Epistemic Perceptualists claim that emotions are sources of immediate defeasible justification for evaluative propositions that can (and do) sometimes ground undefeated immediately justified evaluative beliefs. For example, fear can constitute the justificatory ground for a belief that some object or event is dangerous. Despite its attractiveness, the view is apparently vulnerable to several objections. In this paper, I provide a limited defence of Epistemic Perceptualism by responding to a family of objections which all take as a premise a popular and attractive view in value theory – Neo-Sentimentalism – according to which values are analysed in terms of fitting emotions.

Analysis of the nature of voting is fundamental to an understanding of the nature and value of democracy. Three questions ought to be distinguished concerning voting. First, how are we to conceive of the activity of voting? What is its nature? Second, what is it that people aim at when they vote? What are the grounds on which people vote, the reasons with which they justify their vote? And third, what ought people to aim at when they vote? What are the relevant grounds for voting in one way or another? These last are explicitly normative questions. At times individuals vote on the basis of concerns which are not appropriate to the issues involved. The first question is not a question of psychology or of value; it is a metaphysical question. What is the nature of voting? How is it possible to count votes? Two answers are widely given in the literature. The first is that voting consists in the expression of preference. On this kind of view, either a vote is a preference or it is a fairly direct and unambiguous expression of the preference of the voter.

By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.

At the beginning of Book X of his last work The Laws Plato turns his attention from violent and outrageous actions in general to the particular case of undisciplined and presumptuous behaviour in matters of religion: “We have already stated summarily what the punishment should be for temple-robbing, whether by open force or secretly. But the punishments for the various sorts of insolence in speech or action with regard to the gods, which a man can show in word or deed, have to be proclaimed after we have provided an exordium. Let this be it: ‘No one believing, as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the gods has ever yet performed an impious action willingly, or uttered a lawless word. Anyone acting in such a way is in one of three conditions: either, first, he does not believe the proposition aforesaid; or, second, he believes that though the gods exist they have no concern about men; or, third, he believes that they can easily be won over by the bribery of prayer and sacrifice” (§ 885B).

Several theorists argue that one does not experience something as being at or coming from a distance or direction in olfaction. In contrast to this, I suggest that there can be a variety of spatial aspects of both synchronic and diachronic olfactory experiences, including spatial distance and direction. I emphasise, however, that these are not aspects of every olfactory experience. Thus, I suggest renouncing the widespread assumption there is a uniform account of the nature, including the spatial nature, of what is experienced in olfactory experience.

Seventeenth century discussions of materialism, whether favorable or hostile towards the position, are generally conducted on a level of much less precision and sophistication than recent work on the problem of the mind-body relation. Nevertheless, the earlier discussions can still be interesting to philosophers, as the plethora of references to Cartesian arguments in the recent literature makes clear. Certainly the early development of materialist patterns of thought, and efforts on both the materialist and immaterialist side to establish fundamental points in the philosophical analysis of mind, have considerable historical interest at the present time. This paper attempts to clarify the significance of some of leibniz's views in connection with the materialist thesis. I do not have in mind his rather notorious parallelism, though some of the points made below bear indirectly on the character of this position (or perhaps on the question whether he held it consistently). Instead, I will examine his approach to arguments against materialism.

Galileo and his fellowers discovered, and subsequent centuries have amply confirmed, that you get much better predictions by thinking of things as masses of particles blindly bumping each other than by thinking of them as Aristotle thought of them — animistically, teleologically, anthromorphically. They also discovered that you get a better handle on the universe by thinking of it as infinite and cold and comfortless than by thinking of it as finite, homey, planned, and relevant to human concerns. Finally, they discovered that if you view planets or missiles or corpuscles as point-masses, you can get nice simple predictive laws by looking for nice simple mathematical ratios. These discoveres are the basis of modern technological civilization. We can hardly be too grateful for them. But they do not, pace Descartes and Kant, point any epistemological moral.

There was a duel at dawn between A and B. A shot B, who lingered on until dusk of that day, and then died of his bulletwound. Certain background conditions are satisfied (it doesn't matter now what they are) which make it right to say not just that A caused B's death but that he killed him. So, A shot B and killed him. This seems to be structurally different from "A shot B and he kicked him," but what is this structural difference? How does the shooting relate to the killing?

Traditional debates about scientific realism tend to focus on issues concerning scientific representation (broadly speaking) and de-emphasize issues concerning scientific intervention. Questions about the relation between theories and the world, the nature of scientific inference, and the structure of scientific explanations have occupied a central place in the realism debate, while questions about experimentation and technology have not. Ian Hacking's experimental realism attempts to reverse this trend by shifting the defense of realism away from representation to intervention. Experimental realism, according to Hacking, does not require us to believe that our theories are true (or approximately true), nor does its defense depend on inference to the best explanation. For Hacking, the strongest proof for realism is that we can manipulate objects: 'So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them, then they are real' (ibid., 23).

In this discussion I shall argue that some fairly widely held views about human habits are mistaken. These misconceptions are important because of the pervasiveness of the habitual in human behavior and because it is the concept of habit that has served as the prototype of various conceptions of conditioned response which are used in psychological explanation. One major task of this analysis is to show that accounts in which actions are explained by reference to rules are not incompatible with accounts in which the same behavior is seen as the product of habit.

There are decision problems where the preferences that seem rational to many people cannot be accommodated within orthodox decision theory in the natural way. In response, a number of alternatives to the orthodoxy have been proposed. In this paper, I offer an argument against those alternatives and in favour of the orthodoxy. I focus on preferences that seem to encode sensitivity to risk. And I focus on the alternative to the orthodoxy proposed by Lara Buchak’s risk-weighted expected utility theory. I will show that the orthodoxy can be made to accommodate all of the preferences that Buchak’s theory can accommodate.

1. Introduction

A paternalistic act is one in which the protection or promotion of a subject's welfare is the primary reason for attempted or successful coercive interference with an action or state of that person. My aim in this paper is to determine the conditions under which such acts are Justified. The route I take is through the concept of consent, with actual consent providing the foundation for a rather complex condition which I claim is necessary and sufficient for the Justification of paternalism.

Because a paternalistic act apparently violates a subject's right to non-interference, it constitutes a problem in the general area of rights. Ideally, then, one should have a developed and convincing theory of rights — that is, a theory which contains an analysis of the concept of a right, and offers solutions to the central problems, e.g. who has rights and why, what considerations override prima facie rights, and how the relative importance of prima facie rights is determined — from which the solutions to various problems about paternalism can be derived.

Intellectualists tell us that a person who knows how to do something therein knows a proposition. Along with others, they may say that a person who intends to do something intends a proposition. I argue against them. I do so by way of considering ‘know how ——’ and ‘intend ——’ together. When the two are considered together, a realistic conception of human agency can inform the understanding of some infinitives: the argument need not turn on what semanticists have had to say about (what they call) ‘the subjects of infinitival clauses’.

The distinction between occurrent and non-occurrent mental states is frequently appealed to by contemporary philosophers, but it has never been explicated in any significant detail. In the literature, two accounts of the distinction are commonly presupposed (and occasionally stated explicitly). One is that occurrent states are conscious states. The other is that non-occurrent states are dispositional states, and thus that occurrent states are manifestations of dispositions. I argue that neither of these accounts is adequate, and therefore that another account is needed. I propose that occurrent states are active states.

The idea of equality exerts considerable influence on our moral imaginations, yet it has remained philosophically elusive. Although men and women have thought equality worth dying for, philosophers have been largely unable to give any systematic account of its importance as a moral ideal, or of its function in moral and political theory.

It is widely held that we can obtain beliefs and withhold believing propositions directly by performing an act of will. This thesis is sometimes identified with the view that believing is a basic act, an act which is under our direct control. Descartes holds that the will is limitless in relation to belief acquisition and that we must be directly responsible for our beliefs, especially our false beliefs, for otherwise we could draw the blasphemous conclusion that God is responsible for them. For Descartes and his followers judgment and assent are acts of the will which may be made both when they ought and when they ought not to be made. They are expressions of freedom of the will and as such we are directly responsible for the beliefs we acquire. Other philosophers who seem to espouse volitionalism include Aquinas, Locke, Kierkegaard, Newman, James, Pieper, Chisholm and Meiland.

Innocence is a notion that can prove controversial. Claims of innocence typically support not imposing burdens on the innocent when their conduct is relevantly unobjectionable. This paper examines innocence in the context of violent conflict between states or groups. Many thinkers about the morality of such violence want to establish a principle that would protect innocent civilians. Yet the common view in just war theory does not affirm the moral innocence of civilians. Similarly, the common view that soldiers have an equal right to kill does not affirm their equal moral culpability.

Talk of innocence usually Starts from the idea that a kind of moral appraisal makes sense. We assume that persons can be innocent or not by virtue largely of the choices they have made. I will accept this assumption and set aside metaphysical doubts about our capacity for freedom. There is, of course, no issue of moral innocence if in fact we cannot be morally responsible for our actions.

The course of my experience is quite consistent with the hypothesis that it is being produced by a mad scientist who is feeding into my sensory receptors entirely delusive stimuli. Indeed, I could at this very moment be nothing more than a brain floating in a vat of nutrients, my nerve ends linked up to some infernal apparatus by means of which my unknown deceiver induces in me utterly erroneous beliefs about the world.

So begins a familiar line of thought which dramatizes an equally familiar sceptical problem about the relation between our experiences and the world. However, Hilary Putnam has recently offered a marvellously ambitious argument which is intended to kill stone-dead the philosophical fantasy that we might be deluded brains in a vat.

Since his article, ‘Outline for a Decision Procedure in Ethics,’ John Rawls has advocated a coherentist moral epistemology according to which moral and political theories are justified on the basis of their coherence with our other beliefs, both moral and nonmoral (1951: 56, 61). A moral theory which is maximally coherent with our other beliefs is in a state which Rawls calls ‘reflective equilibrium’ (1971: 20). In A Theory of Justice Rawls advanced two principles of justice and claimed that they are in reflective equilibrium. He defended this claim by appeal to a hypothetical contract; he argued that parties in a position satisfying certain informational and motivational criteria, which he called ‘the original position,’ would choose the following two principles of justice to govern the basic structure of their society.

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.