Eudaimonist virtue ethicists from Aristotle to contemporary Neo-Aristotelians have held (1) that human flourishing (eudaimonia) is the ultimate ethically justifying end of action and (2) that human flourishing consists in the exercise of virtues of character. This paper has two goals. First, I argue for separating these two commitments and distinguishing eudaimonism in general from its common virtue-ethical interpretation. To do so, I clarify the justificatory structure of eudaimonism. Second, I object to the conjunction of these two views, eudaimonism and the character virtue conception of flourishing. On the eudaimonist assumption that flourishing is the sole ultimate justificatory end of ethical action, whatever flourishing consists in must be a plausible ultimate end that does not require further justification. But character-virtuous activity is not a plausible ultimate end. The moral and prudential activities that exercise character virtues like justice, courage, and moderation characteristically aim to produce or distribute instrumental benefits which must serve, and be justified by, other ends in turn.

In this paper we argue for a surprising similarity between the kinds of roles notation plays in music and in mathematics. We argue that in both cases the notation is doing more than merely documenting something that we have an independent grip on – either a musical performance/composition or a mathematical structure. In both instances, the notation can lead to new innovations, it can help in abstracting away from distracting details and it can facilitate explanations. In light of these functions, we argue that both musical and mathematical notations serve as models of the intended targets: musical and mathematical structures. Seen in this light, developing, and reflecting upon, notation is central to both musical and mathematical practice and is deserving of greater philosophical attention.

To live meaningfully, we can’t just be receptacles for the right sorts of activities – it has to matter that it’s us living our lives. Something is missing in valuable activities, if the same value could be achieved by anyone who performs the task. Meaningfulness requires that it be our own ideals, personalities, and priorities contributing to the value of what we do. Recognizing this can shed light on our relationship with meaning in three ways. First, it shows a distinctive reason that autonomy is important: what we do without autonomy will lack meaning. Second, it helps us understand a challenge we encounter when facing trade-offs between different types of meaning, navigating between opportunities to have a few of our characteristics matter widely (e.g., as a filmmaker or an activist) and intimate contexts in which much more of who we are matters to a small group of people. Finally, if living meaningfully involves our central characteristics shaping what’s valuable about our actions, then discovering pre-set purposes (e.g., from fate, God, or the cosmos) might actually undermine our capacity to live meaningful lives.

Nisbett and Wilson’s (1977) classic study in social cognition, the so-called ‘stocking case’, is a long-lasting authority that has often been interpreted as providing empirical support for the claim that introspection regarding mental processes such as the decision-making process is untrustworthy. In this article, I argue that such interpretations fail to identify the appropriate targets of introspection or appropriate object of criticism, thus leading to the emergence of several sceptical views. I show that researchers erroneously view the psychological causes of mental processes, rather than the processes themselves, as the targets of introspection and erroneously equate introspection about the decision-making process with mechanisms such as reasoning and retrospection. Therefore, sceptical views concerning the trustworthiness of introspection about the decision-making process ultimately commit two fallacies pertaining to – what I call – equivocal targets and equivocal mechanisms.

Back in 1982, when I started studying with Samuel Scheffler, a major subject of debate was whether – and, if so, exactly why and how – the existence of agent-relative reasons for action justifies making fundamental changes to consequentialist moral theory. How dramatically the tables have turned in the years since! Now the question tends to be whether – and, if so, exactly why and how – agent-neutral reasons for action can have a significant role to play in contractualist moral theory. In the first half of this paper, I offer some arguments for thinking that agent-neutral reasons do exist and that they are more basic than reasons of other sorts. In the second half of the paper, I offer some arguments for thinking that such reasons, being more basic, must have a central role to play in contractualist moral theory.

This paper critiques the ‘Trolley Problem’ tradition in moral philosophy as simplistically reductive and dangerous in its applications. Beginning with Philippa Foot’s abortion arguments and evolving through Judith Thomson’s and Robert Nozick’s work, trolleyology abstracts moral decisions from social context, masking a politics of extreme individualism. This decontextualized approach, masquerading as objective moral science, has pernicious real-world consequences. The paper traces how trolleyology has influenced ‘Revisionist’ Just War theory, which reduces collective political conflict to individual self-defense scenarios. This reductive framework has helped justify contemporary drone warfare and targeted killing by treating complex military decisions as simple moral calculations. I argue that genuine ethical thought requires engagement with social context, relationships, and political complexity rather than abstract thought experiments.

In this paper, I argue that we do not know how to implement abstract principles of liberal egalitarian justice. Starting with Scheffler’s Rawlsian diagnosis of the retreat of liberal democracy in the United States, I argue that it may be due to our lack of knowledge about how to institutionalize a Rawlsian just liberal society. To illustrate the difficulty or challenge, I examine several policy proposals to help build human capital for property-owning democracy and argue that they can fail for various reasons. The main problem is that the changing ways in which diverse individuals respond to policies and interact with one another affect policy consequences, but their complexity surpasses our limited knowledge. The ignorance gives us reason to be patient with the slow pace of building an ideal liberal society, tolerant of those who are sceptical about interventions to implement liberal egalitarian principles, and open to policy experimentation and learning. I further argue that we should publicly acknowledge our ignorance about policy outcomes, as it can reduce political polarization, by moderating policy positions and interpreting policy disagreements as empirical rather than moral, and counter democratic backsliding.

I spell out a distinctive account of what is wrong with inequalities of wealth: they constitute asymmetries of power. Two ideas lie behind this view. The first is that asymmetries of power constitute inegalitarian relationships. Think of the relationship of king to subject or master to slave: these are in part constituted by asymmetric power. The second is that wealth gives one power over people. When you have a lot of money, you can pay people to do what you want, and that gives you power over them. Inequalities of wealth, by constituting asymmetries of power, thus constitute objectionably inegalitarian relationships.

This paper discusses a deflationary theory of human action developed by John Hyman. His theory of human action comprises two central claims, one about the general nature of action, another about the mark of human agency. An action is the causing of a change by a substance. A human action, as opposed to sub-personal actions, is one that results from the integrated operations of our cognitive and motor systems. Taken together these two claims offer a minimalist theory of human action that does not appeal to intention, the will or the power to choose. The first claim is by now familiar in the literature, not so the second one. This paper offers a critical discussion of this second claim. I shall argue that it sits uncomfortably with certain kinds of mental action. As a fix, I argue that we should appeal to the functional role of the executive system to specify the relevant kind of integration characteristic of human action. I proceed to show how the revised proposal shares the appeal of Hyman’s view while avoiding its difficulties.

I aim at dissolving Saul Kripke’s dogmatism paradox by defending the idea that, with respect to any particular proposition p known by a subject A, it is not irrational for A to ignore all evidence against p. Here my defence of the dogmatic attitude depends on the crucial assumption – and this is an assumption made by Kripke himself in the setting of the paradox – that A wishes above all else to avoid gaining a false belief or losing a true one. An appendix briefly examines the possibility of a knowledge version of the paradox, as opposed to Kripke’s original true-belief version.

What do we make of someone who claims not to believe something, and yet whose behaviours suggest belief – such as someone who claims not to believe in ghosts, yet refuses to walk through the graveyard at night, or someone who claims to know that they have switched off the oven, yet feels the need to go and check? Some have proposed treating cases like these in terms of states of ‘half belief’ or ‘in-between’ belief. We propose that sometimes these cases are best understood not as an epistemic matter concerning such compromised belief states, but rather as an aesthetic matter concerning imaginative states and what they enable us to appreciate about the actual world. Anxiety over the graveyard, or over the oven, can be characterised in terms of the explanatory structures the person is disposed to imagine – explanatory structures which the person knows are non-actual, but which would explain were the world to work differently. Overactive imagination is where one’s preoccupation with imagining a non-actual explanatory structure takes priority over things that it should not. Underactive imagination is where a person is insensitive to how aspects of the world support the imagining of non-actual explanatory structures.

In this paper I offer a defence of absence causation in response to a central challenge: the problem of profligacy. Focussing on two related cases of absence causation, holes and surface absences, the account of absence causation offered for these cases has the following attractions: it captures the central features of many of our common-sense judgments about absence causation in these cases; it doesn’t appeal to norms; and is grounded in salient features of the metaphysics of the cases. As such, there’s a metaphysically respectable, principled criterion for absence causation that solves the problem of profligacy for these cases.

Henry Sidgwick and G. E. Moore’s claims about the irreducibility of ethical concepts to non-ethical ideas began analytical metaethics and the search for fundamental ethical concepts. Moore famously held that the basic ethical notion was that of intrinsic goodness. Subsequent research has revealed, however, that William Frankena was right when he pointed out that what drove Moore’s ‘open question argument’ was the idea of normativity and that this vindicated Sidgwick’s claim that ought rather than good is the fundamental ethical notion. This essay discusses the history of this and related debates between reasons, ought, and fittingness fundamentalists and how these figure in accounting for the difference between deontic moral concepts of right and wrong, on the one hand, and various ethical notions of goodness, on the other.

Most people believe that there is something particularly morally repugnant about terrorism. A number of philosophers have attempted to defend this widely held view by offering accounts of precisely what it is about terrorism that makes it morally distinctive. In this paper I raise some doubts about the accounts that have been defended by others, focusing in particular on Samuel Scheffler’s view. In light of the doubts that I raise about existing accounts, I suggest what must be done in order to arrive at an adequate account, and offer an outline of a view that seems to me promising. On the view that I suggest, terrorist acts reveal something of distinctive moral significance about the agents who perpetrate them, even if they are not in themselves morally worse than otherwise similar acts.

Although it is far from uncharted territory, some contemporary thinkers have been pushing the idea that imagination plays a central role in perception; specifically, as that which explains the phenomenon of perceptual presence. I agree with this general idea. However, there is a tendency among thinkers to place the vague notion of mental imagery at the core of their understanding of what it is to imagine; and attempts to explain perceptual presence in imagistic terms are incompatible with the phenomenology. I will consider another view that attempts to explain perceptual presence in terms of our possession of a form of implicit bodily knowledge of the ways one can access the world. Although it does not encounter the same issues as the imagery view, I will argue that there is much more to the phenomenon of presence than can be accounted for on the access view. I will propose an alternative that can be attributed to Merleau-Ponty. This alternative involves both appeal to a form of bodily knowledge and an imaginative capacity for entertaining the possibility of being situated otherwise; that, when exercised, gives rise to the presence of objects in experience as the objects that they are.

Cosmopolitans who take principles of distributive justice to apply globally have long struggled with the legacy of Rawls. Some parts of Rawls’s view seem to support cosmopolitanism although he rejects this position himself. Samuel Scheffler and Miriam Ronzoni have each identified resources in Rawls’s work that open the door to cosmopolitan conclusions but differ from those traditionally cited by cosmopolitans. Scheffler and Ronzoni argue that changing social circumstances, like those involved in globalization, may affect the scope of principles of distributive justice. But they also both take it to be an open question whether such principles have global reach presently. I argue that this reticence is not justified. Their arguments suggest that principles of distributive justice have long applied globally. Indeed, the view so strongly favors cosmopolitanism that further argument is needed to secure any room for unique domestic principles of distributive justice. I follow Rawls’s lead and draw on Kant to indicate how such an argument might go. Finally, I argue that although the scope of principles of distributive justice is less historically contingent than Scheffler and Ronzoni suggest, there is still considerable room in this view for the evolution of institutions to shape the content of such principles.

The goal of this chapter is to explain the normative force of personal projects and the project-dependent reasons they generate. Scheffler argues that it is not wrong to ignore project-dependent reasons. I point to three considerations that aim to show, pace Scheffler, that it is wrong to simply ignore the project-dependent reasons we once acknowledged. First, it is a condition for valuing a particular project that we have reasons to continue to respond to project-dependent reasons, even in cases where the project has been completed, where circumstances have forced us to abandon it, or where we have become less prone to value the project positively. Second, it is the fact of having once attained meaning in our lives by valuing a particular project that explains why we face additional reasons to sustain the project and to continue to respond to the project-dependent reasons we once acknowledged. Third, to the extent that a particular project accounts, in part at least, for our normative identity, and provided that it is valuable to thereby have conditions for having reasons at all, we have a further explanation of why project-dependent reasons carry a particular normative force for us to continue to value that project.