Gillian Piggott's study of the resonances between the work of Charles Dickens and Walter Benjamin arrives in the wake of an increasing critical interest in Benjamin's life and thought, as an array of books from Graham Gilloch's Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (1996) to Esther Leslie's biographical Walter Benjamin (2007), and beyond, makes clear. While many critics have addressed Benjamin's importance to discussions of nineteenth-century modernity, Piggott's is the first booklength attempt to compare Benjamin and (...) Dickens. Fler goal is to produce a "creative comparison of the authors' responses to modernity" (4) rather than establish direct lines of influence, though she points out that Benjamin was aware of at least some of Dickens's work, particularly The Old Curiosity Shop and Great Expectations (11), and included fifteen entries about him in the Arcades Project (1927-40). (shrink)

I argue that extant accounts of harm all fail to account for important desiderata, and that we should therefore jettison the concept when doing moral philosophy.

Recent literature on intrinsic value contains a number of disputes about the nature of the concept. On the one hand, there are those who think states of affairs, such as states of pleasure or desire satisfaction, are the bearers of intrinsic value (“Mooreans”); on the other hand, there are those who think concrete objects, like people, are intrinsically valuable (“Kantians”). The contention of this paper is that there is not a single concept of intrinsic value about which Mooreans and Kantians (...) have disagreed, but rather two distinct concepts. I state a number of principles about intrinsic value that have typically (though not universally) been held by Mooreans, all of which are typically denied by Kantians. I show that there are distinct theoretical roles for a concept of intrinsic value to play in a moral framework. When we notice these distinct theoretical roles, we should realize that there is room for two distinct concepts of intrinsic value within a single moral framework: one that accords with some or all of the Moorean principles, and one that does not. (shrink)

Defenses of political obligation—the pro tanto obligation to obey the law because the state commands it—often operate at or near the level of ideal theory. Critics, though, increasingly question that approach’s relevance for the imperfect states that exist. This article develops a lesser evil framework to evaluate political obligation with several advantages over more ideal approaches: (1) avoids the questionable assumption that some actual states are reasonably just, (2) recognizes that context matters for political obligation, (3) captures the complicity involved (...) in obeying the state, and (4) identifies a basis—varying intuitions on lesser evil justifications—to distinguish philosophical anarchism from conceptions of political obligation without the former collapsing into the latter. We remain agnostic on whether this framework establishes political obligation to any state but argue that it offers a compelling account of the moral dilemma of obeying the state under nonideal conditions. (shrink)

The evidence most of us have for our beliefs on global climate change, the extent of human contribution to it, and appropriate anticipatory and mitigating actions turns crucially on epistemic trust. We extend trust or distrust to many varied others: scientists performing original research, intergovernmental agencies and those reviewing research, think tanks offering critique and advocating skepticism, journalists transmitting and interpreting claims, even social systems of modern science such as peer-reviewed publication and grant allocation. Our personal experiences and assessments of (...) evidential indicators themselves may be buttressed significantly by trust, not just in. (shrink)

An overview (about 8,000 words) of act utilitarianism, covering the basic idea of the theory, historical examples, how it differs from rule utilitarianism and motive utilitarianism, supporting arguments, and standard objections. A closing section provides a brief introduction to indirect utilitarianism (i.e., a Hare- or Railton-style view distinguishing between a decision procedure and a criterion of rightness).

Power metaphysicians are concerned with, well, powers. Theists claim interest in the most powerful entity there is, God. As such, recent work on the ontology of powers may well have much to offer theists when thinking about God’s power. In this paper I start to provide a metaphysics of God’s ‘power’, something many definitions of omnipotence make reference to. In particular I will be interested in explicating how a power ontology can account for the strength and range of God’s power, (...) as well as showing how this account of divine power can fit with a timeless conception of God. (shrink)

A popular response to the Exclusion Argument for physicalism maintains that mental events depend on their physical bases in such a way that the causation of a physical effect by a mental event and its physical base needn’t generate any problematic form of causal overdetermination, even if mental events are numerically distinct from and irreducible to their physical bases. This paper presents and defends a form of dualism that implements this response by using a dispositional essentialist view of properties to (...) argue that the psychophysical laws linking mental events to their physical bases are metaphysically necessary. I show the advantages of such a position over an alternative form of dualism that merely places more “modal weight” on psychophysical laws than on physical laws. The position is then defended against the objection that it is inconsistent with dualism. Lastly, some suggestions are made as to how dualists might clarify the contribution that mental causes make to their physical effects. (shrink)

The historical sciences, such as geology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, appear to have no means to test hypotheses. However, on closer examination, reasoning in the historical sciences relies upon regularities, regularities that can be tested. I outline the role of regularities in the historical sciences, and in the process, blur the distinction between the historical sciences and the experimental sciences: all sciences deploy theories about the world in their investigations.

We develop positive model theory, which is a non first order analogue of classical model theory where compactness is kept at the expense of negation. The analogue of a first order theory in this framework is a compact abstract theory: several equivalent yet conceptually different presentations of this notion are given. We prove in particular that Banach and Hilbert spaces are compact abstract theories, and in fact very well-behaved as such.

Johannes Kniess argues that a generational smoking ban, which prevents all those born after a certain date from buying tobacco, need not violate relational egalitarian commitments.1 Those denied the freedom to smoke need not be regarded as inferior, discriminated against, stigmatised or have their interests neglected. However, his argument focuses on a comparison between the younger cohort, who are permanently denied the freedom to smoke, and existing smokers, who retain the freedom to smoke because withdrawing this would impose greater burdens (...) on them. As illustrated in table 1, there are three relevant groups in society: (1) older smokers, (2) older non-smokers and (3) younger non-smokers. (The ban, if effective, means that there will not be any smokers in the younger cohort, so the potential fourth category is empty.) The comparisons Kniess makes focus on groups 1 and 3, but neglect group 2: those who are old enough to smoke, but who are not already smokers. View this table: Table 1 Groups in society A generational ban involves differential treatment of older cohorts (groups 1 and 2) and younger cohorts (group 3). Kniess argues that such differential treatment can be …. (shrink)

We reply to Scheffler's "Doing and Allowing.".

It is often thought that some version of what is generally called the publicity condition is a reasonable requirement to impose on moral theories. In this article, after formulating and distinguishing three versions of the publicity condition, I argue that the arguments typically used to defend them are unsuccessful and, moreover, that even in its most plausible version, the publicity condition ought to be rejected as both question-begging and unreasonably demanding.

Purposeful infection of healthy volunteers with a microbial pathogen seems at odds with acceptable ethical standards, but is an important contemporary research avenue used to study infectious diseases and their treatments. Generally termed ‘controlled human infection studies’, this research is particularly useful for fast tracking the development of candidate vaccines and may provide unique insight into disease pathogenesis otherwise unavailable. However, scarce bioethical literature is currently available to assist researchers and research ethics committees in negotiating the distinct issues raised by (...) research involving purposefully infecting healthy volunteers. In this article, we present two separate challenge studies and highlight the ethical issues of human challenge studies as seen through a well-constructed framework. Beyond the same stringent ethical standards seen in other areas of medical research, we conclude that human challenge studies should also include: independent expert reviews, including systematic reviews; a publicly available rationale for the research; implementation of measures to protect the public from spread of infection beyond the research setting; and a new system for compensation for harm. We hope these additions may encourage safer and more ethical research practice and help to safeguard public confidence in this vital research alternative in years to come. (shrink)

It's often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis—the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure.

This paper considers whether an analogy between distance and dissimilarlity supports the thesis that degree of dissimilarity is distance in a metric space. A straightforward way to justify the thesis would be to define degree of dissimilarity as a function of number of properties in common and not in common. But, infamously, this approach has problems with infinity. An alternative approach would be to prove representation and uniqueness theorems, according to which if comparative dissimilarity meets certain qualitative conditions, then it (...) is representable by distance in a metric space. I will argue that this approach faces equally severe problems with infinity. (shrink)

We continue [2], developing simplicity in the framework of compact abstract theories. Due to the generality of the context we need to introduce definitions which differ somewhat from the ones use in first order theories. With these modified tools we obtain more or less classical behaviour: simplicity is characterized by the existence of a certain notion of independence, stability is characterized by simplicity and bounded multiplicity, and hyperimaginary canonical bases exist.

There is this view propounded by some theorists which claims that some conceptions of the nature of time are incompatible with the Christian position on the defeat of evil. The aim of this article is twofold. First, to clarify exactly which thesis about time’s nature is taken to be problematic for the defeat of evil. And second, to show that scriptural support for understanding the defeat of evil as requiring that evil not be in the range of the existential quantifier, (...) something implicitly contended by those who put forward this problem, is weak and that these passages can be read in plausible ways which are affirmable by those who endorse the ‘problematic’ thesis. (shrink)

The introduction (about 6,000 words) to _The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism_, in three sections: utilitarianism’s place in recent and contemporary moral philosophy (including the opinions of critics such as Rawls and Scanlon), a brief history of the view (again, including the opinions of critics, such as Marx and Nietzsche), and an overview of the chapters of the book.

A critical assessment of the second chapter of Samuel Fleischacker’s Being Me Being You, where Fleischacker makes use of Smith’s account of empathy to develop a distinctive Smithian conception of ‘humanity’.

In this paper, I consider intellectualist and anti-intellectualist approaches to knowledge-how and propose a third solution: a virtue-based account of knowledge-how. I sketch the advantages of a virtue-based account of knowledge-how and consider whether we should prefer a reliabilist or a responsibilist virtue-account of knowledge-how. I argue that only a responsibilist account will maintain the crucial distinction between knowing how to do something and merely being able to do it. Such an account, I hold, must incorporate ‘learning how to do (...) something’ as an essential part. Drawing on an argument by Craig, I hold that the function of the concept of knowing how is to mark out practical experts whom one can trust either to perform an action on one's behalf, or to teach one how to perform that action oneself. The best way to identify practical experts, I hold, is to discover what they have learned about performing the action in question. In arguing for the importance of the concept ‘learning’ to the field of knowledge-how, I argue for a new connection between the philosophy of education and virtue epistemology. (shrink)

Whole-genome analysis and whole-exome analysis generate many more clinically actionable findings than traditional targeted genetic analysis. These findings may be relevant to research participants themselves as well as for members of their families. Though researchers performing genomic analyses are likely to find medically significant genetic variations for nearly every research participant, what they will find for any given participant is unpredictable. The ubiquity and diversity of these findings complicate questions about disclosing individual genetic test results. We outline an approach for (...) disclosing a select range of genetic results to the relatives of research participants who have died, developed in response to relatives? requests during a pilot study of large-scale medical genetic sequencing. We also argue that studies that disclose individual research results to participants should, at a minimum, passively disclose individual results to deceased participants? relatives. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues, on the relationship between individual emissions and climate change, that “we cannot claim to know that it is morally wrong to drive a gas guzzler just for fun” or engage in other inessential emissions-producing individual activities. His concern is not uncertainty about the phenomenon of climate change, nor about human contribution to it. Rather, on Sinnott-Armstrong’s analysis the claim of individual moral responsibility for emissions must be grounded in a defensible moral principle, yet no principle withstands scrutiny. (...) I argue thatthe moral significance of individual emissions is obscured by this critique. I offer a moral principle, the threshold-contribution principle, capable of withstanding Sinnott-Armstrong’s criticisms while also plausibly explaining what’s wrong with gas-guzzling joyrides and other gratuitous emissions-producing individual acts. (shrink)

There are cases of ineffable learning — i. e., cases where an agent learns something, but becomes certain of nothing that she can express — where it is rational to update by Jeffrey conditionalization. But there are likewise cases of ineffable learning where updating by Jeffrey conditionalization is irrational. In this paper, we first characterize a novel class of cases where it is irrational to update by Jeffrey conditionalization. Then we use the d-separation criterion to develop a causal understanding of (...) when and when not to Jeffrey conditionalize that bars updating by Jeffrey conditionalization in these cases. Finally, we reflect on how the possibility of so-called “unfaithful” causal systems bears on the normative force of the causal updating norm that we advocate. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this article is to (...) add further considerations in support of that tension. I suggest three ways in which utilitarianism comes significantly apart from mainstream concerns with animal welfare. First, utilitarianism opposes animal cruelty only when it offers an inefficient ratio of pleasure to pain; while this may be true of eating animal products, it is not obviously true of other abuses. Second, utilitarianism faces a familiar problem of the inefficacy of individual decisions; I consider a common response to this worry, and offer further concerns. Finally, the common utilitarian argument against animal cruelty ignores various pleasures that humans may get from the superior status that a structure supporting exploitation confers. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of religion there are three main ways in which God is conceptualised in relation to personhood:God is a person and so personal. God is non-personal, and so is not a person. God is a personal non-person. The first two of these options will be familiar to many, with held by most contemporary monotheist philosophers of religion and mainly by those who are pantheists., however, is a view some may not have come across, despite its proponents claiming it (...) was the view of great philosophical theologians from the past. However, within recent times has become more popular. On the face of it, it might not be clear what the difference between and is, and whether debate had between the two positions is substantive. The goal of this paper is therefore to clarify the debate and assess whether the many claims advocates of make as to why God cannot be a person stand up to scrutiny or are persuasive. My suggestion will be that on the whole they do and are not. As such, defenders of will either need to defend these reasons in more detail or focus on the area I suggest the debate really rests on. (shrink)

I review the book “Making Prehistory: Historical Science and the Scientific Realism Debate” by Derek Turner. Turner suggests that philosophers should take seriously the historical sciences such as geology when considering philosophy of science issues. To that end, he explores the scientific realism debate with the historical sciences in mind. His conclusion is a view allied to that of Arthur Fine: a view Turner calls the natural historical attitude. While I find Turner’s motivations good, I find his characterisation of the (...) historical sciences unconvincing. I say why in a section at the end of the review. The result is that I am unpersuaded by his thesis. (shrink)

The Exclusion Argument for physicalism maintains that since (1) every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, and (2) cases of causal overdetermination are rare, it follows that if (3) mental events cause physical events as frequently as they seem to, then (4) mental events must be physical in nature. In defence of (1), it is sometimes said that (1) is supported if not entailed by conservation laws. Against this, I argue that conservation laws do not lend sufficient support to (...) (1) to render its denial ‘unscientific’, and that those who accept (3) and deny (4) may consequently respond to the Exclusion Argument by denying (1) without thereby setting themselves at odds with current science. I also argue that conservation laws are compatible with (3) and the negation of (4), and that one can therefore accept conservation laws and (3) while denying both (1) and (4). (shrink)

None of us can avoid being interested in food. Our very existence depends on the supply of safe, nutritious foods. It is then hardly surprising that food has become the focus of a wide range of ethical concerns: Is the food we buy safe? Is it produced by means which respect the welfare of animals and sustain the land? Are modern biotechnologies employed in food production immoral? This book addresses such issues by applying ethical principles to many areas of current (...) concern. The contributors provide original and thought-provoking treatments of a number of highly topical issues - from global hunger and its ethical implications to the cultural habits affecting consumption. This interdisciplinary study will prove to be essential reading for all those concerned with food, as professionals, students or consumers. (shrink)

In The Impossibility of Perfection, Michael Slote tries to show that the traditional Aristotelian doctrine of the unity of the virtues is mistaken. His argumentative strategy is to provide counterexamples to this doctrine, by showing that there are what he calls “partial virtues”—pairs of virtues that conflict with one another but both of which are ethically indispensible. Slote offers two lines of argument for the existence of partial virtues. The first is an argument for the partiality of a particular pair (...) of virtues: frankness and tact. The second is a kind of feminist critique. I argue that both of these lines of argument fail. In both cases, Slote fails to ask whether the apparent conflict between putatively partial virtues has arisen from a misunderstanding of the demands of those virtues. From this error I suggest we can learn an important lesson: whether in our studies thinking about the virtues or in our everyday lives trying to practice them, it is a serious mistake to focus on the relationships among virtues without considering precisely what each of these virtues demands. (shrink)

Some features of the ideology motivating the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC have surprisingly modern echoes in 20th-century genocides. Racial, religious or cultural prejudices, gender and other social hierarchies, territorial expansionism, and an idealization of cultivation all characterize the thinking of Cato the Censor, like that of more recent perpetrators. The tragedy of Carthage, its details lost with most of the works of Livy and other ancient authors, and concealed behind allegory in Virgil’s Aeneid, became known to early (...) modern Europeans from briefer ancient accounts rediscovered only in the 15th century, as Europe’s own expansion began. (shrink)

The Impossible Arises is an art history and philosophy of impossible pictures, focused especially on the contributions of Oscar Reutersvärd. The book draws on an archive of Reutersvärd’s letters an...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework of multiversional narrative processing, or multiversionality. Multiversionality is the consideration of multiple possible event sequences for an incomplete narrative during reception, from reading a novel to listening to the story of a friend’s day. It occurs naturally and is experienced in a wide range of cases, such as suspense, surprise, counterfactuals, and detective stories. Receiving a narrative, we propose, is characterized by the spontaneous creation of competing interpretive models of the narrative that are then (...) used to create predictions and projections for the narrative’s future. These predictions serve as a mechanism for integrating incoming information and updating the narrative model through prediction error, without completely eliminating past versions. We define this process as having three aspects: (1) constrained expectations, (2) preference projection, and (3) causal extrapolation. Constrained expectations and preference projections respectively create the bounds and subjective desires for a narrative’s progress, while causal extrapolation builds, reworks, and maintains the potential models for understanding the narrative. We offer multiversionality as a novel framework for thinking about narrative, social cognition, and decision making that presents adaptive benefits and future directions for empirical study. (shrink)

Opponents of legalised assisted dying often assert that palliative care is worse in countries where assisted dying has been legalised, and imply that legalised assisted dying makes palliative care worse. This study considers five versions of this claim: that it is difficulty to access expert palliative care in countries where assisted dying has been legalised, that those countries rank low in their quality of end‐of‐life care; that legalising assisted dying doesn't expand patient choice in respect of palliative care; that growth (...) in palliative care services has stalled in countries where assisted dying has been legalised; and that legalised assisted dying impedes the growth of palliative care or causes it to decline. In each case, it concludes that neither argumentation nor evidence supports these claims. (shrink)

Utilitarianism directs us to act in ways that impartially maximize welfare or utility or at least aim to do that. Some find this view highly compelling. Others object that it has intuitively repugnant results; that it condones evildoing and injustice; that it is excessively imposing and controlling; that it is alienating; and that it fails to offer meaningful practical guidance. In this 'Little Debates' volume, James Lenman argues that utilitarianism's directive to improve the whole universe on a cosmic time scale (...) is apt to lead it down a path of imperious moral overreach. Lenman further maintains that the project ultimately shipwrecks upon an extreme lack of epistemic humility in framing the determinants of what is morally right and wrong beyond the limits of what we can ever hope to know. Utilitarianism thus leaves us morally clueless. In contrast, Ben Bramble seeks to develop and defend an original form of utilitarianism, less vulnerable than other, more familiar versions to a number of important objections (including those raised by Lenman). Bramble's form of utilitarianism aims to avoid other unappealing results by presenting it as a claim about what we have the most reason to do and not as a theory of right action (which Bramble urges we should understand quite differently by referencing what would motivate virtuous people). The two authors debate various forms of this longstanding ethical theory, arguing for very different conclusions, in a way that is sure to leave readers with new views of their own moral thoughts and lives. Key Features: Focuses on one of the dominant ethical theories debated by moral philosophers today Clearly written, free of jargon and technicality, highly accessible to students Accessibly addresses questions of great importance to anyone wishing to grow in understanding of human moral life Provides a glossary of key terms that are bolded in the main text Includes section summaries that give an overview of the main arguments and a comprehensive bibliography for further reading Important issues discussed include: welfare; value; right action; virtue; impartiality; obligations to non-human animals; the badness of human extinction; the happiness of future people; the ethics of climate change; the long term future; and the moral significance of the limits to what we can know. (shrink)

Moral Blackmail: Coercion, Responsibility, and Global Justice identifies a novel kind of forced action, yet one that is relatively neglected in ethics and moral philosophy. Moral blackmail occurs when someone is forced to do something because someone else has made all its alternatives morally unacceptable. Ben Colburn explores moral blackmail by first examining existing theories of coercion, responsibility, and voluntary action, and defending its existence from various sceptical metaethical arguments, before arguing that moral blackmail's significance is not limited to the (...) interpersonal: it is also endemic in the structures of distribution and decision-making at the largest scale. To show this, he considers two problems in intergenerational and international justice: the problem of 'passing the buck' in environmental and population policies in the former, and the problem of 'taking up the slack' in situations of partial compliance with the demands of the latter. Recognising these as instances of moral blackmail writ large offers novel solutions to these long-standing philosophical problems, as well as offering proof in use of the account Colburn proposes. Moral Blackmail will be of interest to those studying and researching political philosophy, ethical theory, applied ethics and politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Viewers of Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us are likely to approach the film expecting it to be about race. Undercutting current cultural orthodoxy about which marker of identity has priority, the story reveals itself instead to be about class, as doppelgängers emerge from underground to free themselves from the affluent originals allegorically oppressing them in a capitalist culture. In what Vera Tobin calls a “narrative rug-pull,” the revelation of the main character’s real identity invites viewers to reinterpret what they have (...) seen and to rethink what their loyalties were and should be. Us thereby performs a rug-pull of a specifically ideological variety, as, prior to the reveal, viewers only make the specific interpretive assumptions they do because of deeper ideological ones. Where Tobin writes against the notion that cognitive biases are necessarily bad, since they can be deployed for aesthetic pleasure, I argue further that they can be weaponized in narrative to artfully combat ideological bias. There is untapped potential for rug-pulling to be used in ideology critique, though I end with some pessimistic caveats about the possibility of doing so in a capitalist culture. (shrink)

A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like competence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action, un- can be added to many verbs, but not all (e.g., roll/unroll; close/*unclose). This study compared theoretical accounts of how this is done. Children aged 5–6 (N = 18), 9–10 (N = (...) 18), and adults (N = 18) rated the acceptability of un- prefixed forms of 48 verbs (and, as a control, bare forms). Across verbs, a negative correlation was observed between the acceptability of ungrammatical un- prefixed forms (e.g., *unclose) and the frequency of (a) the bare form and (b) alternative forms (e.g., open), supporting the entrenchment and pre-emption hypotheses, respectively. Independent ratings of the extent to which verbs instantiate the semantic properties characteristic of a hypothesized semantic cryptotype for un- prefixation were a significant positive predictor of acceptability, for all age groups. The relative importance of each factor differed for attested and unattested un- forms and also varied with age. The findings are interpreted in the context of a new hybrid account designed to incorporate the three factors of entrenchment, pre-emption, and verb semantics. (shrink)

Many people feel that respecting a person’s autonomy is not sufficiently important to obligate us to stay out of their affairs in all cases; but the ground for interference may often turn out to be a hunch that the agent cannot really be competent, or cannot really know what her decision implies; for if she were both of these things, surely she would not make such a foolish decision. This paper suggests a justification of paternalism that does not rely on (...) such appeals. I argue that in cases where an agent will undergo a significant alteration in their evaluative outlook – ‘evaluative shift’ – three central, persuasive objections to paternalism lose their force, and offer a prima facie case for paternalism in some of these cases. I then suggest that we can extend this argument to some cases where evaluative alteration is not predictable, but where the risk and harm are both significant. In such cases, paternalism may be justified. (shrink)

It is widely believed to be permissible for a physician to discontinue any treatment upon the request of a competent patient. Many also believe it is never permissible for a physician to intentionally kill a patient. I argue that the prospect of deactivating a patient’s artificial heart presents us with a dilemma: either the first belief just mentioned is false or the second one is. Whichever horn of the dilemma we choose has significant implications for contemporary medical ethics.

This book is about love - our ideals of love, our experiences of love, and the fatal consequences of love. A unique collaboration between a leading philosopher in the field of emotions and a social scientist, In The Name of Love presents fascinating insights into romantic love and its future in modern society.

The value of ecological restoration has seen considerable criticism and defense in environmental ethics over the past thirty years. Proponents stress the human and ecological benefits of restoration projects at their best; critics characterize restoration as impossible, arbitrary, domination or delusional. As ethical debates on ecological restoration developed and sometimes threatened to devolve into scholastic quibbling, pragmatists contributed a welcome perspective, as Light and others urged that those investigating restoration attend to its publicly relevant aspects. Most recently...

Why do thinkers hostile or agnostic toward Christianity find in its apocalyptic doctrines—often seen as bizarre—appealing tools for interpreting politics? This article tackles that puzzle. First, i...

Defenses of political obligation—the pro tanto obligation to obey the law because the state commands it—often operate at or near the level of ideal theory. Critics, though, increasingly question that approach’s relevance for the imperfect states that exist. This article develops a lesser evil framework to evaluate political obligation with several advantages over more ideal approaches: (1) avoids the questionable assumption that some actual states are reasonably just, (2) recognizes that context matters for political obligation, (3) captures the complicity involved (...) in obeying the state, and (4) identifies a basis—varying intuitions on lesser evil justifications—to distinguish philosophical anarchism from conceptions of political obligation without the former collapsing into the latter. We remain agnostic on whether this framework establishes political obligation to any state but argue that it offers a compelling account of the moral dilemma of obeying the state under nonideal conditions. (shrink)

An important strand of argument in Alastair Norcross's Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands is the rejection of the standard account of harm, which underwrites non-comparative statements of the form “act A harms person X.” According to Norcross, the correct account of harm is a contextualist one that only underwrites comparative statements of the form “act A results in a worse world for X than alternative act B, and a better world than alternative act C.” This article criticizes Norcross's contextualist (...) account and his rejection of the standard account. It follows that moral theorists of all kinds should not be deterred by Norcross's arguments from continuing to rely on the standard account and using it to non-comparatively categorize some acts as harmings. (shrink)

What is the fundamental nature of the physical universe? This paper generates new insights into this question through examining how brute fact metaphysics intersects with our best cosmological theories of the universe’s origin. To do this, I first make the case that fundamental physical things are – by necessity – ontologically brute. Ontological bruteness, I maintain, provides a rationale for the counterfactual claim that there is no reason why a fundamental has one physical identity rather than another. The paper then (...) gives an overview of modern cosmology. This empirically oriented analysis is enjoined to a metaphysical argument that – since science’s candidate fundamentals are impermissibly complex – we can appeal to brute fact metaphysics to meaningfully entertain the possibility of simpler fundamentals. The paper then investigates a particular simple fundamental I take to be most plausible: consciousness (understood as the intrinsic nature of matter). This discussion draws on cosmic-level evolution and panpsychism. While I remain agnostic about whether consciousness’ instantiation in fundamental-level physics and cosmology will be empirically verified, the paper draws attention to a number of emerging experimental paradigms that can – at least in principle – contribute to this project. (shrink)