Early in World War I, Virginia Woolf wrote these words: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be […]’. It is tempting to assume that darkness simply hides the unknown and the threatening. It is more challenging to think of it as Woolf did: rich with possibility in even the most desperate times.

We live in what many would readily describe as dark times. These times have brought (among much else) a once-in-a-century public health crisis, the continued redemption of toxic white supremacy, declining trust in and support for public institutions, and growing evidence of impending climate devastation. ‘Dark Futures’ will consider some of the scenes of this devastation and mine them for insights into our predicaments and our prospects.

Strawson's view on punishment has been either neglected or recoiled from in contemporary scholarship on ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (FR). Strawson's alleged retributivism has made his view suspect and troublesome. In this article, we first argue, against the mainstream, that the punishment passage is an indispensable part of the main argument in FR (section 1) and elucidate in what sense Strawson can be called ‘a retributivist’ (section 2). We then elaborate our own hypothesis of symbolic retribution to explain the continuum between moral reactive attitudes and punishment that Strawson only adumbrates (section 3). After this justification of the punitive response to wrongdoing, we compare and contrast our specific kind of retributivist hypothesis with other positions in the so-called ‘new retributivism’ (section 4). Our hypothesis differs from other subvarieties of expressive retributivism in putting centre stage the idea of punishment as taking up a reverential stance towards the victim.

Within the field of virtue and vice epistemology open-mindedness is usually considered an archetypal virtue. Nevertheless, there is ongoing disagreement over how exactly it should be defined. In this paper I propose a novel definition of open-mindedness as a process of impartial belief revision and use it to argue that we should shift our normative assessments away from the trait itself to the context in which it is exercised. My definition works by three sequential stages: not screening new claims, impartially weighing the evidential strength of claims, and updating beliefs accordingly. Using this definition I argue for a focus on agents’ particular circumstances to determine what degrees of credulity, open-, or closed-mindedness are appropriate in any given situation. As well as providing conceptual clarity regarding the concept of open-mindedness this paper indicates the benefits of this contextual approach for our everyday epistemic attitudes. In particular it enables us to recognise, without stigma, when ourselves or others deviate from open-mindedness for appropriate reasons.

The capabilities approach is the theory according to which, in order to assess people's quality of life and reflect on the basic political entitlements, we should consider what people are capable of doing and being. Focusing mostly on Nussbaum's account, a number of scholars analysed the metaethical structure underlying the approach, showing her Aristotelian and Kantian sources. This article explores another aspect of Nussbaum's theory which has so far been somewhat overlooked: the role of emotions in the justification and motivational support of the approach. After showing the importance Nussbaum places on compassion (and other benevolent emotions) to warrant her moral theory, I argue that – assuming her own cognitive account of compassion – her argument begs the question. I will then contend that Nussbaum's case does not have the inner tools to overcome such a circularity, trying to suggest, in conclusion, a possible way out which is consistent with it.

This paper investigates the moral emotion of being socially, but non-agentially connected to a harm. I propose understanding the emotion of an affiliated onlooker as a species of regret called ‘social-regret’. Breaking from existing guilt- and shame-based accounts, I argue that social-regret can be a fitting, expressive, and revelatory reactive attitude that opens the way for deliberation over accountability for others’ harms. When we feel social-regret, our attention is directed towards the moral salience of our social relations and the expectations that undergird them, as well as possibilities for ameliorative action. I consider several existing accounts of affiliated onlookers’ emotions (including embarrassment, guilt, and shame), and I highlight the advantages of supplementing these with a regret-based account. Social-regret provides a novel way to understand negative, self-directed emotions in response to others’ harms as rational, expressive, and potentially reason-giving experiences.

Our world is mobile. People move, either within the state or from one state to another, to access opportunities, to improve their living conditions, or to start afresh. Yet, we usually assume that migration is an exceptional activity that leads to permanent settlement. In this paper, I invite us to reconsider this assumption. First, I analyse several ways in which people experience mobility in contemporary societies. Then, I turn to migration, as a specific form of mobility. I distinguish between a legal/administrative, a social, and a self-identification-based approach to migration, demonstrating that they lead to divergent definitions of who is a migrant. I proceed by introducing the concept of mobile migration and by developing a typology of mobile migrants. I conclude that, in order to devise migration policies that treat migrants fairly, a careful consideration of the claims and interests of the different types of mobile migrants is necessary.