Much recent work on self-knowledge has been inspired by the idea that the ‘transparency’ of questions about our own mental states to questions about the non-mental world holds the key to understanding how privileged self-knowledge is possible. I critically discuss some prominent recent accounts of such transparency, and argue for a Sartrean interpretation of the phenomenon, on which this knowledge is explained by our capacity to transform an implicit or ‘non-positional’ self-awareness into reflective, ‘positional’ self-knowledge.

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.

It is sometimes suggested that Descartes’ version of the so-called ontological ‘argument’ should be read not as a formal proof but as a seif-evident axiom, grasped by intuition. If correct, this Suggestion would enable us to answer finally one of the vexed questions of Cartesian scholarship, namely what relation holds between the ontological argument, as presented in the Fifth Meditation, and the causal argument of the Third Meditation. The ontological argument has the appearance of being an afterthought but, given the elegant and tightly ordered structure of the Meditations, this cannot be. Still, commentators have wondered why Descartes separates his theistic proofs in this way, and why the ontological argument emerges later in the ‘order of reasons.’ If the ontological ‘argument’ were intended as the report of an intuition, then these long-standing difficulties would be easily resolved. One could argue that rather than being an afterthought, it is the culmination of the meditator's efforts to achieve perfect knowledge (scientia) of God's existence.

The concept of exploitation plays a key role in Marx's attack on capitalism. No one denies this. Yet there is much confusion as to just what Marx's concept of exploitation is.

Recent discussions tend to fall into two groups. In the first are those which offer extensive analyses of Marx's concept of alienation, but seldom mention ‘exploitation’. When writers in this first group do mention ‘exploitation’ they mistakenly assume that the concept is transparent and unproblematic.

The second group has little to say about alienation, but does attempt an account of exploitation. These writers mistakenly confine Marx's concept of exploitation to the labor process itself. Both approaches fail to articulate important connections between alienation and exploitation.

What is it to be a hypocrite? Gilbert Ryle's answer is the by now commonly held one: to be hypocritical is to “try to appear activated by a motive other than one's real motive”; again, it is “deliberately to refrain from saying what comes to one's lips, while pretending to say frankly things one does not mean.” Can this be the right answer? My aim is to show that it cannot. In doing this I hope to gesture towards a richer understanding of our notion of hypocrisy.

Aristotle shares with Plato the attitude that the world, ‘the all,’ is a kosmos, a well-ordered and beautiful whole which, as such, can be rendered intelligible, or understood, by the intellect. One understands things, generally speaking, by tracing them back to their sources, origins or principles (ἀρχαί) and causes or explanatory factors (αἰτίαι), and seeing in what manner they are related to these principles. We know, or understand, a thing when we grasp ‘the why’ or cause. Consequently, understanding is systematic. Some things we understand through themselves - these are the first principles and as such are not understood by tracing them back to causes. (The first causes have no causes.) We understand other things by systematically relating them in appropriate ways to what is known through itself. These other things are known through, or by means of, their causes and principles.

John Rawls's famous difference principle is capable of at least four distinct statements, each of which occurs in A Theory of Justice. According to what I shall term the Crude Principle it is a necessary and sufficient condition for the justice of an institutional scheme which expands social and economic inequality that, subject to the satisfaction of more weighty principles, it increases the level of advantage of the least advantaged. Expressing this principle Rawls writes that,

Any organised society needs some method for determining common policy: public decisions must be forged from private preferences, and particular interests must find a reconciliation in the general good. A society is tolerable only if its decisions are reached by a rational path; for, just as a reasonable man decides his private life on the basis of reasonable procedures, so a reasonable society must formulate its communal behaviour on the basis of reasonable principles. If the Principle of Rationality is violated, society collapses into an anarchic tohubohu, governed by naked power or arbitrary caprice.

Moral philosophy has conceived of its task in many different ways throughout its history. One of these has been to articulate qualities of character, or ‘virtues,’ which the morally good or morally admirable person will possess.

This paper is a first step in an attempt to work out a feminist perspective on this aspect of moral philosophy and its history. I will focus on the moral philosophies of Kant and Hegel who exemplify different versions of a general orientation within moral philosophy which I call ‘moral rationalism.’ For the moral rationalist reason and rationality are at the center of the conception of the good or moral man (and I use the word ‘man’ here intentionally).

In the Anthropocene, human beings are capable of bringing about globally catastrophic outcomes that could damage conditions for present and future human life on Earth in unprecedented ways. This paper argues that the scale and severity of these dangers justifies a new international criminal offence of ‘postericide’ that would protect present and future people against wrongfully created dangers of near extinction. Postericide is committed by intentional or reckless systematic conduct that is fit to bring about near human extinction. The paper argues that a proper understanding of the moral imperatives embodied in international criminal law shows that it ought to be expanded to incorporate a new law of postericide.

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.

Algorithmic communications pose several challenges to democracy. The three phenomena of filtering, hypernudging, and microtargeting can have the effect of polarizing an electorate and thus undermine the deliberative potential of a democratic society. Algorithms can spread fake news throughout the society, undermining the epistemic potential that broad participation in democracy is meant to offer. They can pose a threat to political equality in that some people may have the means to make use of algorithmic communications and the sophistication to be immune from attempts at manipulation, while other people are vulnerable to manipulation by those who use these means. My concern here is with the danger that algorithmic communications can pose to political equality, which arises because most citizens must make decisions about what and who to support in democratic politics with only a sparse budget of time, money, and energy. Algorithmic communications such as hypernudging and microtargeting can be a threat to democratic participation when persons are operating in environments that do not conduce to political sophistication. This constitutes a deepening of political inequality. The political sophistication necessary to counter this vulnerability is rooted for many in economic life and it can and ought to be enhanced by changing the terms of economic life.

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.

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.).

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.

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.

Despite the vast literature on Rawls's work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy. When his arguments have been discussed, they have received staunch criticism. Some critics have charged that Rawls's arguments are not deeply democratic. Others have gone further, claiming that Rawls's arguments denigrate democracy. These criticisms are unsurprising, since Rawls's arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete. In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil liberties, Rawls does not say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties.

In this paper, I complete some of Rawls's arguments and show that he has grounds for including political liberties, particularly those of a democratic nature, in the principle of equal basic liberty. In doing so, I make some beginning steps toward illustrating the genuinely democratic nature of Rawls's arguments. Rawls believes that a few different arguments can be given for democratic institutions and that these arguments work together to support the value of democracy. In this paper, I focus on Rawls's arguments relating to self-respect. I focus on this set of arguments because they are among the strongest of Rawls's arguments for equal political liberty and its fair value.

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.

This is a contribution to the symposium on Herman Cappelen’s book Fixing Language. Cappelen proposes a metasemantic framework—the “Austerity Framework”—within which to understand the general phenomenon of conceptual engineering. The proposed framework is austere in the sense that it makes no reference to concepts. Conceptual engineering is then given a “worldly” construal according to which conceptual engineering is a process that operates on the world. I argue, contra Cappelen, that an adequate theory of conceptual engineering must make reference to concepts. This is because concepts are required to account for topic continuity, a phenomenon which lies at the heart of projects in conceptual engineering. I argue that Cappelen’s own account of topic continuity is inadequate as a result of the austerity of his metasemantic framework, and that his worldly construal of conceptual engineering is untenable.

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.