The criminal law distinction between conduct malum in se and malum prohibitum is five centuries old in common law jurisdictions and yet both its meaning and its usefulness remain matters of debate. I join the fray, arguing (a) that the terms cannot be interpreted literally, but that (b) there is a way of drawing the distinction that is both plausible and useful. Conduct mala in se is conduct that must be prohibited in any just polity, while mala prohibita conduct may but need not be criminalized. I employ concepts from social contract theory in the explanation.

As a means for thinking more precisely about the moral content of criminal offenses, this article argues that we should think of malum in se and malum prohibitum not as binary categories into which an offense does or not fit, but rather as contrasting, scalar qualities that all criminal offenses, to one degree or another, possess. Under this approach, an offense is malum in se to the extent that it criminalizes conduct that is morally wrong independent of the law, while it is malum prohibitum to the extent it criminalizes conduct that is morally wrong (if at all) in virtue of its being illegal.

The distinction between crimes that involve wrongs in themselves and crimes that are wrong because the law makes them so has long puzzled theorists. This essay argues that the distinction, while getting at something real, is based on a mistake. That mistake is made both by those who see moral wrongness as a necessary condition for criminality and by those who believe merely making something illegal is sufficient to make it criminal. Neither is correct. Rather, what makes something a criminal wrong is that it involves a violation of a law that has been justified in terms of “public reason.”

Some philosophers see an analogy between simulation and experiment. But, once we acknowledge some similarities between computer simulations and experiments, can we conclude from them that simulations generate empirical knowledge, as experiments do? In this paper, I argue that the similarities between simulation and experiment give the scientist at most the illusion that she is conducting an experiment, but cannot seriously ground the analogy. However, it does not follow that experiments are always epistemologically superior to simulations. I analyze the cases when simulations and experiments equally yield new empirical knowledge.

In Ecological Thinking, Lorraine Code argues that advocacy “often makes knowledge possible” and without it “certain kinds of knowing are impossible.” By acknowledging the value of subjectivity and testimony in knowledge creation, I argue that ecological thinking serves as an appropriate framework for engagement with individuals who are living with mental illnesses. Contrasted with the dominant Anglo-American epistemologies that involve excessive degrees of mastery and control (with the tendency to silence the voices of Others), I argue that ecological thinking facilitates healthy advocacy practices precisely because of its inclusivity and receptivity towards different perspectives in knowledge creation.

Luck egalitarians argue that distributive justice should be understood in terms of our capacity to be responsible for our choices. Both proponents and critics assume that the theory must rely on a comprehensive conception of responsibility. I respond to luck egalitarianism’s critics by developing a political conception of responsibility that remains agnostic on the metaphysics of free choice. I construct this political conception by developing a novel reading of John Rawls’ distinction between the political and the comprehensive. A surprising consequence is that many responsibility-based objections to luck egalitarianism turn out to be objections to Rawls’ political liberalism as well.

Aristotelian virtue theorists are currently engaged in a discussion with philosophers who use psychological findings to question some of their main assumptions. In this article, I present and argue against one of these psychological challenges—Jesse Prinz’s Normativity Challenge—which rests on the claim that findings in cultural psychology contradict the Aristotelian thesis that the normativity of virtues derives from nature. First, I demonstrate that the Normativity Challenge is based on three problematic assumptions about contemporary Aristotelianism. Second, I argue that it presupposes the truth of a metaethical framework that Aristotelians reject: moral relativism.

Christine Overall has argued that miracles, if they exist, would be an evil committed by God and therefore disprove the existence of God. However, her notion of a miracle as an intervention presupposes a view about the relation between God and creation that posits God as an ‘outsider.’ Such a view has not been held by all theists. It was not held by Thomas Aquinas. I show that Aquinas’s conception is not susceptible to Overall’s criticisms. The upshot is that theists should avoid any view of God as an ‘outsider,’ if they wish to avoid Overall’s criticisms.

Moral realists face an epistemological challenge: they must explain why many judgments that are likely to be (mind-independent) moral truths are those it would be evolutionarily adaptive to hold. Is it a coincidence? Do evolutionary forces track these truths? Third-factor explanation is the strategy most commonly adopted by moral realists to explain this striking correlation. In this article, I argue that it does not allow them to meet the challenge.

I offer a critical analysis of a contemporary work in analytic philosophy applied to epistemology of logic and mathematics. I discuss the reach and limits of Paolo Mancosu’s work, as recently published in a French translation (2015).