In this article, I argue that interpersonal cruelty can often be explained in ordinary moral terms in conjunction with facts about social hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that misogynistic cruelty often stems from the sense that certain women are wrongdoers; it often stems from the sense that certain, privileged men are entitled to violate women; and it often stems from the sense that, at least when they threaten such men, women simply do not matter. Misogynistic cruelty is thus more a product of moral vilification, entitlement, and devaluation than dehumanization proper. I explore the implications for the need to posit dehumanization as a mechanism to explain cruelty elsewhere.

On my account, dehumanization is the act of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. When this occurs, it is never complete, because those that dehumanize others cannot avoid recognizing their humanness. Consequently, dehumanization involves regarding others as both fully human and fully subhuman beings. Inferences about dehumanizing states of mind are based on interpretations of human behavior. A Davidsonian account of interpretation has it that we interpret behavior in such a manner as to make it maximally coherent, rational, and consistent. In contrast, a Freudian account of interpretation has it that the human mind is largely incoherent, irrational, and inconsistent. The dichotomy between Davidsonian and Freudian hermeneutic strategies accounts for disagreements between realists and skeptics about dehumanization, because of dichotomous interpretations of the testimony of perpetrators and victims. Skepticism about dehumanization often invokes an Objection from Strangeness to call into question such testimony. However, Objections from Strangeness rely on questionable commonsense psychological assumptions.

Within the recent glut of philosophical work on hope, relatively little attention has been devoted to the circumstantial conditions that frustrate or accommodate hoping. In this article, I show how an individual’s spatial environment can constrain their capacity to sustain determinate hopes for the future via an extended case study: long-term refugee detention. Taking seriously refugees’ claims that a central cause of widespread hopelessness is the feeling of being in limbo, and drawing on recent work on the role of the imagination in hoping, I demonstrate how an individual’s spatial environment can limit imaginative access to the interim steps between their present circumstances and a desired future, making it difficult to see any way their hope could be realized.

Conceptual improvements are a significant dimension through which local moral progress occurs, both at the individual and societal levels. Michele Moody-Adams (1999) offers a narrow view of moral progress, suggesting that only a deepened understanding of complex, existing moral concepts can constitute moral progress. Consequently, she views the role of moral philosophy as limited to constructing deeper accounts of these concepts. We broaden Moody-Adams’s (1999) account by identifying three distinct types of conceptual improvements that can constitute moral progress: deepening the understanding of existing concepts, creating new concepts, and enhancing the ability to apply concepts. We support this typology with historical examples where such improvements constituted moral progress. Based on this typology, we argue that the role of moral philosophy extends beyond developing and refining moral theories to include the active creation of new concepts and the facilitation of conceptual application.

Orthodox contractualists and rule consequentialists think that, for any action, the consequences of everyone performing that action determine whether that action is permissible. For them, “what if everyone did that?” is the fundamental moral question. By making “what if everyone did that?” the fundamental question of good moral reasoning, these moral theories can easily justify prohibitions on free-riding. But it also makes them face the ideal world problem. I argue that it was a mistake for moral theorists to generalize from an objection appropriate to cases of free-riding to all of morality. In short, we should understand the question “what if everyone did that?” to give expression to one, and only one, kind of objection to one’s action—namely, that, by performing that action, one would be making an exception of oneself. If we limit the scope of “what if everyone did that?” in this way, we can justify prohibitions on free-riding while avoiding the ideal world problem.

An agent’s epistemic prospects depend on a combination of that agent’s individual characteristics and features of that agent’s epistemic environment. Such factors cannot always be cleanly separated. Often, individual characteristics impact agents’ epistemic prospects by shaping the epistemic environments in which individuals find themselves. In particular, features of individuals often repel or attract certain sorts of information, a phenomenon I label epistemic magnetism. I argue that epistemic magnetism is a ubiquitous and underrecognized phenomenon that sometimes promotes and sometimes frustrates the achievement of positive epistemic outcomes. Then, I consider a series of simple proposals concerning what distinguishes between beneficial and harmful forms of epistemic magnetism. I argue that these proposals cannot capture the impacts of epistemic magnetism. Instead, I offer a series of principles that serve to roughly characterize the consequences of this phenomenon. I conclude with some remarks on why epistemologists have thus far tended to overlook epistemic magnetism.

Two approaches dominate the literature on the construction of emotions: transitory role theory and the more recent Conceptual Act Theory. We identify two ways in which these approaches would benefit from correction, revision, or further development. First, they tend to downplay the body, insisting that social forces work primarily at a conceptual level. That is, culture is considered to primarily impact the conceptualization of emotion, not emotional embodiment. Second, they tend to neglect the impact social norms have on emotions. We include relevant work in traditions outside philosophy and psychology (sociology, anthropology, and queer theory) that may shed light on the impact of social norms on emotions, as well as the relationship between socialization and embodiment. We propose an account of emotions as constructs that combine sociality and corporeality—an account that understands social norms and bodily responses as interdependent. Our proposal is to understand emotions as constructed via societal norms that materialize in bodily states. This advances the debate on the nature of emotions by integrating different theoretical strands (construction and embodiment), and it also contributes to the emerging literature on emotional injustice by shedding light on the role the social plays, for example, in shaping whose body gets to express which emotions.

Human languages are powerful representational tools, but can they represent every possible kind of entity? This seems unlikely. We can easily imagine languages—God’s language, or that of advanced extraterrestrials—that represent features of reality that our actual languages fail to capture. Eklund (2024) calls these alien languages. Yet despite the intuitive pull of this picture, it is unclear what alien languages, so understood, would amount to. I argue that there are no alien languages in this sense; human languages can represent any entity that can be linguistically represented at all. Still, I propose an alternative sense in which a language can be alien. On my cognitive account of alien language, a language is alien when linguistic understanding of it requires cognitive resources not used in understanding human languages. This account better explains the sense in which we can and cannot speak an alien language. We can represent whatever alien languages represent, but understanding alien languages may require cognitive resources that we lack.

This article articulates and defends an argument for pantheism which has not featured prominently in contemporary philosophy of religion but which is rooted in foundational ideas defended by pantheists and by non-pantheistic theists. It is inspired in part by the idea advocated by some theists that God is existence itself, and in part by the idea associated with pantheistic thinkers such as Śaṅkara that the universe is the “way” that fundamental existence is. Moreover, it is motivated by a simple and attractive view about God’s fundamental nature which might be shared by pantheists and non-pantheists according to which God is the asymmetric source of all else. Beginning from this view about God’s fundamental nature, it argues that God is existence. It then contends that there is therefore a clear and robust sense in which the universe “is” God, since the universe is the “way” existence is.