A hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007) occurs when a gap in shared resources leaves an agent unable to make her experience intelligible to herself or others. On Miranda Fricker’s account, no individual is culpable for a hermeneutical injustice (2007; 2013; 2016). This is because community-level structures determine the shared resources we use to make our experiences intelligible—e.g. shared languages and concepts. No individual has control over community-level structures, so no individual is responsible for gaps in shared resources. Contra Fricker, I argue that, for communicative hermeneutical injustice, individuals often do have control over the resources used to make their experiences intelligible to others. When we encounter gaps in a common language (like ‘English’), language users innovate across those gaps. If a hearer rejects a suggested innovation, they might culpably preserve a gap in shared resources. Fricker (2013; 2016) has responded to similar arguments (e.g. Medina 2012; Pohlhaus 2012), arguing that these are not cases of hermeneutical injustice. My account evades this response. Every case of communicative hermeneutical injustice involves a failed innovation.
A priori philosophical anarchism says that a right to be obeyed would run up against the duty to act autonomously, so there must be no one with a right to be obeyed. More recently, a parallel criticism of moral testimony has been advanced according to which there can be no right to be believed about moral matters because it would lead us to fail in our duty to form our moral beliefs for ourselves, and thus to bear responsibility for the beliefs and the actions we perform on account of them. This essay advances an interpretation of both objections to practical deference and a novel solution drawing on G.E.M. Anscombe’s little-discussed essay, “Authority in Morals.” I argue that the concern animating a priori anarchism and this version of moral testimony pessimism is that practical deference undermines our responsibility for our actions or beliefs. Anscombe’s discussion of teaching authority affords us a way of seeing that this is wrong-headed. In fact, the right to be obeyed or believed does not—and cannot—threaten to undermine a subject’s responsibility for what she believes or does out of deference to authority.
This paper evaluates the Condorcet Jury Theorem in the context of ambiguity. It explores the effects on the assumption of voter competence when voters face situations in which they can no longer ascribe a single probability. In contrast to voting in situations where voters are able to assign such probabilities, this paper demonstrates that voters may fail to vote competently under ambiguity, even if they are honest, practically rational, and epistemically competent. Thus, the conditions under which voter competence can be guaranteed become unclear once we adopt a less idealised framework of uncertainty. Specifically, conditions that ensure voter competence under risk do not necessarily guarantee voter competence under ambiguity. The second contribution is a more positive one. It outlines a fruitful research agenda aimed at identifying collective decision procedures that are better suited to less idealised uncertainty frameworks. In this regard, the paper shows how allowing abstention can have positive effects on the epistemic benefits of voting and extends the Condorcet Jury Theorem accordingly.
Causal decision theory has typically been discussed in contexts where agents adopt sharp credences of the sort adequately represented by a single probability measure. Under this assumption, causal decision theory is committed to a number of counterintuitive verdicts in cases involving decision instability. Many of these troubles lessen for sufficiently open-minded causalists who adopt maximally imprecise credences regarding their own acts. I suggest this provides novel pragmatic support for a version of the deliberation crowds out prediction thesis according to which rational agents’ act credences should generally be imprecise in this way, and then propose an appropriate decision rule for use by causalist agents with imprecise credences.
A drawback of the standard modal ontological proof is its assumption that it's possible that there is something godlike. Kurt Gödel's ontological proof seeks to establish this possibility with the help of some axiological principles. But the axiological principles he relies on are implausible. And the same goes for other Gödelian ontological proofs in the literature. In this paper, I put forward a Gödelian ontological proof that only relies on plausible axiological principles. And I adapt the proof both for constant and varying domains. Nevertheless, the proof still needs the axiom that being godlike is positive in the sense of being a "purely good"-making property.
