Recent studies point to a surprising divergence between people's use of the concept of _intention_ and their use of the concept of _acting intentionally_. It seems that people's application of the concept of intention is determined by their beliefs about the agent's psychological states whereas their use of the concept of acting intentionally is determined at least in part by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior itself (i.e., by their beliefs about whether the behavior is morally good (...) or morally bad). These findings raise a number of difficult questions about the relationship between the concept of intention and the concept of acting intentionally. The present paper addresses those questions using a variety of different methods, including conceptual analysis, psychological experimentation, and an examination of people's use of certain expressions in other languages. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a comparatively new field of research, and it is only natural that many of the key methodological questions have not even been asked, much less answered. In responding to the comments of our critics, we therefore find ourselves brushing up against difficult questions about the aims and techniques of our whole enterprise. We will do our best to address these issues here, but the field is progressing at a rapid clip, and we suspect that it will be (...) possible to provide more adequate answers a few years down the line. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to describe and resist two intellectual tendencies when thinking about how to do political philosophy in India today. The first involves a resistance to ‘Western political thought’, as alien, unfamiliar, or simply inappropriate for thinking about Indian political realities. The estrangement from Western political thought as 'foreign' comes with a concomitant instinct regarding how we should do political theory in India, namely by engaging with Indian thinkers and traditions, both ancient and modern. -/- My (...) primary aim is to resist this division between ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ thought, particularly when the ‘Indian’ in Indian political thought is taken to be a matter of origins, motivating a search for the indigenous. My own answer to the question posed by the title of the chapter – “What is ‘Indian’ about Indian Political Thought” does not rest upon such a division. Indeed, I believe that there are forms of engagement with Western political thought in an Indian context which are not different in kind from engagement with that thought in a Western context. These engagements are not well described as doing either ‘Western’ or ‘Indian’ political thought. (shrink)

In this note, written for a Book Symposium on Joseph Raz’ 'Morality of Freedom', I examine the extent to which the book succeeds in meeting what he calls the ‘‘revisionist challenge’’ to theories of liberty. Raz locates the revisionist challenge in the work of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. It has two separable aspects. The first is to deny that liberty is intrinsically valuable, and to claim rather that ‘‘those who wrote and talked of the value of liberty really cherished (...) not liberty but something else,’’ such as justice or equality. The second is to claim that this ‘‘something else’’ need refers not to one particular value, but rather to a ‘‘complex of values’’, such as might be captured by Rawls’ list of the basic liberties. Raz’ ultimate goal is to defend a conception of personal liberty on which is not only intrinsically valuable, but has a unity provided by an underlying 'core' in the ideal of personal autonomy. I suggest that Raz' formulation of the ideal of personal freedom, while undoubtedly impressive, does not fully respond to the revisionist challenge. (shrink)

How should philosophers in India approach the work of John Rawls? I argue against the view that his work should be regarded as exclusively within the domain of 'Western philosophy', which needs some distinctive process of translation and contextualization in order to speak to 'Indian conditions'. I also question the idea that 'Indian political philosophy' should be seen as an autonomous discipline with roots specifically in the Indian past.

My focus in this essay is on 'institutional' or 'procedural' criticisms of the death penalty. These criticisms take aim at the death penalty as it is carried out in practice. They begin with empirical observations about the imperfect functioning of the various institutions involved in death penalty administration, such as courts and the police. These institutional imperfections, it is claimed, result in the death penalty being imposed arbitrarily or capriciously; skews death penalty verdicts by various forms of deprivation and discrimination (...) (direct and indirect); and deliver an unacceptable rate of wrongful convictions. These facts are then taken as reasons to abolish or at least establish a moratorium on the death penalty until the imperfections are ironed out to an acceptable level. -/- My aims in this essay are three-fold. First, I aim to unpack the term “arbitrary” as a term of criticism against the criminal justice system. I argue that claims about arbitrariness refer to a range of more specific forms of injustice: one should speak not of arbitrariness as such but rather of an arbitrariness basket which is home to many kinds of injustice. Second, I wish to defend what I call "modest abolitionism," which relies upon a general duty to mitigate severe injustices when their rectification is particularly difficult or resource-intensive. Finally, I respond to some important criticisms of abolitionist arguments which take the arbitrariness of death penalty administration as their core. (shrink)