Consider people’s ordinary concept of belief. This concept seems to pick out a particular psychological state. Indeed, one natural view would be that the concept of belief works much like the concepts one finds in cognitive science – not quite as rigorous or precise, perhaps, but still the same basic type of notion. But now suppose we turn to other concepts that people ordinarily use to understand the mind. Suppose we consider the concept happiness. Or the concept love. How are (...) these concepts to be understood? One obvious hypothesis would be that they are best understood as being more or less like the concept of belief. Maybe these concepts, too, pick out a particular mental state and thereby enable people to predict, explain and understand others’ behavior. We will argue that this hypothesis is mistaken. Instead, we suggest that the different concepts people use to understand the mind are fundamentally different from each other. Some of these concepts do indeed serve simply to pick out a particular mental state, but others allow a role for evaluative judgments. So, for example, our claim will be that when people are wondering whether a given agent is truly ‘happy’ or ‘in love,’ they are not merely trying to figure out whether this agent has a particular sort of mental state. They are also concerned in a central way with evaluating the agent herself. In short, our aim is to point to a striking sort of difference between the different concepts that people use to pick out psychological attitudes. We will be.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The demand for sublimation of one's primitive and “evil” instincts plays a crucial role in Nietzsche's ethics. But prominent misreadings of Nietzsche's concept of sublimation have led to errors in interpreting his view of the highest type of man. I argue that Nietzsche's view of sublimation is that it is the elevation of the objects of a drive through reinterpretation or reimagining them in such a way that the attainment of these new objects achieves a greater potency of expression (...) for the drive while retaining its intrinsic aims. I also clarify the function of sublimation in his ethics. (shrink)

In his book The Myth of Evil, Phillip Cole argues that we ought to abandon the concept of evil. Cole claims that the concept of evil forms part of a dualistic worldview that divides normal people from inhuman, demonic, and monstrous wrongdoers. Such monsters are found in fiction, Cole suggests, but not in reality, so evil is of no explanatory use. Yet even if there were actual evil persons, Cole maintains, evil would be a redundant, pseudo-explanatory concept, a psychological black (...) hole that is of no use in our explanations of why people do wrong. Contrary to Cole's claims, evil does have the requisite form to function as an explanation, and thus, if there are any actual evil actions or persons, evil will be explanatorily useful. Cole is right to suggest that evil cannot provide a complete explanation for any actions, but none of our virtue or vice concepts can do so, and they are none the worse for that. Cole is also right to suggest that the concept of evil is often used to play certain narrative roles, but he fails to see that evil can play those roles only if it has an explanatorily useful form. While it is true that evil could be paraphrased out of explanations of actions without any loss of information, that does not show that the concept is explanatorily redundant. In fact, Cole's preferred alternative explanations of extreme wrongdoing that eschew appeals to evil are themselves inadequate because they fail to account for the directed and intentional nature of some extremely wrong actions. (shrink)

Žižek has asked us to consider when we should care about the _tyrant’s bloody robes_. He was asking whether we should show restraint in responding to terrible injustice. The unsettling depiction of ‘Joker’ in Todd Phillips’ (2019) film of the same name goes some way to answering this question. We witness in this film a Joker unlike the many others we had seen in the Batman cinematic universe. Arthur Fleck is not a villain, at least not when he sets (...) out to live in our world. In his own words, he is just a man with ‘nothing left to lose’ living a life that has become ‘nothing but a comedy’. He is not the chaos spreading sociopath depicted in _The Dark Knight_ (2008). He is a man with a mental health condition. An outcast. Pushed around by society until he decided to do something about it. But why is a vigilante in a bat mask acceptable, but one in clown make-up is not? Maybe our traditional understandings of “right” and “wrong” and our childish cultural tropes about “good” and “evil” no longer serve us as they should when our heroes are greedy corporatists and our villains are the marginalised, disabled and mentally ill. Could it be that the Batman stories we have heard since we were children are designed to make us fret about the tyrant’s bloody robes? In this paper I explore Žižek’s analysis of Joker alongside his accounts of surplus-enjoyment with particular reference to Arthur Fleck’s life whilst living with a disability. (shrink)

In his book The Myth of Evil , Phillip Cole claims that the concept of evil divides normal people from inhuman, demonic and monstrous wrongdoers. Such monsters are found in fiction, Cole maintains, but not in reality. Thus, even if the concept of evil has the requisite form to be explanatorily useful, it will be of no explanatory use in the real world. My aims in this paper are to assess Cole’s arguments for the claim that there are no actual (...) evil persons, and, in so doing, to develop a clearer framework in which to think about evil personhood. While Cole is right to claim that there are no actual evil monsters or supernatural demons, he underestimates the extent to which ascriptions of demonic monstrosity are figurative rather than literal. Hence, a lack of actual monsters does not imply a lack of actual evil persons. More plausibly, Cole suggests that the concept of evil implies an unrealistically dualistic worldview, with purely evil people on one side and ordinary people on the other. Since no one is purely bad, Cole claims, the concept of evil fails to refer to actual persons. Cole is wrong to think that the use of extreme moral concepts is incompatible with fine-grained moral evaluations across a broad spectrum between the extremes. Nor is Cole sufficiently careful in unpacking the various ways in which a person might be considered purely bad. I will argue that some actual persons are extremely bad, that it is very likely that some actual persons are fixedly bad, and that quite possibly no actual persons are thoroughly bad or innately bad. It is plausible that a person is evil only if he is extremely and fixedly bad, but Cole is wrong to suppose that a person is evil only if he is thoroughly and innately bad. Thus, even if we accept Cole’s claim that no actual person is thoroughly or innately bad, it still seems very likely that some actual persons are evil, and hence that evil can be an explanatorily useful concept. (shrink)

This paper provides an exploration of whistleblowing as a protracted process, using secondary data from 868 cases from a whistleblower advice line in the UK. Previous research on whistleblowing has mainly studied this phenomenon as a one-off decision by someone perceiving wrongdoing within an organisation to raise a concern or to remain silent. Earlier suggestions that whistleblowing is a process and that people find themselves inadvertently turned into whistleblowers by management responses, have not been followed up by a systematic study (...) tracking the path of how a concern is repeatedly raised by whistleblowers. This paper provides a quantitative exploration of whistleblowing as a protracted process, rather than a one-off decision. Our research finds that the whistleblowing process generally entails two or even three internal attempts to raise a concern before an external attempt is made, if it is made at all. We also find that it is necessary to distinguish further between different internal as well as external whistleblowing recipients. Our findings suggest that whistleblowing is a protracted process and that this process is internally more protracted than previously documented. The overall pattern is that whistleblowers tend to search for a more independent recipient at each successive attempt to raise their concern. Formal whistleblower power seems to determine which of the available recipients are perceived as viable and also what the initial responses are in terms of retaliation and effectiveness. (shrink)

I argue that there are non-trivial objective chances (that is, objective chances other than 0 and 1) even in deterministic worlds. The argument is straightforward. I observe that there are probabilistic special scientific laws even in deterministic worlds. These laws project non-trivial probabilities for the events that they concern. And these probabilities play the chance role and so should be regarded as chances as opposed, for example, to epistemic probabilities or credences. The supposition of non-trivial deterministic chances might seem to (...) land us in contradiction. The fundamental laws of deterministic worlds project trivial probabilities for the very same events that are assigned non-trivial probabilities by the special scientific laws. I argue that any appearance of tension is dissolved by recognition of the level-relativity of chances. There is therefore no obstacle to accepting non-trivial chance-role-playing deterministic probabilities as genuine chances. (shrink)

If moral status depends on the capacity for consciousness, what kind of consciousness matters exactly? Two popular answers are that any kind of consciousness matters (Broad Sentientism), and that what matters is the capacity for pleasure and suffering (Narrow Sentientism). I argue that the broad answer is too broad, while the narrow answer is likely too narrow, as Chalmers has recently argued by appeal to ‘philosophical Vulcans’. I defend a middle position, Motivational Sentientism, on which what matters is motivating consciousness: (...) any kind of consciousness which presents its subject with reasons for action. (shrink)

A new formulation of the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA) for the existence of God is offered, which avoids a number of commonly raised objections. I argue that we can and should focus on the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe, and show how physics itself provides the probabilities that are needed by the argument. I explain how this formulation avoids a number of common objections, specifically the possibility of deeper physical laws, the multiverse, normalisability, whether God would fine-tune at (...) all, whether the universe is too fine-tuned, and whether the likelihood of God creating a life-permitting universe is inscrutable. (shrink)

In the absence of explicit punitive sanctions, why do individuals voluntarily participate in intergroup warfare when doing so incurs a mortality risk? Here we consider the motivation of individuals for participating in warfare. We hypothesize that in addition to other considerations, individuals are incentivized by the possibility of rewards. We test a prediction of this “cultural rewards war-risk hypothesis” with ethnographic literature on warfare in small-scale societies. We find that a greater number of benefits from warfare is associated with a (...) higher rate of death from conflict. This provides preliminary support for the relationship between rewards and participation in warfare. (shrink)

The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such ‘between-subjects unity’. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of ‘experience-sharing’, in which the same token experience belongs to more (...) than one subject. The second argument, based on the phenomenological claim that unified experiences have interdependent phenomenal characters, I show to rest on an equivocation. Finally, the third argument accuses between-subjects unity of being unimaginable, or more broadly a formal possibility corresponding to nothing we can make sense of. I argue that the familiar experience of perceptual co-presentation gives us an adequate phenomenological grasp on what between-subjects unity might be like. (shrink)

Most philosophers acknowledge ways of overcoming blame, even blame directed at a culpable offender, that are not forgiving. Sometimes continuing to blame a friend for their offensive comment just isn't worth it, so we let go instead. However, despite being a common and widely recognised experience, no one has offered a positive account of letting go. Instead, it tends to be characterised negatively and superficially, usually in order to delineate the boundaries of forgiveness. This paper gives a more complete and (...) systematic account of this important practice. We argue that the basic distinction between forgiving and letting go of blame follows from distinctions that many philosophers already accept. We then develop a positive account in terms of the reasons one has to let go rather than forgive and show that letting go is as valuable a part of our shared moral lives as forgiveness. (shrink)

Eavesdropping judgments (judgments about truth, retraction, and consistency across contexts) about epistemic modals have been used in recent years to argue for a radical thesis: that truth is assessment-relative. We argue that judgments for 'I think that p' pattern in strikingly similar ways to judgments for 'Might p' and 'Probably p'. We argue for this by replicating three major experiments involving the latter and adding a condition with the form 'I think that p', showing that subjects respond in the same (...) way to 'thinks' as to modals. This poses a serious challenge to relativist treatments of the modal judgments, since a relativist treatment of the corresponding 'thinks' judgments is totally implausible, so if a unified account of the phenomena is to be found, it cannot be a relativist one. We briefly sketch how a unified account might look. (shrink)

I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the relative qualitative homogeneity of the brain's basic constituents, a discrepancy that has been raised as a problem for identity theorists by Maxwell and Lockwood (as one element of the ‘grain problem’), and more recently as a problem for panpsychists (under the heading of ‘the palette problem’). The challenge posed to panpsychists by this discrepancy is to make sense of how a relatively small ‘palette’ of basic qualities could (...) give rise to the bewildering diversity of qualities we, and presumably other creatures, experience. I argue that panpsychists can meet this challenge, though it requires taking contentious stands on certain phenomenological questions, in particular on whether any familiar qualities are actual examples of ‘phenomenal blending’, and whether any other familiar qualities have a positive ‘phenomenologically simple character’. Moreover, it requires accepting an eventual theory most elements of which are in a certain explicable sense unimaginable, though not for that reason inconceivable. Nevertheless, I conclude that there are no conclusive reasons to reject such a theory, and so philosophers whose prior commitments motivate them to adopt it can do so without major theoretical cost. (shrink)

Two options are ‘incommensurate’ when neither is better than the other, but they are not equally good. Typically, we will say that one option is better in some ways, and the other in others, but neither is better ‘all things considered’. It is tempting to think that incommensurability is vagueness—that it is (perhaps) indeterminate which is better—but this ‘vagueness view’ of incommensurability has not proven popular. I set out the vagueness view and its implications in more detail, and argue that (...) it can explain most of the puzzling features of incommensurability. This argument proceeds without appeal to John Broome’s ‘collapsing principle’. (shrink)

Many philosophical views have the surprising implication that, within the boundaries of each human being, there is not just one mind, but many: anywhere from two (the person and their brain, or the person and their body) to trillions (each of the nearly-entirely-overlapping precise entities generated by the Problem of the Many). This is often treated as absurd, a problem of ‘Too Many Minds’, which we must find ways to avoid. It is often thought specifically absurd to allow such a (...) multiplication of conscious subjects, even if we could accept it for physical objects. I consider metaphysical, phenomenological, and moral arguments for this asymmetry, and show that they all fail: many overlapping conscious minds is no more problematic than many overlapping physical objects. Theories that imply such a multiplicity may or may not be true, but they cannot be rejected simply for implying it. (shrink)

Panpsychism is a striking metaphysical claim: every part of the physical world has some form of consciousness. Does this striking claim have equally striking ethical implications? Does it change what duties we owe to which beings, or how we should understand the relation between self-interest and altruism? Some defenders as well as critics of panpsychism have suggested it does. Others have disagreed. In this paper, we attempt to survey and organize these existing discussions. We suggest that panpsychism is likely to (...) have significant implications, but that they 1) stop short of some of the most radical implications sometimes associated with the view (by both critics and proponents), and 2) often depend heavily on the exact sort of panpsychism that is endorsed, as well as how one settles various independent questions about value and identity. (shrink)

I examine the origins of ordinary racial thinking. In doing so, I argue against the thesis that it is the byproduct of a unique module. Instead, I defend a pluralistic thesis according to which different forms of racial thinking are driven by distinct mechanisms, each with their own etiology. I begin with the belief that visible features are diagnostic of race. I argue that the mechanisms responsible for face recognition have an important, albeit delimited, role to play in sustaining this (...) belief. I then argue that essentialist beliefs about race are driven by some of the mechanisms responsible for “entitativity perception”: the tendency to perceive some aggregates of people as more genuine groups than others. Finally, I argue that coalitional thinking about race is driven by a distinctive form of entitativity perception. However, I suggest that more data is needed to determine the prevalence of this form of racial thinking. (shrink)

There is a well-known remark in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations which even some philosophers sympathetic to his work have found very hard to accept. It reads:Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language;it can in the end only describe it.For it cannot give it any foundation either.It leaves everything as it is. Surely, it is said, that is carrying matters too far. Wittgenstein's hyperbole should be excused as a harmless stylistic flourish.

Studies of animal culture have not normally included a consideration of cetaceans. However, with several long-term field studies now maturing, this situation should change. Animal culture is generally studied by either investigating transmission mechanisms experimentally, or observing patterns of behavioural variation in wild populations that cannot be explained by either genetic or environmental factors. Taking this second, ethnographic, approach, there is good evidence for cultural transmission in several cetacean species. However, only the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops) has been shown experimentally to (...) possess sophisticated social learning abilities, including vocal and motor imitation; other species have not been studied. There is observational evidence for imitation and teaching in killer whales. For cetaceans and other large, wide-ranging animals, excessive reliance on experimental data for evidence of culture is not productive; we favour the ethnographic approach. The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties. The wide movements of cetaceans, the greater variability of the marine environment over large temporal scales relative to that on land, and the stable matrilineal social groups of some species are potentially important factors in the evolution of cetacean culture. There have been suggestions of gene-culture coevolution in cetaceans, and culture may be implicated in some unusual behavioural and life-history traits of whales and dolphins. We hope to stimulate discussion and research on culture in these animals. (shrink)

Philosophical exploration of individualism and externalism in the cognitive sciences most recently has been focused on general evaluations of these two views (Adams & Aizawa 2008, Rupert 2008, Wilson 2004, Clark 2008). Here we return to broaden an earlier phase of the debate between individualists and externalists about cognition, one that considered in detail particular theories, such as those in developmental psychology (Patterson 1991) and the computational theory of vision (Burge 1986, Segal 1989). Music cognition is an area in the (...) cognitive sciences that has received little attention from philosophers, though it has relatively recently been thrown into the externalist spotlight (Cochrane 2008, Kruger 2014, Kersten forthcoming). Given that individualism can be thought of as a kind of paradigm for research on cognition, we provide a brief overview of the field of music cognition and individualistic tendencies within the field (sections 2 and 3) before turning to consider externalist alternatives to individualistic paradigms (section 4-5) and then arguing for a qualified form of externalism about music cognition (section 6). (shrink)

There is a longstanding debate between those who think that cognition extends into the external environment and those who think it is located squarely within the individual. Recently, a new actor has emerged on the scene, one that looks to play kingmaker. Predictive processing says that the mind/brain is fundamentally engaged in a process of minimising the difference between what is predicted about the world and how the world actually is, what is known as ‘prediction error minimisation’. The goal of (...) this paper is to articulate a novel approach to extended cognition using the resources of PP. After outlining two recent proposals from Constant et al. and Kirchhoff and Kiverstein, I argue that the case for extended cognition can be further developed by interpreting certain elements of the PP story as a “mark of the cognitive”. The suggestion is that when construed at an ‘algorithmic level’ PEM offers a direct route to thinking about extended systems as genuine cognitive systems. On route to articulating the proposal, I lay out the core argument, defend the proposal’s novelty, and point to several of the advantages of the formulation. Finally, I conclude by taking up two challenges raised by Hohwy about the prospects of using PEM to argue for extended cognition. (shrink)

Compersion is an important concept for non-monogamous people. Often described as jealousy's opposite, compersion labels positive feelings toward the intimacy of a beloved with other people. Since many people think jealousy is ordinary, intransigent, and even appropriate, compersion can seem psychologically and ethically dubious. I make the case for compersion, arguing it focuses on the flourishing of others and is thus not akin to pride, vicarious enjoyment, or masochistic pleasure. People cultivate compersion by softening their propensity to be jealous and (...) by attending to the flourishing of others, which requires them to tackle entitlement and temper vulnerability. I argue that jealousy is not a valuable emotional disposition; its instrumental benefits are minor, unstable, and have to be traded against the harms of aggression. Arguments that conclude that jealousy is a virtue rest on contentious premises and overlook the practical question as to whether jealousy and compersion could be cultivated together. (shrink)

The view that research with competent adults requires valid consent to be ethical perhaps finds its clearest expression in the Nuremberg Code, whose famous first principle asserts that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” In a similar vein, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that “no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.” Yet although some formulations of the consent principle allow no exceptions, others hold (...) that informed consent is not always strictly necessary for ethical research. The U.S. federal regulations known as the “Common Rule,” which govern research with human subjects, lists several conditions for waiving consent. However, neither guidance documents on the ethics of clinical research nor the literature in bioethics contains a general justification of research without consent. The purpose of this paper is to advance a justificatory framework that will explain why research without consent is permissible in paradigmatic cases and that can be useful in analyzing cases about which there is disagreement. We argue that research without consent can be justified on two grounds: if it stands to infringe no right of the participants and obtaining consent is impracticable, or if the gravity of the rights infringement is minor and outweighed by the expected social value of the research and obtaining consent is impracticable. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to deconstruct the language used in President Trump’s Facebook posts while on the campaign trail, and the subsequent comments which reiterate and reify this rhetoric, to understand how Syrian refugees are labeled as a dangerous population unworthy of asylum. By utilizing the theoretical groundwork of Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe, this qualitative content analysis will explore how Syrian refugees, as depicted by Facebook comments, represent a “disposable population.” We conclude that by reducing Syrian refugees to (...) a sub-human status and representing them as the dangerous and unworthy other, both President Trump who initiated this rhetoric, and those who responded in a way which legitimized his views, effectively labeled Syrian refugees as a dangerous population unworthy of asylum within the USA. (shrink)

Apocalypticism has been widely denounced as a framework that devalues the world and its history, funding moral dualism. While this is certainly true of many forms of apocalypticism, it is not an accurate understanding of ancient apocalyptic texts. This article establishes a framework of theological virtue ethics drawn particularly from Herbert McCabe, in which human rationality and Christian morality are understood as political, linguistic, narrative, bodily and sacramental. From within this framework, Anathea Portier-Young’s work is considered, relating early Jewish apocalyptic (...) to trauma theory and describing how these texts narrated socio-political catastrophe in order to open up possibilities of resistance and hope. These considerations point us towards a constructive understanding of apocalyptic imagination and praxis within a political, linguistic, narrative, bodily and sacramental framework. Contemporary employments of Afro-pessimism in Black theology, particularly in J. Kameron Carter, then interrogate the proposed apocalyptic imagination, asking whether Christian apocalyptic praxis can cultivate hope in the face of the catastrophe of modern racism. (shrink)

Are communicators perceived as committed to what they actually say (what is explicit), or to what they mean (including what is implicit)? Some research claims that explicit communication leads to a higher attribution of commitment and more accountability than implicit communication. Here we present theoretical arguments and experimental data to the contrary. We present three studies exploring whether the saying–meaning distinction affects commitment attribution in promises, and, crucially, whether commitment attribution is further modulated by the degree to which the hearer (...) will actually rely on the promise. Our results support the conclusion that people perceive communicators to be committed to ‘what is meant’, and not simply to ‘what is said’. Our findings add to the experimental literature showing that the saying–meaning distinction is not as pivotal to social relations as often assumed, and that its role in commitment attribution might be overestimated. The attribution of commitment is strongly dependent on the (mutually known) relevance of ‘what is meant’. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was an energetic activist, yet his bleak depiction of totalizing power and his refusal to make normative claims have led many to judge that Discipline and Punish (1975) did not sustain a positive political project. This article offers a new, contextualist account of Foucault’s political purposes by reading Discipline and Punish as a tool for coalition building through historical worldmaking. Addressing the division and marginalization of movements on France’s “alternative left” like feminism and gay liberation, Foucault wove together (...) their differentiated concerns into a shared historical world. His apparently demoralizing identification of the same forms of power everywhere in fact revealed new possibilities for alliance. Focusing on Foucault’s unifying historical narratives reveals a positive project beyond the negative, denaturalizing “critique of power” we usually associate with his political thought. Foucault’s coalitional work of worldmaking may offer a model for genealogical political theory today. (shrink)

We often have some reason to do actions insofar as they promote outcomes or states of affairs, such as the satisfaction of a desire. But what is it to promote an outcome? I defend a new version of 'probabilism about promotion'. According to Minimal Probabilistic Promotion, we promote some outcome when we make that outcome more likely than it would have been if we had done something (anything) else. This makes promotion easy and reasons cheap.

This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves appear to (...) be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas. (shrink)