This article examines Okeja’s Deliberative Agency and its proposal that deliberative agency should replace consensus as the central value of political life under conditions of political failure. Okeja argues that, given pervasive cognitive disorientation and normative instability, consensus lacks normative potential and must give way to a model of politics grounded in contestation and the active agency of individuals as co-creators of meaning (Okeja, 2022, pp.182–184). This paper challenges that move by questioning whether deliberative agency is itself normatively more viable under the same conditions it is meant to address. It argues that the survival of imagination, which Okeja invokes to ground agency, is insufficient to secure the coherence and reliability required for meaningful deliberation. Consequently, the paper contends that Okeja’s attribution of normative priority to deliberative agency is not sufficiently justified as normatively superior under those same conditions.
This article provides an overview of Manuel Vargas’ newly reformulated approach to revisionary compatibilism about free will, as presented in the second edition of Four Views on Free Will (2024).
This paper argues that the notion of Dialogue articulated by physicist–philosopher David Bohm constitutes a distinctive method of philosophical practice based on shared inquiry into the dynamics of thought. The paper contends that Bohmian Dialogue addresses the contemporary civilizational crisis of shared meaning, particularly its most outward manifestation in the form of communication breakdown. Although not conceived as a psychotherapeutic intervention or an instrumental communication technique, Bohmian Dialogue may exert a unique socio-therapeutic force. Through contemplative practices of suspending judgments and sustained observation of the movement of thought, Bohmian Dialogue can foster cognitive rebalancing by cultivating open, receptive modes of attention. Based on conceptual analysis and close engagement with Bohm’s writings, the paper situates his account within contemporary debates on philosophical practice.
The “flicker of freedom” defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) continues to challenge Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs). Flickers are often assumed to entail indeterminism, and thus to conflict with compatibilist theories of moral responsibility. This paper argues that a refined version of the flicker strategy—one appealing to weak, non-robust, fine-grained alternative possibilities—is not mutually exclusive to compatibilism, and thus does not obviously require indeterminism. Drawing on Vihvelin’s dispositional account of ability, I show that agents in FSCs retain a compatibilist form of leeway that remains both morally relevant and immune to determinism. Specifically, I argue that such leeway is morally relevant insofar as it indicates an agent’s exercise of agency in the actual sequence, thereby verifying rather than competing with the sourcehood condition on moral responsibility. I term this view Wide Source Compatibilism: a compatibilist account that preserves the insights of both leeway and actual-sequence theories. Therefore, actual-sequence compatibilists should also endorse a form of leeway compatibilism. The result is a more resilient compatibilism, one in which leeway strengthens, rather than undermines, the actual sequence.
What, if anything, can be morally objectionable about the practice of epistemic partiality commonly associated with personal friendship? Recently, Jack Warman has argued that it may lead us to insult non-friends and perpetuate testimonial injustice against them by refusing their relevant testimony about our friends. In this article, we challenge Warman’s view on three grounds. First, we show that it underspecifies the conditions under which refusal of non-friends’ testimony counts as insulting. Second, we argue that epistemic partiality, as discussed in the literature, does not in fact require or lead individuals to refuse non-friends’ testimony in an insulting way. Third, we show that Warman’s two arguments concerning the moral wrongness of epistemic partiality assign such wrongness in two competing ways and thus turn out to be incompatible with each other. Finally, we go beyond Warman’s proposal to consider whether epistemic partiality may generate epistemic injustice in another way, by bestowing friends with credibility excesses.
This article analyzes the Zhuangzian moral sage—an ideal of effortless, spontaneous action aligned with the Dao—through Harry Frankfurt’s theory of free will, characterizing this figure as a “higher wanton.” The article then presents two analytic challenges to this ideal. First, it argues that the Zhuangzian sage’s exclusion of ambivalence undermines the well-functioning agency required in value-laden dilemmas. Second, it posits that the exclusion of rational reflection hampers the ability to navigate complex moral situations. Despite these critiques, the article offers possible Zhuangzian responses to both challenges. Ultimately, the goal is not to dismiss the Zhuangzian ideal, but to illuminate the tensions between Zhuangzian ideal and rationalist autonomy, fostering a dialogue between these distinct conceptual frameworks.
According to the consent-based argument for anti-natalism, procreation is always morally problematic insofar as it involves imposing serious and protracted harm on children without their consent and without an appropriate justification, for unlike other cases in which we are morally permitted to harm others without their consent, imposing the harms of existence is not necessary to prevent children from experiencing greater harm. In recent years, several philosophers have issued responses to this argument that attempt to avoid its anti-natal implications. For instance, some have rejected the principle that it is wrong to non-consensually impose harm on persons who are not otherwise at risk of experiencing greater harm; others have sought to demonstrate that this principle is not in fact violated in the case of procreation, either because we are permitted to act paternalistically on behalf of the children we create and so do not require their consent to the harms of existence or because we are normally justified in inferring their consent hypothetically; and others have sought to demonstrate that procreation may nevertheless be permissible if parents perform compensatory duties to their offspring or take sufficiently robust measures to minimize the harm they are likely to experience over the course of their lifetimes. My objective in this paper is to show why these arguments are less persuasive than they initially appear, and hence why the consent-based argument for anti-natalism still presents a serious challenge to the moral permissibility of procreation.
In his latest book, The Complex Tapestry of Free Will (2024), Robert Kane builds on previous workof his in developing a novel libertarian position on free will. Alfred Mele (2017)presents a libertarian view that is argued to be superior to the view Kane heldat that time. Kane’s latest view avoids the main problem raised in Mele 2017, butother problems are raised for it here. It is argued that a version of the libertarianview presented in Mele 2017 that is modified to match an important modificationKane makes in his own view is superior to Kane’s new view. Topics discussedinclude the nature of decision-making, necessary conditions for freely decidingto do something, problems luck apparently poses for deciding freely, being ableto decide what to do, and what agents are trying to do when they deliberateabout what to do.
In this paper, I attempt to uncover motivations for the main premise that supports essential representationalism about perceptual experience (ER), namely the Immediacy thesis. ER claims that for every phenomenal property in the class Φ, there is some representational property R such that, necessarily, having Φ entails having R. The Immediacy thesis is that, roughly, the very phenomenal relation to the experience’s qualitative profile entails a representational relation to the qualitative profile of the represented object, and that these two profiles are type-identical. In § 2, I clarify ER’s commitments. Then I attempt to uncover the role of the Immediacy thesis in the four arguments for representationalism: the argument from transparency (§ 3), the argument from inference to the best explanation (§ 4), the argument from perceptual seemings (§ 5), and the argument from perceptual capacities (§ 6). In § 7, I conclude by wrapping up the results of my analyses in §§ 3–6 and elaborating on the role of the so-called Immediacy thesis in the dialectic of representationalist arguments.
Pluralism is an inevitable reality in the contemporary world, posing a challenge for regional cultures as they navigate coexistence with diverse cultures. In this paper, I explore how Confucianism can respond to this challenge. I begin by critically assessing two influential proposals. Joseph Chan’s perfectionist approach grounds state action in universally recognizable goods independent of any comprehensive doctrine, thereby aiming to secure pluralism, but risks severing Confucian values from their cultural roots. Sungmoon Kim’s perfectionist approach, by contrast, although it claims to accommodate pluralism, requires that political values satisfy the Confucian intelligibility condition, and thereby opens itself to charges of sectarianism. To move beyond this impasse, I introduce the framework of explanatory metaphysics, which conceives metaphysics as the ongoing tracking of moral reality through human practices and experiences. On this basis, I argue that a form of Confucian perfectionism developed from Chan’s approach can accommodate pluralism while meeting the intelligibility condition, provided it adopts an explanatory metaphysical orientation. Because different cultural traditions can track the same moral reality through their own explanatory frameworks, pluralism emerges as a structural feature rather than a concession.
Lycan’s flexible approach intentional content helps him treat all of the external sense modalities as systems that represent different kinds of entities in the external environment. It is argued, however, that he errs by taking “theoretical entities” as being the targets of representation—things like reflectance for colour and molecular compounds for the chemical senses. A simple acquaintance model is offered, which starts at the same place as his treatment but goes in a somewhat different direction. In the final section of the paper, Lycan’s layering model of sensory representation is shown to be ontologically incomplete.
Many of the standard arguments for moral expressivism also seem to apply to the domain of taste. One standard argument turns on the apparent possibility of moral disagreement without any disagreement in belief. This suggests that moral disagreements and taste disagreements are best understood as disagreements in attitude. This presents the expressivist with a dilemma. Taste disagreements are paradigmatic examples of so-called faultless disagreements, whereas moral disagreements are not faultless. But if moral and taste judgments are attitudinal states, then the disagreement intuitions in the different domains should be uniform, which they are not. Eriksson (2016) argues that moral judgments are attitudinally more complex than taste judgments and that this explains the difference. Pietroiusti (2021) argues that Eriksson’s suggestion is unpersuasive. This paper develops and defends a view in the spirit of Eriksson’s suggestion against Pietroiusti’s arguments.
This article examines the gender pay gap in Hollywood as a paradigmatic case of inequality among the super-rich. While the issue has gained visibility through public interventions by actresses such as Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Lawrence, and Emma Watson, its moral significance is not immediately obvious, given that it concerns highly privileged individuals. Nevertheless, the case raises questions central to two ongoing philosophical debates: the normative status of extreme wealth and the role of celebrities in public moral discourse. Building on current work in expressivist theory, the article asks whether the equal pay claims of super-rich celebrities can be justified. The article reconstructs two possible versions of the Disrespect Argument—the Insider and Outsider Variants—and argues that neither proves adequate. The conclusion is that, despite their initial plausibility, these expressivist arguments fail to yield a normatively determinate basis for grounding Hollywood celebrities’ claims to pay equality.
In an influential account of humility, Robert C. Roberts defines humility as low concern for one’s social status as opposed to pride and its various forms. But how is the status in question to be understood? Is the paradigmatic case of an unhumble person someone who craves to win the most prestigious philosophy chair in the world? In this contribution, I will show that the unhumble caring for social status can have an internalised form which is much more difficult to identify since it manifests as a desire to be excellent or superior not in the eyes of others but in one’s own eyes, as is the case with self-satisfaction or smugness. In order to clarify this, I contrast this invidious unhumble case with an innocuous ambition, say, to be an excellent philosopher. I will consider and reject two candidates for marking the invidious case: first, the competitive emotions of envy and jealousy experienced by its subject; and second, the competitive or comparative way in which her superior status is constructed. I conclude that in order to explain the difference, it is necessary to look deeper into the person’s moral psychology, namely, into her sense of her own worth. I claim that what marks the invidious case of the excellent philosopher is a certain misconception of her sense of her worth: she not only cares too much for the social status her excellence gives her, but she also derives her own worth from it. An unhumble person thus mistakes her (internalised) social worth for her worth as a person.
Rodriguez’s book offers an intriguing account of self-knowledge and privileged access in terms of how we non-relationally express our minds through behaviour. This paper argues that non-relational expressivism is fundamentally unstable, because it attempts to preserve a privileged, first-person perspective on one’s own mental states while rejecting the epistemic reading of the privileged access thesis. Section 2 explores the problems non-relational expressivism faces in accounting for psychological phenomena such as (in)sincerity and pretence, while Sect. 3 considers Rodriguez’s semantic analysis of expressive and descriptive first-person mental utterances, showing how he cannot avoid giving an account of the truth conditions of first-person self-ascriptions of belief. Section 4 formulates a dilemma for Rodriguez: in order to coherently explain how mental states can be non-relationally expressed, he must either give them an ontological status independent of the behavior that expresses them, or accept that, ultimately, there is nothing besides behavior. Neither option appears attractive for Rodriguez.
High-levelism about perceptual experience holds that experience presents not only low-level features such as colour and shape, but also high-level properties such as natural and artefact kinds. Twin-Earth-style arguments are widely taken to threaten this liberal view: they are supposed to show that Twin-Earth cases involve only low- or mid-level ‘looks’, rather than differences in kind-representing phenomenology. A familiar high-levelist reply weakens the link between phenomenal character and phenomenal content, allowing phenomenal duplicates to differ in which high-level properties they represent. In this paper, I argue that this argument tacitly relies on a bridging principle I call Appearance-Profile Fixation (APF): sameness of a coarse, image-based appearance profile suffices for sameness of high-level phenomenology. First, I reconstruct Twin-Earth arguments so as to make APF explicit and motivate it by appeal to the gist literature in vision science. Second, drawing on a Structural-Fit Lemma for phenomenal spaces and a ‘fake pine’ case, I show that APF is hard to reconcile with robust forms of high-levelism even on a weak notion of phenomenal content. Third, using high-levelists’ own interpretations of bistable displays, Mooney faces, rapid-scene categorisation, and appearance-matched metamers, I argue that high-level phenomenology can vary while the relevant appearance profile is held fixed. The upshot is that the dialectical force of Twin-Earth arguments against high-levelism depends on a substantive, yet optional, thesis about cross-world phenomenal pairing that high-levelists have independent reason to reject.
Some argue that God’s love or mercy would save everyone; others argue that God’s justice or respect for human freedom demands damnation; and others argue that God would annihilate the lost. I present a new alternative, hyper-annihilationism, on which each view is correct. According to hyper-annihilationism, God hyper-will annihilate the lost; the eschaton is such that all are saved; and it is possible that there are now people enduring everlasting conscious torment.
