Many strategies for pursuing justice demand heightened attention to other people's oppressed status. For example, we are told to be aware of people's position in an unjust system when forming beliefs about them, and to bear in mind how marginalized people might interpret our words and actions as microaggressions. I argue that when such 'woke attention' becomes pervasive-when someone's oppressed status is regularly, over time and across contexts, prioritized in many people's minds-the person loses some control over their own narrative, over how the story of their life is constructed by others. An oppression-centred narrative, which they might want to reject, becomes a dominant one. In order to respect autonomy in the sense of authoring one's own life, including the story of one's life, we should therefore consider how we can reduce the need for woke attention in pursuing social justice-for example, by using debiasing techniques.
Relationism is the view that our best physical theories can dispense with spacetime. To show the feasibility of relationism, philosophers have suggested a whole range of approaches, from the postulation of a physical plenum to the use of modality. Shamik Dasgupta has recently suggested using his Generalism to develop a relationist account of spacetime. This paper argues that Dasgupta's Generalism offers no hope to the defenders of relationism. We first present Generalism in what we take to be its most perspicuous formulation. We then discuss a recent argument by Sider () against Generalism and show how to defuse it. Finally, we present a novel argument against Generalism based on Barrett's criterion of parsimony (Barrett ).
I argue that some simple things are aesthetically valuable, or beautiful. I give an account of simple beauty as beauty in simplicity. I then address some suspicions about simple beauty. Some people allege that simple beauty is at odds with aesthetic agency. In fact, I argue, simple beauty promotes certain kinds of aesthetic agency. Others allege that simple things do not warrant sustained appreciation. I argue that simple beauties present existential truths that warrant sustained awareness because of their importance and our forgetfulness.
Recent debates about consciousness and welfare have focused on whether consciousness is required for welfare subjectivity. There have been fewer attempts to explain the significance that particular kinds of consciousness have for welfare value. In this paper, I explore the relevance of cognitive experience for theories of welfare. I introduce the cognitive zombie intuition, the idea that an absence of cognitive experience can drastically change one's welfare. I then attempt to explain the cognitive zombie intuition. I first consider and reject the idea that cognitive experience is itself a welfare good. I then argue that cognitive experience plays an object-expanding role: it drastically expands the range of objects welfare subjects can desire or be pleased by. This expanded range includes paradigmatic welfare goods such as intellectual achievement, friendship, humor, aesthetic experiences, and existential experiences. I close by showing how cognitive experience's object expanding role is compatible with leading theories of welfare.
According to an influential line of argument, our beliefs about which material objects exist were influenced by selective pressures that are insensitive to the true ontology of material objects, and are therefore debunked (Merricks 2001; Korman 2014, 2015; Rose and Schaffer 2017). Extant responses to this line of reasoning presuppose controversial philosophical theses, such as anti-realism about material objects, theism, or a special faculty of apprehension. The present paper develops a novel strategy for responding to debunking arguments against belief in ordinary objects, which I call 'semi-deflationism': our beliefs about which material objects exist are the consequents of conditional statements that we are a priori entitled to believe and whose antecedents we have empirical justification to believe. Semi-deflationism offers an attractive epistemology of material objects. It also shares certain similarities with Amie Thomasson's (2007, 2015) analytic deflationism, but it is immune to several difficulties with it. Most importantly, semi-deflationism doesn't imply that seemingly difficult debates about the ontology of material objects can be trivially settled, and it leaves open the possibility that although our beliefs about which objects exist are rational, they are ultimately undermined by substantive arguments for revisionary views.
A familiar kind of intellectual controversy sees hoaxers submit materials that they consider of low quality to editors, hoping to expose what they view as deficient editorial standards. I offer a defence of this practice. Whereas a common criticism is that their use of deception makes such hoaxes unethical, I argue that authors do not have an obligation to only submit material that they consider truthful or good. Hoaxes can also perform important functions, such as drawing attention to the current state of an academic or artistic discipline. While particular hoaxes can be unethical, when this occurs, it will be due to contingent features of the hoax in question, not because of the core deception that hoaxes as such involve. Not only can properly executed hoaxes uphold their own form of truth-telling, they can exhibit aesthetic values that we associate with authentic works of art, such as originality and skilful performance. However, this latter outcome can occur in ways that the hoaxers did not intend. I illustrate my argument by reference to the Ern Malley and Sokal hoaxes. Although I appeal in places to hoaxes' potentially positive consequences, my framework is broadly ecumenical rather than consequentialist, in so far as most non-consequential views also give some weight to consequences.
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the topic of moral responsibility for 'non-ideal' agents. And yet, one important type of 'non-ideal' agent, the narcissistic agent, has not received much attention. In this paper, I seek to fill this gap. My focus is on psychological entitlement, a feature that has been largely overlooked. I argue that this feature impairs narcissistic agents' moral competence. This is because it both causes them to form distorted moral assessments in a wide range of situations and impairs their ability to use feedback from others to correct these distortions. I conclude that narcissistic agents have mitigated responsibility owing to their impaired moral competence. As I furthermore show, this does not entail that we simply need to accept the damage they do. Rather, we may take steps to protect ourselves against the destructive effects of narcissistic entitlement, both on a personal and on a societal level.
Among those who accept a secular and scientific worldview, it is mostly taken for granted that people die when their bodies stop functioning. This is, in fact, a feature of such a worldview that often serves to separate it from religious or spiritual ones. Yet developments over the past several decades in theories of personal identity and cosmology-in our understanding of what we are like and what the universe is like-should cause us to rethink this assumption. First, there is the rise of psychological views of personal identity, which understand people not as bodies but as psychologies, independent of any particular substrate. Second, most physicists have come to view the universe as infinite. In this paper, I argue that those who accept these views should be far from certain of their own mortality. Most importantly, I argue that the best psychological view-Derek Parfit's-when combined with the most popular cosmological view, guarantees immortality.
What is the relationship between pleasure and desire? While some philosophers reduce pleasure to desire, this paper explores the prospects for a hedonic theory of desire, which reduces desire to pleasure instead. I argue that desiring that p is best analyzed not as a disposition to feel pleased that p when you believe that p, but rather as a disposition to feel pleasure in what you imagine when you imagine that p. I give three arguments for this hedonic theory of desire, defend it against objections, and consider its broader theoretical implications for current debates in ethics and philosophy of mind.
A common view among latter-day Kantians is that hope is needed to defeat the threat of moral demotivation. I argue against this view by drawing on Kant's neglected account of despair. On this account, despair is an affect in response to hopelessness. A certain kind of despair-wild despair-can be intensely motivating. Wild moral despair (as I call it) can even help to sustain moral motivation. Yet this presents a challenge: since wild moral despair can defeat moral demotivation, why hope over despair? I answer that by hindering reflection, affects hinder the exercise of our practical rationality for Kant. Yet this cost extends not only to despair, but also to affective hope. Non-affective hope can defeat moral demotivation without this cost, and thus is the kind of hope that has true value for Kant.
