In this paper we investigate how important something is. By ‘importance’ we mean how much it is fitting to care about a thing. We explore a view about this which we call Proportionalism. This view says that a thing’s importance depends on that thing’s share of the world’s total value. The more of what matters there (...) is, the less you can care about each thing in particular. The less of what matters there is, the more you can care about each thing in particular. We argue that, in many respects, Proportionalism is superior to its competitors. It captures some intuitions they leave out and it has a powerful motivation. So, we suggest, you should keep things in proportion. (shrink)

A ‘bad feminist’ is someone who endorses feminist ideals and values but finds themselves falling short of them. Since bad feminists exhibit an inconsistency between what they say and what they do, this can generate worries about hypocrisy. This article investigates whether and when members of political movements with certain ideals ought to worry they are being hypocritical. It first provides a diagnosis of why worries about hypocrisy seem common in the political arena. I argue that accusations of hypocrisy are (...) apt when one is in insufficiently committed to the values entailed by one’s pronouncements. It is particularly hard to assess what constitutes sufficient commitment in politics because many issues are multi-factorial, overdetermined, and involve numerous competing considerations, making it difficult to assess how genuine commitments to values should manifest in behaviour. Since there are many ways that one can act inconsistently with their pronouncements, mere inconsistency is not a signal of hypocrisy, particularly if one is disposed to take on costs to further that movement’s ends. I also consider and respond to a number of considerations against calling out hypocrisy, including worries about our accuracy, worries about the effects such accusations have on discourse, and worries about how accusations incentivise particular kinds of behaviour. (shrink)