Two common theses in contemporary epistemology are that ‘knowledge excludes luck’ and that knowledge depends on ‘purely epistemic’ factors. In this essay, I shall argue as follows: given some plausible assumptions, ‘anti-luck epistemology,’ which is committed to the fi rst thesis, implies the falsity of the second thesis. That is, I will argue that anti-luck epistemology leads to what has been called ‘pragmatic encroachment’ on knowledge. Anti-luck epistemologists hoping to resist encroachment must accept a controversial thesis about true belief or a dubious claim about luck and value and interests.

It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus on what makes standards like etiquette ‘not really normative’. I defend a fictionalist theory on which etiquette is ‘not really normative’ in roughly the same way that Sherlock is ‘not really a detective’, and show that fictionalism about some normative standards helps us explain the possibility of normative authority.

Does natural selection explain why individual organisms have the traits that they do? This question has been the subject of vigorous debate in recent philosophy of biology. Sober and Walsh have defended the thesis that natural selection does not explain why any individual organism has the traits that it does. This thesis, I shall call ‘the Negative View.’ Neander and Matthen have defended the contrary thesis, which I shall call ‘the Positive View,’ according to which natural selection at least sometimes does explain why an individual organism has the traits that it does. In this paper, I will argue that recent arguments for the Positive View fail for a reason hitherto unnoticed and I will demonstrate that other recent defenses of the Negative View depend upon my own for their plausibility.

I begin, in Section II, by showing that the issue is whether or not natural selection explains, of an individual, why it has the traits it does.

Automated Influence is the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to collect, integrate, and analyse people’s data in order to deliver targeted interventions that shape their behaviour. We consider three central objections against Automated Influence, focusing on privacy, exploitation, and manipulation, showing in each case how a structural version of that objection has more purchase than its interactional counterpart. By rejecting the interactional focus of “AI Ethics” in favour of a more structural, political philosophy of AI, we show that the real problem with Automated Influence is the crisis of legitimacy that it precipitates.

A person enters the moral realm when she affirms that other persons matter in the same way that she does. This, of course, is just the beginning, for she must then determine what follows from this affirmation. One way in which we treat other persons as mattering is by respecting them. And one way in which we respect persons is by respecting their wishes, desires, decisions, choices, ends, and goals. I will call all of these things ‘aims.’ Sometimes we respect another person's aims simply by refraining from doing certain things, such as treating her in ways that thwart her aims, or interfering with her attempt to pursue them. Other times we respect a person's aims by taking positive action to help her pursue them.

But how exactly does respect for persons translate into respect for their aims? And which aims merit respect? One answer comes from Kant.

Philosophers of science now broadly agree that doing good science involves making non-epistemic value judgments. I call attention to two very different normative standards which can be used to evaluate such judgments: standards grounded in ethics and standards grounded in political philosophy. Though this distinction has not previously been highlighted, I show that the values in science literature contain arguments of each type. I conclude by explaining why this distinction is important. Seeking to determine whether some value-laden determination meets substantive ethical standards is a very different endeavor from seeking to determine if it is politically legitimate.

James Tully and others have argued recently that the theory of property Locke defends in the Second Treatise was designed to justify European settlement on the lands of North American Natives. If this view becomes generally accepted, and Tuck suggests it will be, doubts may arise about the impartiality of Lockean property theories. Locke, as is well established and documented again by Tully, had huge vested interests in the European settlement of North America and possibly in the enslavement of Native Peoples. Doubts about Locke may reflect on all rights theories of property and thus bring into question ‘one of the major political philosophies of the modem world’ (Tully, ‘Rediscovering America,’ 165). Raising these doubts is part of Tully's declared intention (Tully, ‘Rediscovering America,’ 166). His article tries to show that the Native systems of property and government which Locke defines away as illegitimate are in fact interesting and potentially beneficial alternatives to Lockean individual rights theories.

Picture a heroin addict of the sort frequently found in philosophical work on freedom and responsibility. In Harry Frankfurt's terms, she is an unwilling addict. She wishes she were not an addict, has attempted to break her addiction but failed, and hopes to escape from the demands of the drug — but in spite of her will to resist, she satisfies her craving in the end. The unwilling addict does not merely have a conflict of desires: she experiences herself as surrendering to a desire which is not really hers, a desire with respect to which she feels a passive observer or an active opponent. Her desire strikes her as alien, incomprehensible. There are at least two striking features of such an addict. The first is what we will call her akrasia.(We use the term ‘akrasia’ here in a broad sense, to mean ‘ acting against one's better judgment,’ and assume for this paper that akrasia in this form exists.) Her better judgment recommends not taking heroin, indeed ending the habit, yet she takes heroin anyway. The second is what we will call her alienation from her desire to use the drug.

Among the more notorious of Cartesian doctrines is the bête machine doctrine — the view that brute animals lack not only reason, but any form of consciousness (having no mind or soul). Recent English commentaries have served to obscure, rather than to clarify, the historical Descartes's views. Standard interpretations have it that insofar as Descartes intends to establish the bête machine doctrine his arguments are palpably flawed. One camp of interpreters thus disputes that he even holds the doctrine. As I shall attempt to show, not only does Descartes affirm the doctrine, his supporting arguments are not palpably flawed — even if they ultimately come up short. It will indeed emerge that, in making his case, Descartes employs interesting argumentative strategies that have not been duly appreciated.

It is often supposed that there is a relationship between desert and responsibility: that to be deserving we must be responsible for that which makes us deserving. Indeed, there seems little doubt that a supposed relationship between desert and responsibility, combined with a growing tendency to view less and less as the responsibility of the individual, contributed to the reluctance to appeal to desert which has been a feature of much recent moral and political philosophy. Certainly, if to be deserving we need to be responsible for that which makes us deserving ‘all the way down,’ it is not easy to see how anyone could ever be deserving of anything.

I will argue that the claim that we can deserve only on the basis of that for which we are responsible — the desert-responsibility thesis — is false. There is no conceptual connection between desert and responsibility. Nevertheless, it is true that many claims to deserve are undermined if there is a lack of responsibility.

It has been argued that the attribution of intentional actions is sensitive to our moral judgment (Knobe 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, see also Mele 2003, Phelan & Sarkissian 2008). I will examine these arguments and Suggest an alternative explanation for the experiments they are based on.

Joshua Knobe conducted the following experiment (Knobe 2003) to support this claim. Subjects were given two vignettes that differed only in one small detail and this difference influenced their attribution of intentionality. The first vignette was the following:

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.

This paper argues that Deonna and Teroni's attitudinal theory of emotions faces two serious problems. The first is that their master argument fails to establish the central tenet of the theory, namely, that the formal objects of emotions do not feature in the content of emotions. The second is that the attitudinal theory itself is vulnerable to a dilemma. By pointing out these problems, our paper provides indirect support to the main competitor of the attitudinal theory, namely, the perceptual theory of emotions.

It is often said that singular causal statements express a relationship between one event and another or between a fact and an event. This is a very strong view, which has the following simple corollary: singular causal statements whose cause-term purports to refer to an event (or a fact) and whose effect-term purports to refer to an event express a relationship between an event (or a fact) and an event.

Thus, both Davidson and Kim would claim that the singular causal Statement

(1) Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk caused his death expresses a relationship between two events, referred to, respectively, by the expressions “Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk” and “his death.” For Kim, but not for Davidson, an event is analyzable as a thing's having a property at or during a time. The event of Socrates’ drinking hemlock at dusk consists of Socrates’ at a certain time having the property of drinking hemlock at dusk. I shall not here try to choose between their respective theories of events but will only note that both theorists would say that (1) expresses a relationship between events however the latter are to be construed.

This paper explains and defends a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On this view, credences are a species of beliefs, and the degree of credence is determined by the content of what is believed. We begin by developing what we take to be the most plausible belief-first view. Then, we offer several arguments for it. Finally, we show how it can resist objections that have been raised to belief-first views. We conclude that the belief-first view is more plausible than many have previously supposed.

Philosophy is a difficult mode of expression, and anyone who uses the word ‘potentiality’ invites misunderstanding. It is no surprise, then, that John Fisher ascribes to me a doomed position I do not hold. According to him I argue:

1. X is a creature of a certain sort.

2. Creatures of this sort have right R.

3. Therefore, X has a right R.

We talk of the differences between the old Camus and the new Camus. Often such talk is equivalent to talk of the differences between Camus’ old self and Camus’ new self, between Camus’ diachronous selves. In other contexts, contexts which I shall ignore, the old and the new Camus is something we can read, provide literary criticism of, ponder over. In these contexts it is to the literary works of the old and new Camus that we are referring. The same kind of ambiguity attaches to the expressions ‘the early Beethoven’ and ‘the later Beethoven’.

Both in ethics and in epistemology one source of scepticism in its contemporary version is the realization, often belated, of the full consequences of atheism. Modern non-moral philosophy looks back to Descartes as its father figure, but disowns the Third Meditation. But if God does not underwrite one's cognitive powers, what does? The largely unknown evolution of them, which is just a version of Descartes’ unreliable demon? “Let us … grant that all that is here said of God is a fable, nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arived at the state of being that I have reached, whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method — since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my being the less powerful” (Meditation I, Haldane and Ross, tr.).

In 1989 the philosopher and self-described feminist Christina Sommers published a short essay — ‘an opinion piece,’ she called it — that was eventually developed into and published as a philosophical article. In this essay Sommers criticized ‘feminist philosophers’ (her term) for being ‘oddly unsympathetic to the women whom they claim to represent.’ Specifically, Sommers accused these philosophers of ignoring the ‘values of the average woman’ and of being caught up in an ‘ideological fervor.’ To emphasize her point that the so-called feminist philosophers have lost touch with ‘the average woman,’ Sommers wrote that ‘One must nevertheless expect that many women will continue to swoon at the sight of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs to a fate undreamt of in feminist philosophy.’

Why should one be moral? This question is nearly as old as the discipline of moral philosophy itself; it has been troubling ethicists ever since Glaucon challenged Socrates to disprove that “the life of the unjust man is much better than that of the just.” To find an answer to the question of why one should be moral has been taken to be one of the most fundamental tasks of moral philosophy. And even a casual survey of the history of ethics will reveal that there are many ways of trying to answer the question.