Political protests are almost always collective endeavours, in which many people come together to jointly express some claim or demand. The power of those protests lies, in part, in their collectivity. But this collectivity also means that we may end up protesting alongside others who, though they endorse the shared claim the protest is expressing, also make other claims which are deeply unjust or harmful during the protest. This paper explores whether protesting alongside such others makes one complicit in the promotion or expression of those unjust or harmful claims, and whether we therefore have a duty not to participate (or to cease ongoing participation) in such protests. I identify two moral risks involved in protest which may ground such a duty – that we inadvertently amplify those views, and that we are unable to engage in effective counterspeech in response to them – and submit that when these risks are especially high, protestors have a pro tanto duty not to participate. However, I also show that the resources provided by different organisational forms protestors may use can help mitigate these risks.
Sometimes, after evaluating our motivations, values, and goals, we may retain or reject old ones, adopt new ones, and work to fulfill them. As a result, we might gain a skill, shift our perspective on a political issue, or begin to appreciate an aesthetic value. This process is one of active self-shaping. Philosophers have identified a special phenomenon of it through the lens of aspiration and explored its cognitive and conative aspects. Yet, more remains to be said about why we should understand it as a comprehensive experience, one that captures not only both components but also the specific way in which they co-occur, and its continuous nature. In this paper, I aim to provide new grounds for existing discussions and develop and defend three core ideas about aspiration: it is something continuous; incorporates both cognitive and conative elements; and involves an alignment between the two.
There has been a resurgence of instrumentalist accounts of moral psychology. The new accounts are seen as having overcome traditional criticisms against instrumentalism—and to have done so, centrally, by incorporating key insight from P. F. Strawson’s approach. Call this strategy the Strawson Defence of instrumentalism. The defence is widespread, but I will primarily focus on an admirably explicit development of it by Dale E. Miller in response to criticism by Bernard Williams. The aims of this paper are, first, to show that the Strawson Defence fails to answer the criticism and, second, to show the unimpeded relevance of the more serious aspect of Williams’ criticism for instrumentalism today. While the Hare-Williams debate frames this discussion, as it does Miller’s discussion, its relevance extends to the significant role that the Strawson Defence presently has in motivating a revival of instrumentalism.
Some authors have recently argued that people who emit large amounts of greenhouse gases are liable to defensive harm against their property. The main reason is that, according to recent estimates, a high emitter causes—in a matter of hours or days—a climate-related death in expectation. However, the actual probability that a high emitter will cause a death is very low. This is a problem in standard defensive liability accounts, which claim that a person can only be liable if she will cause death unless stopped, or at least creates the appearance that she will. There are plausible non-standard liability accounts where causation is not necessary for liability, and culpable risk imposition can suffice. The problem is that the probability of death that a high emitter imposes on each person is still low, on a par with many everyday acts that are intuitively justified. I argue that some emitters do nevertheless culpably impose unjustified risk. These emitters impose a low probability risk of death, but a very high normic risk of death. This means that it would be ‘normal’ if emitters caused death—we would need no additional explanation why their emissions caused death.
How do the colour blue and the number four relate with respect to their tastiness? Most disregard these cases of ‘non-comparability’ due to the fact that they seem to be of no interest when discussing practical reasoning. They are taken to be nonsensical and consequently do not cause a problem for everyday practical deliberation. In this paper, non-comparability is treated more carefully and not swiftly judged to be of no philosophical interest. It is argued that non-comparability constitutes support for the claim that there can be instantiated incomparability. First, several definitions of non-comparability are presented. Then a toy example is presented to show how non-comparability can cause a problem for practical deliberation. Finally, well-known discussions involving irreducible normative concepts are shown to constitute cases of non-comparability that are interesting from the perspective of practical reasoning. It is concluded that non-comparability provides substantial support for the possibility of instantiated incomparability.
