I want to present some evidence that facts about de re attitudes or causal facts are important in the explanation of actions. In particular, I will argue that an attempt by Ernest Sosa and Mark Pastin [4] to give a scheme for explaining intentional actions fails. By adding either de re or causal locutions we can devise a more adequate schema for explaining action, but their analysis had been designed to eliminate de re locutions from explanations of intentional action. Showing the failure of their analysis does not, of course, show that de re or causal elements are required in these explanations, since it does not rule out the possibility of alternative explanatory schemes. But the centrality of de re or causal elements is supported by the inadequacy of their attempts to dispense with them.

This is yet another study of Mill's ‘proof’ of utilitarianism, and since the topic is by now rather shop-worn I should state right off what new form I hope to give to it. Mill argues from the premise that each person desires his own happiness to the conclusion that the general happiness is desirable. To be more precise, he argues that one's own happiness is the only thing that any person desires as an end, and from this he moves to the conclusion that the general happiness is that state of things which should be promoted. It is not necessary at the outset to accept this as the correct rendering of Mill's argument; it is part of my object to show that it is.

In this article I want to investigate what sort of explanation is being given when someone says “He did x out of such and such emotion” or “Such and such emotion was his motive tor doing x”. In order to do this I will try and argue for the following:

1. (1) The term ‘motive’ should not be limited to contexts where we expect that the motivation does not fall within the standard range.

2. (2) The motive which is said to be behind an actual action is to be construed as a cause.

3. (3) The motive which is said to be behind an actual action is to be construed as entailing a want which is a cause.

4. (4) However not all actions which can be said to be done out of some motive can be said to be actions which the agent wanted to do.

The neo-Lockean justification of the highly unequal distribution of income in capitalist societies is based upon two key premises: that people are the rightful owners of their labor and talents, and that the external world was, in the state of nature, unowned, and therefore up for grabs by people, who could rightfully appropriate parts of it subject to a ‘Lockean proviso.’ The argument is presented by Nozick. Counter-proposals to Nozick’s, for the most part, have either denied the premise that people should morally be viewed as the owners of their talents, or have challenged Nozick’s Lockean proviso.

Rawls, and to a more limited extent Ronald Dworkin, deny self-ownership. As Rawls writes: ‘…the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset … The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.’ Behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, those who deliberate about justice are deprived of knowledge about characteristics whose distribution is morally arbitrary. In Dworkin’s proposal for resource egalitarianism, agents calculate the insurance policy they would hypothetically ask for, were they denied knowledge of what talents they will draw in the birth lottery. Compensation for unequal talents is, according to Dworkin, properly made by taxing and transferring income according to the way it would have been distributed as a consequence of such insurance. Dworkin’s veil of ignorance is thin, because agents in the appropriate posture for deliberating about income distribution know their preferences and attitudes toward risk, but not their talents. For both Rawls and Dworkin, the self-ownership premise is challenged by constructing a veil of ignorance in which people are deprived of knowledge of certain personal characteristics, knowledge of which would bias their opinions, from a moral viewpoint.

I want to discuss a certain class of paradoxes, which I will call ‘pragmatic paradoxes.’ The term reflects the role of indexical elements in some familiar instances of the class, such as the statements ‘I am not here,’ or ‘I am not now speaking,’ and serves to distinguish the paradoxes in which I’m interested, from the semantic paradoxes, like the Liar.

An analysis of the Surprise Exam paradox affords a natural approach. Here is one version of the paradox. On Friday the teacher informs the class that one day next week (Monday- Friday) an exam will take place, and that it will be unexpected until announced, on the day it is to take place. The students reason that it can’t take place on Friday, since, were it not to occur by Thursday, they would be expecting it Friday, contrary to the teacher’s specification. If it can’t take place Friday, then it can’t take place Thursday either, for similar reasons. And so forth. The students conclude that no such exam can take place. But of course it can. So, what went wrong?

Four decades ago, Bernard Williams accused Kantian moral theory of providing agents with ‘one thought too many’. The general consensus among contemporary Kantians is that this objection has been decisively answered. In this paper, I reconstruct the problem, showing that Williams was not principally concerned with how agents are to think in emergency situations, but rather with how moral theories are to be integrated into recognizably human lives. I show that various Kantian responses to Williams provide inadequate materials for solving this ‘integration problem’, and that they are correspondingly ill-positioned to account for the authority of morality, as Williams suspected all along.

According to Nietzsche, both modern individuals and societies are pathologically fragmented. In this paper, I examine how he proposes we combat this affliction in his Untimely Meditations. I argue that he advocates a dual struggle involving both instrumental domination and eradication. On these grounds, I claim the following: 1. pace a growing number of commentators, we cannot categorise the species of conflict he endorses in the Untimely Meditations as agonistic; and 2. this conflict is better understood as analogous to the species of struggle that Schopenhauer describes in his account of purposive organisation.

Deep neural networks are said to be opaque, impeding the development of safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence, but where this opacity stems from is less clear. What are the sufficient properties for neural network opacity? Here, I discuss five common properties of deep neural networks and two different kinds of opacity. Which of these properties are sufficient for what type of opacity? I show how each kind of opacity stems from only one of these five properties, and then discuss to what extent the two kinds of opacity can be mitigated by explainability methods.

Thomas Reid distinguished between natural and artificial language and argued that natural language has a very specific sort of priority over artificial language. This paper critically interprets Reid's discussion, extracts a Reidian explanatory argument for the priority of natural language, and places Reid's thought in the broad tradition of Cartesian linguistics.

One of the most influential arguments in favour of perdurantism is the Argument from Vagueness. The argument proceeds in three stages: The first aims to establish atemporal universalism. The second presents a parallel argument in favour of universalism in the context of temporalized parthood (‘diachronic universalism’). The third argues that diachronic universalism entails perdurantism. I offer a novel objection to the argument. I show that on the correct way of formulating diachronic universalism the principle does not entail perdurantism. On the other hand, if diachronic universalism is formulated as Sider (incorrectly) proposes, the argument fails to establish his principle, and thus perdurantism.

The aim of this article is to develop an understanding-based argument for an explicitly political specification of the concept of race. It is argued that a specification of race in terms of hierarchical social positions is best equipped to guide causal reasoning about racial inequality in the public sphere. Furthermore, the article provides evidence that biological and cultural specifications of race mislead public reasoning by encouraging confusions between correlates and causes of racial inequality. The article concludes with a more general case for incorporating empirical evidence about public reasoning into philosophical debates about competing specifications of the concept of race.

How does trust relate to faith? We do not know of a theory-neutral way to answer our question. So, we begin with what we regard as a plausible theory of faith according to which, in slogan form, faith is resilient reliance. Next, we turn to contemporary theories of trust. They are not of one voice. Still, we can use them to indicate ways in which trust and faith might both differ from and resemble each other. This is what we do. Along the way, we evaluate substantive issues related to these possible differences and similarities.

In this paper, I consider Isaac Newton’s fevered accusation that John Locke is a ‘Hobbist.’ I suggest a number of ways in which Locke’s account of the mind–body relation could plausibly be construed as Hobbesian. Whereas Newton conceives of the human mind as an immaterial substance and venerates it as a finite image of the Divine Mind, I argue that Locke utterly deflates the religious, ethical, and metaphysical significance of an immaterial soul. Even stronger, I contend that there is good reason to suspect that Locke is a crypto-materialist, at least with respect to human beings, and in this respect, could reasonably be labeled a ‘Hobbist.’

When, in spite of our good intentions, we fail to meet our obligations to others, it is important that we have the correct theoretical description of what has happened so that mutual understanding and the right sort of social repair can occur. Consider an agent who promises to help pick a friend up from the airport. She takes the freeway, forgetting that it is under construction. After a long wait, the friend takes an expensive taxi ride home. Most theorists and non-theorists react to such cases by either judging the agent’s action as a violation of her obligation to help or as having satisfied the only obligation she really had, namely to try to help. However, as I show, there are serious difficulties that arise from categorizing this agent’s action as satisfying or violating her obligation – difficulties that are avoided if we instead add “mere moral failures”; to the basic categories for moral evaluation. An agent merely fails when she neither satisfies nor violates her obligation. She is responsible for what she has done, yet without thereby having done wrong. Moreover, there is a recognizable (though nameless) reactive attitude reflecting the agent’s responsibility that falls between blame and mere regret, and is also importantly different from agent-regret. What I show is that we need not reach for blame as our only way of registering that an agent has morally failed another. While thus far overlooked, mere moral failure is by no means a rare occurrence, but rather a regular part of life among friends, family, investors and clients, police and citizens, doctors and patients, and many others.

The doctrine of divine aseity has played a significant role in the development of classical theism. However, very little attention has been paid in recent years to the question of how precisely aseity should be characterized. We argue that this neglect is unwarranted since extant characterizations of this central divine attribute quickly encounter difficulties. In particular, we present a new argument to show that the most widely accepted contemporary account of aseity is inconsistent. We then consider the prospects for developing a new account of aseity which avoids the pitfalls we have highlighted.

It is a central tenet of ethical intuitionism as defended by W. D. Ross and others that moral theory should reflect the convictions of mature moral agents. Hence, intuitionism is plausible to the extent that it corresponds to our well-considered moral judgments. After arguing for this claim, I discuss whether intuitionists offer an empirically adequate account of our moral obligations. I do this by applying recent empirical research by John Mikhail that is based on the idea of a universal moral grammar to a number of claims implicit in W. D. Ross’s normative theory. I argue that the results at least partly vindicate intuitionism.

Intuitions about contextualist cases such as Cohen’s airport case pose a problem for classical anti-skeptical versions of invariantism. Recently, Tim Black (2005), Jessica Brown (2006), and Patrick Rysiew (2001, 2005, 2007) have argued that the classical invariantist can respond by arguing that pragmatic aspects of epistemic discourse are responsible for the relevant problematic intuitions. This paper identifies the mechanisms of conversational implicature and impliciture as the basic sources of hope for this explanatory strategy. It then argues that neither of these sources provides the classical invariantist with a convincing response to the airport case and its analogs.

Direct comparison of the ostensibly competing principles embedded in rival theories of Justice is often complicated by differences of view as to the nature and scope of the concrete Judgments a theory of Justice must attempt to illumine. Aristotle's official view, for example, is that Justice is a disposition or character trait. This commits him to scrutiny of Judgments about the Justice of particular actions since it is actions which serve to reveal, and to help form, the disposition in question. But it also stands in the way of any proper recognition of the fact that the competing principles of Justice he examines apply in the first instance neither to actions nor to dispositions but to states of affairs or situations: actions are Just for Aristotle when they help to bring about a Just distribution.

According to one understanding of them, Tarskian principles about truth (and falsity) aim to explicate the core of the classical conception of truth (and falsity), as endorsed by Aristotle and others:

Timothy Williamson famously offered an argument from these Tarskian principles in favour of bivalence — the contention that whatever says something is either true or false — to the effect that denying bivalence in particular cases classically entails a contradiction. This has played a crucial role in the reception of Williamson's case against the main alternative classical view of the nature of vagueness, supervaluationism, and thus in favor of his own epistemic view.