In this introduction, I briefly summarize Sophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality. I situate her monograph within two highly contemporary bodies of literature — relational egalitarianism and discrimination theory — to show how it provides important insights for understanding both what it means to treat others as equals in society and how to define wrongful discrimination. Moreau's work on discrimination is of great relevance for philosophers and socio-legal theorists alike as the commentaries from the symposium contributors demonstrate, including Dale Smith, Pablo Gilabert, Andrea Sangiovanni, Daniel Viehoff, Jessica Eisen, Alysia Blackham, and Iyiola Solanke.

The articles in this volume celebrate the work of Steven Burns. Versions of the articles were presented originally at two sessions organized in Burns's honour at the 2022 meeting of the Atlantic Regional Philosophers’ Association (ARPA), held at Dalhousie University in Halifax. This introduction presents a brief academic biography and summarizes each of the contributions. The articles, by Michael Hymers, Robbie Moser and Darren Bifford, Alice MacLachlan, Jason Holt, and Warren Heiti, address perennial themes in philosophy, such as self-knowledge, attention, friendship, interpretation, and judgement. The collection concludes with some last words by Burns himself.

Les discussions récentes au sujet des rapports entre sciences et sociétés concourent aux impératifs politiques pour la diffusion des connaissances qui transcendent les disciplines. Je soutiens qu'un argument pour la diffusion des résultats de la recherche en sciences, technologie, ingénierie et mathématiques (STIM) serait valable pour les sciences humaines et sociales (SHS). Je précise les conséquences de cette transposition en prenant l'exemple de la recherche en philosophie. J'aboutis à la conclusion que l'obstacle principal à la diffusion des résultats dans ce domaine est la reconnaissance d'une expertise philosophique.

This article is inspired by two of Steven Burns's many philosophical interests — self-deception and Wittgenstein — as well as by a wariness that we share of the analytic-continental divide in contemporary philosophy. I argue here that, despite obvious differences of temperament and concern, Sartre and Wittgenstein share a scepticism about the “epistemic model” of first-person authority. This shared scepticism emerges in a striking way in their challenges to the idea that psychological phenomena should be understood on the model of objects in physical space. Wittgenstein's scepticism is more thorough-going, but emphasizing the similarity allows us to see Sartre as making an important contribution to our understanding of first-person authority, even if we are wary of the voluntarism of his approach.

In Faces of Inequality, Sophia Moreau offers a pluralist theory of discrimination, according to which discriminatory conduct involves one or more of (at least) three types of wrong. She claims, further, that each of these wrongs represents a failure to treat some people as the equal of others. I argue that this further claim is mistaken. I also suggest that there may be no need for a pluralist theory of discrimination to identify a property that is shared by the different types of wrong recognised by the theory (beyond the fact that each is present in cases of wrongful discrimination).

Social conventionalism — the position that social conventions governing language use determine or constitute the meanings of our words — has faced two major problems. The first is the Agreement Problem: how could speakers agree to use words in certain ways without already speaking meaningfully? The second is the Novelty Problem: how can conventions fix the meanings of innovative uses of words? David Lewis famously responded to the Agreement Problem but his account flounders on the Novelty Problem. Josh Armstrong emends Lewis’ account to solve the Novelty Problem. I argue that Armstrong's emendation fails and that neither he nor Lewis has an adequate response to the Agreement Problem.

At the heart of Sophia Moreau's theory of wrongful discrimination is the moral duty to treat others as equals. This article raises some challenges regarding the contours of this duty and suggests some ways to make the theory stronger. In particular, it suggests that we incorporate a cosmopolitan view of the duty's scope, that we illuminate the features at the basis of individuals’ equal moral status to determine its grounds, and that we identify some considerations about important interests to articulate its contents. The relation between Moreau's theory and human rights discourse is also briefly examined, and more engagement with the latter is recommended.

This article is an appreciative exegesis of Steven Burns's article “If a Lion Could Talk.” In his essay, Burns clarifies Ludwig Wittgenstein's enigmatic remark “If a lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to understand him” by locating it within the broader context of Wittgenstein's work in the philosophy of psychology. We read Burns's interpretation of the remark as opening core Wittgensteinian issues of meaning and (mis)understanding, and we situate it within the context of the work of Burns's teacher, Peter Winch. Our discussion is a close exegesis of the immediate content of the lion remark and it highlights connections to Wittgenstein's remarks on James George Frazer's The Golden Bough. We show how Burns and Winch employ Wittgenstein's methods of dissolving philosophical puzzles by drawing attention to intermediate familiar cases. We conclude with some impressionistic remarks about Socrates in a short discussion of the difficulty of the philosophical technique and activity Burns demonstrates and recommends.

This article was written before Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Alice Munro, wrote an essay in the Toronto Star on July 7, 2024, describing her mother's silence in the face of her abuse at the hands of Munro's husband/Skinner's stepfather, Gerald Fremlin. I wish to honour Skinner's story and her courage in coming forward, as well as her wish that “… this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother.” I, like so many others, will continue to grapple with Munro's writing and her reflections on intimate human relationships — as well as her literary legacy — following these revelations.

Response-dependence about moral responsibility argues that someone is morally responsible if and only if, and because, they're an appropriate target of reactive attitudes. But if we can be partially morally responsible, and if reactive attitudes are too coarse-grained to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents, then response-dependence is false. Shawn Wang dubs this the “Granularity Challenge.” This article rejects the second premise of the Granularity Challenge. Human emotions are fine-grained enough to register small differences in normatively significant features of agents. One illustrative example of this, I argue, is how children gradually emerge as partially responsible agents.

Sophia Moreau's wide-ranging and nuanced book defends a pluralist view of wrongful discrimination. I argue three points. First, I argue that Moreau's account of deliberative freedom does not provide a distinct ground for objecting to discrimination. Second, I argue that there is not as wide a gap between her view and expressivism as she makes there out to be. Third, there is an intriguing gap in the argument that deserves further exploration: Moreau never provides us with an account of when and why social subordination is wrong.

Philosophers and psychologists acclaim Edward C. Tolman's “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men” as an early, transformative instance of representationalist explanation. The article is said to mark a move by Tolman to renounce his behaviorism and to herald a new, cognitivist psychology. I argue, opposingly, that framing the text with reference to later psychology badly distorts its meaning. The text is better understood with respect to the contexts of its age and deeper currents in the history of psychology. Tolman is not upturning behaviorism; he is re-litigating an intramural debate between behaviorists pertaining to the place of physiology in psychology.

Sophia Moreau, in her important book, offers an insightful account of (one strand of) the wrong of discrimination based on the evil of subordination. My symposium contribution seeks to clarify the structure of Moreau's account of subordination and its normative and axiological status. On one plausible view, subordination is fundamentally bad or wrong. On another view, subordination is a distinctive social phenomenon, which is bad or wrong only derivatively. I will outline each view, and consider the implications each has for certain issues central to Moreau's book.

Steven Burns argues that rich works of art tend to yield best readings rather than ambiguous interpretations. This is no mere statistical claim. Rather, Burns holds that such richness makes ambiguity less likely or sustainable. As a champion of multiple interpretability, I criticize Burns’s account. Adding detail to an ambiguous work may not disambiguate it and may in fact increase the range of equally rewarding interpretations. Ambiguous works are furthermore numerous and noteworthy, and range across various artforms. All else being equal, ambiguity appears to add to rather than detract from the richness of artworks.

Sophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality adopts a provocative philosophical methodology: centring the experiences of victims of discrimination, and the basic contours of anti-discrimination law, in developing an account of wrongful discrimination. If, however, we take seriously sceptical accounts of law developed within feminist and critical race scholarship, we begin to see a tension within Moreau's methodological dyad: if victims of discrimination often experience discrimination law as hostile and disbelieving, how can both be treated as authoritative? This contribution will explore this tension as it emerges in Faces of Inequality, in light of Mari Matsuda's theory of “multiple consciousness.”

Given the rising trend of politicizing formerly mundane topics, philosophers should guard against the concepts we develop being misunderstood or misconstrued to support arguments we never intended. To demonstrate my assertion, I develop the case study of Alex Kacelnik's notion of “biological rationality” (B-rationality) and show ways in which I believe it is vulnerable to misuse and ways I would suggest re-engineering it to be more resistant. I conclude by urging scholars — especially those working on normatively laden topics — to design our concepts such that they are less likely to become associated with harmful discourse or even oppressive policies.

One kind of good listener aspires to be sensitive to the testimony of injustice. Under conditions of oppression, this testimony is silenced. One cause of the silencing is that a dominant rights-based model of distributive justice interferes with our appreciation of a needs-based model of radically egalitarian justice. Another cause is that ambient prejudices threaten to impair the listener. A good listener is not only an individual but also a social animal, one who needs to engage with others in a dialectic of attention in order to undo their own prejudices.

Looking at Canadian provincial pediatric health care policies and laws, the best interest standard (BIS) enjoys support. Within philosophy, however, the BIS faces serious opposition. Granted, there remain a few fervent defenders of the BIS in the contemporary literature; however, I argue that while some authors nominally defend the BIS, my analysis reveals that what they really defend is at best a watered down version of it. In this article, I argue that not only must the BIS be understood narrowly, but a substitute decision-maker (SDM) must satisfy the BIS — for an SDM is her patient's fiduciary.

I survey my career in philosophy, which encompasses 44 years of teaching in Halifax, but begins in London, England with a thesis on self-deception. I describe a practice of using works of literature as a guide to conceptual analysis, and pause in Vienna to translate On Last Things (Weininger, 2001). A line of Wittgenstein's is the basis for reflections on the concept of a Last Judgement. I discuss in some detail a paper of mine for the Atlantic Region Philosophers’ Association in 2018, “One Last Thing,” which takes as its basis The Sense of an Ending, a novel by Julian Barnes. I conclude with some claims about Wittgenstein's relation to religion. I add an Appendix, in which I comment briefly on each of the other articles that make up this symposium.