ABSTRACT According to a traditional conception, a fact is individuated by its constituents and the way these are structured. Lowe (1998) argues against this, claiming that there is no principled way to ascertain what the constituents of facts are and, therefore, there is no way to coherently individuate them. In this paper, I examine and reject Lowe's argument. It will be shown that there are different conceptions of facts, a fine‐grained and a coarse‐grained conception, and that both can coherently individuate facts. In my diagnosis, Lowe's argument arises from a conflation of both conceptions.
In this paper, I give a new type of theistic answer to the "Why be moral?" question. After briefly clarifying the version of the question I'm concerned with, as well as extant theistic answers to the question, I argue for a new kind of answer. Roughly, while on standard answers, future (post death) benefits directly generate present reason to be moral, on my view, they only do so indirectly. On my view, we only have present reason to be moral because we will have reason to be moral in the afterlife. I propose a principle of reason inheritance that would justify this proposal. I also argue for my view, over the standard view: it alone can account for Prichard's Dilemma. Finally, I show how my proposal entails two interesting theses: a bodily eschaton and a loose type of purgatory.
Susan Wolf holds that while blameworthiness requires the ability to do otherwise, praiseworthiness does not. We first tackle the question of what the ability to do otherwise involves, highlighting its relationship with the control condition on moral responsibility. We propose a counterfactual test that would be acceptable to proponents of the rational abilities view such as Wolf. Using this counterfactual test, we argue that Wolf's asymmetry thesis is false: praiseworthy agents, just like blameworthy agents, must be able to do otherwise, in the sense prescribed by the counterfactual test. We conclude the essay by showing that considerations put forward by Wolf and her allies about the normative character of moral responsibility do not imply any asymmetry between blameworthiness and praiseworthiness.
The aim of this paper is two-fold. We argue against the received conception of epistemic malevolence and give a broader characterisation that, we argue, captures its real scope. We tackle the current notion of epistemic malevolence (EM) on three fronts. We claim that this notion fails to capture cases of EM that are (i) not knowledge directed (but that affect the agent's epistemic character), (ii) not robustly volitional (that do not involve an active opposition to the epistemic good by the malevolent agent) and that (iii) are not merely transactional (as opposed to structural). As a result, we claim that the received notion of EM fails to recognise (arguably) clear instances of EM because it is too narrow. Ultimately, we argue that such narrowness gives the false impression that, unlike its moral counterpart, EM is uncommon. After arguing for this, we offer a wider characterisation of EM and show the role this can play in generating solutions to the problem the phenomena poses.
Advanced modalizing, namely, possibilities and necessities concerning modal space itself, is problematic for a Lewis-style analysis of modality. A popular solution, proposed by Divers, postulates explicit semantic clauses for a collapse of advanced modalizing, to the conclusion that all such matters are, if true in the first place, both possible and necessary. But this is problematic: Divers' solution not only leaves no room for "advanced" contingency, but also renders alternative approaches to Lewisian metaphysics not merely false or metaphysically impossible but analytically false. In this paper, we propose a new framework for advanced modalizing that introduces two novel modal operators, which evaluate sentences not at worlds but at galaxies. This move avoids the collapse of modality and potentially restores a measure of contingency to advanced modal discourse. A key strength of our approach is that it enables the expression of alternative metaphysical positions within a unified modal framework.
