Monism regarding hypocrisy's wrongness maintains that there is a single, sui generis wrong of hypocrisy. This paper challenges hypocrisy monism and offers an alternative, hypocrisy disjunctivism, which maintains that the wrongness present in any token case of hypocrisy is always reducible to other, more basic wrongs. Hypocrisy disjunctivism, however, faces a fruitfulness challenge: Why have a concept that names a disjunction of wrongs at all in our normative vocabulary? I answer that "hypocrisy" solves a unique practical problem in allowing speakers to hold normatively inconsistent agents accountable for the wrongs, whatever they may be, that beget these agents' normative inconsistency.
External world skepticism is often thought to entail that we should suspend judgment about the existence of the external world. I challenge this orthodoxy by arguing that, when combined with a plausible principle of ontological parsimony, the skeptical challenge intensifies into an argument for outright disbelief in the external world. The principle in question instructs us to prima facie disbelieve in undetectable postulates. This bears on the skeptical challenge because, by the skeptic's lights, the external world and its constituents qualify as undetectable. This result poses problems for concessive responses to skepticism, such as entitlement-based and pragmatic strategies.
Modal views of luck, influential in epistemology, hold that luck is characterized by modal fragility. They face a well-known challenge: Lackey's Buried Treasure cases, which suggest that an event can be both lucky and modally stable. I argue that this challenge assumes that if two events are each modally stable, their conjunction is also modally stable. This assumption fails for conjunctions of independent, contingent events. When component events arise from independent, uncoordinated causal chains, their convergence can be modally fragile even though each component is modally stable. This handles Buried Treasure and reestablishes the plausibility of modal views of luck.
I develop an axiomatic system of mereology that accounts for the ways in which musical works can be said to have parts. I distinguish two fundamental modes of composition that musical works exhibit: successive composition, whereby sound events are concatenated in time, and simultaneous composition, whereby sound events occur at the same time. I define various relations of parthood in terms of these operations and study the general principles governing them. I prove that they share some basic properties with the relation of parthood of classical mereology but depart from classical mereology in important respects concerning decomposition and composition principles.
Philosophers have long debated whether phenomenal properties can play genuine causal roles. In this article, I aim to develop an emergentist approach to phenomenal causality, an approach that attributes novel causal powers to phenomenal properties and rejects the causal closure of physics. I also compare this emergentist approach with an influential competing approach to phenomenal causality, the compatibilist account, which postulates a model of causal overdetermination understood broadly. There is a widespread view in the philosophy of mind that emergentism is physicalistically unacceptable (whereas compatibilism is consistent with physicalism). However, the article attempts to challenge this consensus by arguing for a physicalist version of emergentism, according to which phenomenal properties as well as their novel causal powers are grounded by (noncausal) physical properties and facts.
An important question regarding public reason liberalism is how much (if anything) it needs to say about epistemology. This paper presents an answer to this question, arguing that the theory does not require reasonable citizens to hold any particular epistemological commitments (contra David Enoch's important critique), but does need to offer an epistemological explanation for the fact of reasonable disagreement. However, that explanation can be sufficiently minimal to be compatible with a wide range of fuller epistemological views. Further, the paper argues that this account of the place of epistemology within public reason liberalism mirrors the theory's structure with respect to moral justification, and indeed its approach to various other philosophical domains.
This paper introduces sentientist political liberalism . Elaborating on the fundamental ideas in John Rawls's political liberalism, we propose that the scheme of fair social cooperation among persons should be understood as embedded within a broader system of social coexistence between persons and other sentient beings. This prompts a revision of the original position: We add a second phase in which participants, acting as trustees for animals, deliberate on principles of fair coexistence. We also extend the idea of public justification to include a duty of diligent trusteeship and the permissibility to appeal to comprehensive doctrines to reform anthropocentric political cultures.
Most non-consequentialists accept that, other things equal, it is more difficult to justify doing harm than it is to justify allowing harm. But there is a further question regarding the moral status of enabling harm. Rickless (2011), following in the footsteps of Foot (1967) and Hanser (1999), has defended the moral equivalence of enabling harm and allowing harm (MEEA). His case for MEEA, as well as MEEA itself, has been criticized by Barry and & Oslash;verland (2016), as well as by Lippert-Rasmussen (2015). In this essay, I revisit this controversy and argue that MEEA and the existing arguments for it withstand all of these criticisms.
This article, based on multilevel social contract theory, advances a novel notion of moral agency for morally pluralistic societies. The notion considers moral agency to be not only socially embedded, modular, and fluid but also at times, to require the adoption of certain ends, at least temporarily, for successful social cooperation. Engaging in such “moral roleplaying,” and, in this sense, gamifying the social moral space, allows for moral differentiation and discourse, facilitating the reconciliation of conflicting moral directives and the construction of a unified moral self despite deep moral conflict.
We offer a philosophical account of the middlebrow as a theoretical category to do explanatory and critical work in aesthetics. On our account, the middlebrow ought to be understood as aspirational popular art. That is, it is art which aspires both to be popular (in a distinctive sense), and at the same time to be something more than popular. Although, as we will discuss, there are many different sorts of "something more" to which middlebrow art may aspire, and this suggests that there are different kinds of middlebrow art, the aspiration itself provides the category with substantial unity.
Alan H & aacute;jek (2024) argues for counterfactual skepticism, the view that many (or "most") counterfactuals are false. In this paper, I consider what H & aacute;jek's semantic position looks like when we pair it with a MacFarlane (2008, 2014)-style relativist postsemantics. On this view, a counterfactual utterance may start out false, but later come to be assessed as true-even if the counterfactual's antecedent and consequent express eternalist propositions. The package view, which I call chancy relativism, preserves H & aacute;jek's metaphysical commitments but pairs smoothly with speakers' intuitions about retrospective assessments.
I argue that Spinoza rejects teleological explanations wholesale. This is because of three of his distinctive theses: his naturalism, according to which all things are governed by the same laws; his account of action, according to which we are active to the extent that we have adequate ideas; and his account of adequate causation, according to which a thing can have only one adequate cause.
In this paper, we argue that, under certain conditions, if something is, apparently, a paradox, then it is a paradox. We then apply this claim to a recent discussion on the so-called "Problem of Change." Throughout the history of Philosophy, many authors have viewed change as a paradoxical phenomenon. More recently, some have defended that the Problem of Change is not a paradox. In the paper, we argue that the Problem of Change is an apparent paradox and that the relevant conditions are met. Consequently, we conclude that the Problem of Change is a paradox.
Track record arguments (TRAs) contend that it speaks in favor of an ethical theory (such as utilitarianism) if many of its past proponents had moral views that were controversial at their time but which we now consider to be clearly true (e.g., women's equal rights in 18th century Europe). This paper explores how to construct potentially sound TRAs and evaluates their merits. I show that, in principle, TRAs can support the claim that an ethical theory should be used as a guide for making ethically significant decisions, while TRAs for the truth of theories face additional obstacles.
Evidence for cognitive impairment-say, by bias or hypoxia-can defeat the epistemic permissibility of belief. This paper argues that such higher-order defeat is an instance of a more basic normative phenomenon: whenever the permissibility of one's belief is defeated, it is defeated by an epistemic reason to withhold belief that is provided by evidence that one is fallible to some degree. This reason can do significant theoretical work in epistemology: It sets a threshold of sufficient evidence for permissible belief and breaks epistemic ties. The resulting view opens the space for reasons-based evidentialism.
This paper is about the hierarchy view: that each word has infinitely many meanings, arranged into levels, with the level n meaning serving as its semantic value when it occurs embedded to degree n in indirect or attitude reporting verbs. Departing from the famous debates over the bare tenability of the hierarchy view, I focus on whether there is any positive reason to endorse it. Philosophers have offered two such reasons. One appeals to intersubstitutability phenomena, first pointed out by Benson Mates. The other appeals to Frege's theory of indirect discourse. I examine each of these and find that neither actually supports the view. Regardless of its bare tenability then, we should reject the view.
Relational egalitarians endorse the positive thesis that achieving equality of social relations is fundamentally important, and sometimes also the negative thesis that distribution has no non-relational importance. This article rejects both theses of relational egalitarianism. Contrary to the negative thesis, there are strong reasons supporting the non-relational importance of distribution, as is brought out by considering a country with huge distributive disparities and pervasive poverty but no relational inequality. Two objections to the positive thesis are presented. First, relational equality is consistent with a levelling down of social relations. Second, equal social relations are of no fundamental importance.
This paper argues for granular permissivism, roughly the view that evidence is sometimes permissive between doxastic attitudes at different levels of grain. The argument identifies three sources of rational slack between granularly differing doxastic states: doxastic tidiness, safety, and evidential responsiveness. After arguing for granular permissivism and contrasting it with a more familiar, Jamesian form of permissivism, I show how granular permissivism offers an escape from some arguments against permissivism. I conclude by drawing out implications from granular permissivism for questions about the value of rationality and rational constraints on deference.
I show that Margaret Macdonald anticipated Quine's well-known criticisms of logical conventionalism in her unpublished 1934 PhD thesis, but that she later developed her criticisms in a direction distinct from that of Quine under the influence of Wittgenstein. Macdonald rejected as senseless the suggestion that statements of logical truth admit of justification, through an examination of the use to which such statements are put in ordinary speech.
In this paper I defend the Contingent Spotlight Theory, a theory of modality analogous to the Moving Spotlight Theory in the philosophy of time. My defence of the theory consists in developing responses to three objections that have been raised against it, two of which are due to Lewis (1986). I also argue that the version of the contingent spotlight theory I develop in response to these objections has some advantages over its closest rival, Philip Bricker's (2006, 2008) 'Leibnizian Realism'.
