Consequentialists often argue that their opponents' views can be consequentialized or that their own view is partly self-effacing. These arguments resemble the quasi-realist moves that many expressivists make. I argue, however, that consequentializing and self-effacement are surprisingly hard to accommodate within an expressivist framework. This threatens to show that expressivism is false, since it threatens to show that there are meaningful normative sentences that do not express noncognitive attitudes. I then argue that this threat can be neutralized by taking expressivists' quasi-realist moves further than they are normally taken. This also reveals a deeper resemblance between quasi-realist moves and self-effacement.
I propose a framework for wonder that accounts for its heterogeneity and clarifies disputes about the ethics of wonder. The various species of wonder are unified as responses to a recurrent practical situation: that of recognizing that our mental structures require alteration to cognitively accommodate some object. This recognition is momentous but evaluatively indeterminate, and this provokes a variety of secondary appraisals and coping responses. The heterogeneity of wonder therefore reflects the ethical drama of the diverse ways we grapple with the limits of understanding and the possibilities of transformation.
In liberal societies, revenge is usually regarded as inherently wrong. I challenge this view by examining two grounds for its impermissibility: motivation and consequences. Because acts of revenge are defined by motivation, the most plausible objection is that this motivation is morally flawed. I reject various arguments supporting this claim and similarly dismiss the objection that revenge is impermissible due to its consequences. I conclude that whether revenge is permissible is a contingent matter and that recognizing a vengeful motive within us is a reason for caution, not for refraining from action.
This article is on the concept of "slack": the absence of binding constraints on behavior. Slack comes in many forms, including as time, money, space, others' goodwill, and support networks. It enables you to weather sudden shocks and avoid crises, or to pursue opportunities and take on risks. It gives you room to fail. Slack is often good for individuals and can create positive externalities for groups. It is not already accounted for in existing treatments of freedom. It is often under threat from several sources, including pressures to optimize, others' demands, and competition.
I defend pluralist metaethical constitutivism: Practical norms governing an agent are grounded in her kind of rational agency. Kinds of rational agency are defined in terms of reasons explanations: To be a given kind of rational agent is for one's actions to admit of certain forms of reasons explanation. Unlike extant, "monist" constitutivists, pluralists need not say that there are constitutive standards of rational agency as such-just that there are constitutive standards of our kind of agency. They can thus admit the possibility of "minimal" agents whose agency cannot ground any norms, retaining monist constitutivism's virtues without its costs.
This article argues for the abolition of a core component of our hegemonic gender regime: compulsory sex-marking. Compulsory sex-marking refers to the social demand that individuals advertise, through conventional means, a binary sex status connected to a socially legible gender role. This linchpin of our hegemonic gender regime poses an unjustifiable threat to our autonomy. In what follows, I not only offer a novel account as to why we should embrace a critical component of gender abolition but also argue that dismantling a core feature of our hegemonic gender regime is compatible with a trans-liberatory political project.
Many theories of responsibility claim that holding someone responsible is "incipiently communicative," but it has been difficult to pin down just what this amounts to. We offer an account of (1) a distinctive sense in which blaming is communicative, (2) what is communicated, and (3) how communication is achieved. Building on the work of Miranda Fricker and others, our account is that blaming is communicative in the sense that it updates a body of mutually represented expectations-normative common ground-which happens via a process of presupposition accommodation.
There are cases in which someone insists to themselves that they are the gender they were assigned at birth without "deep down" believing this. In such a case, which is to be respected, the identity an agent avows or the identity that they fearfully deny? We consider three forms of respect for gender identity and argue that although avowed gender identity should generally receive the first two forms of respect, there are two special contexts in which avowed gender identity can be respectfully challenged. The third form of respect, meanwhile, might equally be owed to avowed and unavowed identity.
When and why is it fitting for emotions to change over time? This article defends a novel answer to this question that emphasizes the motivational aspect of emotions. It is fitting for emotions to change over time insofar as our reasons for being motivated to fulfill the goals of emotions change over time. For example, it is fitting for guilt to dissipate when the agent has successfully made amends because the facts in virtue of which the agent has committed a culpable offense no longer provide reasons for them to be motivated to make amends.
