ABSTRACT It is widely held that an intellectual or epistemic vice is characterized by its negative relationship to epistemic goods. But which epistemic goods, exactly? The main answers in the vice-epistemological literature are (i) the truth and (ii) propositional knowledge. In this article, I demonstrate the need to expand vice epistemology’s axiology beyond these epistemic goods. In particular, I argue that vice epistemologists need to include knowledge-how in their theorizing if they are to provide us with a full account of the nature and development of some putative epistemic vices. First, I show that this species of knowledge can be embedded in the manifestation and development of some vices, such that agents acquire this species of knowledge in virtue of either exercising or acquiring these epistemic vices. Second, I claim that the inclusion of knowledge-how in vice epistemology has important implications for its two main theoretical camps—motivationalism and obstructivism. I end by explaining how a less popular view in the literature can possibly vindicate the relationship between epistemic vices and knowledge-how.
This article develops an original account of the value of authenticity for meaning in life that explains how and when acting authentically enhances meaning in life. I argue that we appropriate meaningful actions by acting authentically, contra Joseph Raz's (2001) position that appropriation occurs through attachments. Authentic actions are distinctly owned by the individual and the more a meaningful action is appropriated, the more it contributes to the meaning in their life. Considering authenticity as an enhancing factor for a meaningful life refines accounts of meaning in life and strengthens objectivist approaches against objections. The value authenticity holds for meaning in life is furthermore not susceptible to the critique of immoral or self-centered authenticity.
It is widely held that theories of well-being must satisfy the criterion of descriptive adequacy. According to the criterion, an adequate theory of well-being must optimally fit our everyday experiences and judgments relating to well-being. This article argues that there is no such criterion that constrains theories of well-being. First, it examines in detail the reasons for which the criterion was originally introduced. Second, it argues against the criterion, on the grounds that well-being is essentially normative and normative theories more generally are not subject to any such constraint. Third, it considers two objections relating to reflective equilibrium and thick normative concepts. Finally, it explores the implications of rejecting the criterion for evaluating theories of well-being and for integrating the philosophy and science of well-being. A positive lesson of the article is that taking the normativity of well-being seriously from a meta-ethical perspective has implications for first-order theorizing about well-being.
This article will argue that Sor Juana develops a revisionary virtue epistemology in her Reply to Sor Filotea in order to counter the oppressive dogmas of her time. Sor Juana's epistemological reorganization of Catholic Scholasticism helps her epistemically ground and morally justify her lifelong passion for learning. Sor Juana's virtue responsibilist epistemology posits that properly oriented humility actually motivates studying, even for women; subtly reworks the scope of the supposed vice of curiositas so as to endorse curiosity about the created world as a virtue; and underscores the equal importance of moral and intellectual virtues for persons of any gender. Furthermore, Sor Juana's system emphasizes grounds for epistemic justification that are accessible third-personally to allow her to move beyond the discriminatory debate about women's intellectual capacities and demonstrate her epistemic agency through externally observable markers.
Permissivisms in both epistemic and practical rationality enjoy support, but they are discussed in strikingly different ways. Epistemic permissivists focus on both intrapersonal and interpersonal cases, finding the latter more popular than the former. In contrast, practical permissivists focus only on intrapersonal cases. This is odd because practical and epistemic rationality are structurally similar. Furthermore, Paul Forrester (2024) argues that permissivism faces significant explanatory burdens regarding the range of one's rational options: permissivists need to explain why some cases are permissive and others are not as well as explain why some options are permissible while others are not. I argue that we can meet Forrester's challenge by appealing to reasons holism, which explains the range of rational options. This appeal also illuminates similarities between practical and epistemic permissivisms, motivating an underappreciated interpersonal practical permissivism.
In this article, I argue that interpersonal cruelty can often be explained in ordinary moral terms in conjunction with facts about social hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that misogynistic cruelty often stems from the sense that certain women are wrongdoers; it often stems from the sense that certain, privileged men are entitled to violate women; and it often stems from the sense that, at least when they threaten such men, women simply do not matter. Misogynistic cruelty is thus more a product of moral vilification, entitlement, and devaluation than dehumanization proper. I explore the implications for the need to posit dehumanization as a mechanism to explain cruelty elsewhere.
Two approaches dominate the literature on the construction of emotions: transitory role theory and the more recent Conceptual Act Theory. We identify two ways in which these approaches would benefit from correction, revision, or further development. First, they tend to downplay the body, insisting that social forces work primarily at a conceptual level. That is, culture is considered to primarily impact the conceptualization of emotion, not emotional embodiment. Second, they tend to neglect the impact social norms have on emotions. We include relevant work in traditions outside philosophy and psychology (sociology, anthropology, and queer theory) that may shed light on the impact of social norms on emotions, as well as the relationship between socialization and embodiment. We propose an account of emotions as constructs that combine sociality and corporeality-an account that understands social norms and bodily responses as interdependent. Our proposal is to understand emotions as constructed via societal norms that materialize in bodily states. This advances the debate on the nature of emotions by integrating different theoretical strands (construction and embodiment), and it also contributes to the emerging literature on emotional injustice by shedding light on the role the social plays, for example, in shaping whose body gets to express which emotions.
This article articulates and defends an argument for pantheism which has not featured prominently in contemporary philosophy of religion but which is rooted in foundational ideas defended by pantheists and by non-pantheistic theists. It is inspired in part by the idea advocated by some theists that God is existence itself, and in part by the idea associated with pantheistic thinkers such as & Sacute;ankara that the universe is the "way" that fundamental existence is. Moreover, it is motivated by a simple and attractive view about God's fundamental nature which might be shared by pantheists and non-pantheists according to which God is the asymmetric source of all else. Beginning from this view about God's fundamental nature, it argues that God is existence. It then contends that there is therefore a clear and robust sense in which the universe "is" God, since the universe is the "way" existence is.
Human languages are powerful representational tools, but can they represent every possible kind of entity? This seems unlikely. We can easily imagine languages-God's language, or that of advanced extraterrestrials-that represent features of reality that our actual languages fail to capture. Eklund (2024) calls these alien languages. Yet despite the intuitive pull of this picture, it is unclear what alien languages, so understood, would amount to. I argue that there are no alien languages in this sense; human languages can represent any entity that can be linguistically represented at all. Still, I propose an alternative sense in which a language can be alien. On my cognitive account of alien language, a language is alien when linguistic understanding of it requires cognitive resources not used in understanding human languages. This account better explains the sense in which we can and cannot speak an alien language. We can represent whatever alien languages represent, but understanding alien languages may require cognitive resources that we lack.
Within the recent glut of philosophical work on hope, relatively little attention has been devoted to the circumstantial conditions that frustrate or accommodate hoping. In this article, I show how an individual's spatial environment can constrain their capacity to sustain determinate hopes for the future via an extended case study: long-term refugee detention. Taking seriously refugees' claims that a central cause of widespread hopelessness is the feeling of being in limbo, and drawing on recent work on the role of the imagination in hoping, I demonstrate how an individual's spatial environment can limit imaginative access to the interim steps between their present circumstances and a desired future, making it difficult to see any way their hope could be realized.
An agent's epistemic prospects depend on a combination of that agent's individual characteristics and features of that agent's epistemic environment. Such factors cannot always be cleanly separated. Often, individual characteristics impact agents' epistemic prospects by shaping the epistemic environments in which individuals find themselves. In particular, features of individuals often repel or attract certain sorts of information, a phenomenon I label epistemic magnetism. I argue that epistemic magnetism is a ubiquitous and underrecognized phenomenon that sometimes promotes and sometimes frustrates the achievement of positive epistemic outcomes. Then, I consider a series of simple proposals concerning what distinguishes between beneficial and harmful forms of epistemic magnetism. I argue that these proposals cannot capture the impacts of epistemic magnetism. Instead, I offer a series of principles that serve to roughly characterize the consequences of this phenomenon. I conclude with some remarks on why epistemologists have thus far tended to overlook epistemic magnetism.
While there is an enormous literature on friendship, next to nothing has been written about enemyship. This neglect may be due to the assumption that enemyship is simply inverted friendship. We reject that assumption and argue that although enemyship shares some important structural relations with friendship (such as dispositions to act and the presence of significant interactions), there are crucial differences. Unlike friendship, enemyship does not require reciprocity, mutual acknowledgment, or equality in any degree. If we are right, enemyship is a sui generis category of human relationship, in need of further exploration. To that end, we offer a conceptual analysis and taxonomy of enemies before turning to two normative questions: is there anything intrinsically good about having an enemy? Would a good person ever have enemies, of any kind?
Conceptual improvements are a significant dimension through which local moral progress occurs, both at the individual and societal levels. Michele Moody-Adams (1999) offers a narrow view of moral progress, suggesting that only a deepened understanding of complex, existing moral concepts can constitute moral progress. Consequently, she views the role of moral philosophy as limited to constructing deeper accounts of these concepts. We broaden Moody-Adams's (1999) account by identifying three distinct types of conceptual improvements that can constitute moral progress: deepening the understanding of existing concepts, creating new concepts, and enhancing the ability to apply concepts. We support this typology with historical examples where such improvements constituted moral progress. Based on this typology, we argue that the role of moral philosophy extends beyond developing and refining moral theories to include the active creation of new concepts and the facilitation of conceptual application.
On my account, dehumanization is the act of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. When this occurs, it is never complete, because those that dehumanize others cannot avoid recognizing their humanness. Consequently, dehumanization involves regarding others as both fully human and fully subhuman beings. Inferences about dehumanizing states of mind are based on interpretations of human behavior. A Davidsonian account of interpretation has it that we interpret behavior in such a manner as to make it maximally coherent, rational, and consistent. In contrast, a Freudian account of interpretation has it that the human mind is largely incoherent, irrational, and inconsistent. The dichotomy between Davidsonian and Freudian hermeneutic strategies accounts for disagreements between realists and skeptics about dehumanization, because of dichotomous interpretations of the testimony of perpetrators and victims. Skepticism about dehumanization often invokes an Objection from Strangeness to call into question such testimony. However, Objections from Strangeness rely on questionable commonsense psychological assumptions.
This article argues that the traditional taxonomy of doxastic attitudes leaves out an important alternative. That is the attitude of rejecting the question. Sundry examples of the phenomenon are presented and their unifying features are identified. One rejects a question when one treats it as if none of its answers were true. One can reject not only non-polar questions, but also polar ones (questions of the form whether p). The stance of rejecting a question is further distinguished from interrogative attitudes in general, and from the third stance of the traditional taxonomy in particular.
Causal loops are circular chains of causally related events: each link causes others which in turn cause it. Not only are causal loops widely accepted as coherently conceivable; some are also provably self-consistent as well as seeming genuinely possible according to currently accepted laws of physics. On the common assumption that causation is transitive, each link in any causal loop would wind up causing itself; but the idea of self-causation is pretty much universally rejected as incoherent. A popular attempt to resolve this dilemma distinguishes "direct" from "indirect" self-causation: the direct variety, which operates without the aid of causal intermediaries, is claimed to be impossible even if the indirect variety isn't. I argue against this attempted resolution on the grounds that causal loops themselves, unlike the links that compose them, should be viewed as directly self-caused; so indirect self-causation via causal loop is possible only if direct self-causation is as well. An important consequence is the availability of groundbreaking solutions to several longstanding puzzles in philosophy of mind.
Orthodox contractualists and rule consequentialists think that, for any action, the consequences of everyone performing that action determine whether that action is permissible. For them, "what if everyone did that?" is the fundamental moral question. By making "what if everyone did that?" the fundamental question of good moral reasoning, these moral theories can easily justify prohibitions on free-riding. But it also makes them face the ideal world problem. I argue that it was a mistake for moral theorists to generalize from an objection appropriate to cases of free-riding to all of morality. In short, we should understand the question "what if everyone did that?" to give expression to one, and only one, kind of objection to one's action-namely, that, by performing that action, one would be making an exception of oneself. If we limit the scope of "what if everyone did that?" in this way, we can justify prohibitions on free-riding while avoiding the ideal world problem.
Much of the debate between na & iuml;ve realism and the content view has focused on a particular aspect of perceptual phenomenology: the phenomenal immediacy that distinguishes perceptual experiences from both imagery experiences and conscious thoughts. According to a version of the argument from hallucination, we should prefer the content view to na & iuml;ve realism because the former, unlike the latter, can provide a unified explanation of the fact that both hallucinatory and veridical experiences possess immediacy. However, the standard variety of the content view that can provide such an explanation is not in a position to provide a unified explanation of a distinct aspect of perceptual phenomenology: perceptual experiences possess a presentational character that they share with imagery experiences (and which distinguishes both from conscious thoughts). Accordingly, I present an argument from imagination in defense of a non-standard variety of the content view-the sensory vehicle theory. Unlike its competitors, the sensory vehicle theory can provide unified explanations of why hallucinatory and veridical perceptual experiences possess immediacy, and why perceptual and imagery experiences possess their presentational character; as such, this theory provides a better explanation of the phenomenal facts than does either na & iuml;ve realism or the standard variety of the content view.
At the heart of P. F. Strawson's naturalistic approach to responsibility sits the Inescapability Claim. The main argument of this article is that the established interpretation of this claim is mistaken. According to, what I will call, the Standard Reading, it is the empirical claim that it is psychologically impossible for us to abandon our responsibility practices. Although widespread, this reading lacks interpretative basis, is in conflict with other features of Strawson's approach, and is-most strikingly-explicitly rejected by Strawson himself. In its place, I propose that we understand Strawson's Inescapability Claim as the metaphysical claim that the concept of responsibility is among those ineliminable concepts that form the fundamental core of any conceivable conceptual scheme. The responsibility skeptic's doubt is "idle, unreal, a pretense", not because their doubt is psychologically inefficacious, but because it treads beyond the bounds of sense; their doubt is, in a particular sense, inconceivable or unintelligible.
