abstracts

While philosophers have written a great deal about the practical and historical significance of analysis, the pedagogical significance of the core analytical concepts, methods, and attitudes is much less prominent in the philosophical literature. To help address this situation, I would like to discuss one of the most fundamental ways in which we can apply analysis in the philosophy classroom. By leading students through a structured analytical discussion aimed at developing a rigorous definition of philosophy in terms of subject matter, methodology, and purpose, we can help them to better understand the nature of philosophy and its place in the academic world. At the same time, we can also help our students to develop basic critical thinking skills applicable across and beyond the college curriculum.

In An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense Thomas Reid presents an argument for the innateness of language. I clarify some concepts and present Reid’s argument. Next, I present the views of Rom Harre and Daniel Robinson. They argue that Reid is not committed to an innate language. Rather, they maintain that Reid is committed to something non-linguistic that allows for the development of language. I show that this interpretation is not consistent with Reid’s own view. Hence, Reid does advocate an innate language.

Although popular with many medieval and early modern Christian thinkers, occasionalism has, for the past two centuries, most commonly been maligned and dismissed as bizarre and outrageous by both atheists and theists alike. In recent years, however, there has been a renewed interest in occasionalism, and, though many theists continue to treat it as anathema, several influential philosophers have shown sympathy for or even defended the view in some form. In this paper, I will try to demonstrate why occasionalism should be at least a live option for many Christians. I will try to demonstrate that occasionalism follows from the combination of two very well established, orthodox doctrines: the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of divine eternality.

2a. Coherence, Consistency, and Cohesion: Clade Selection in Okasha and Beyond

Samir Okasha argues that clade selection is an incoherent concept, because the relation that constitutes clades is such that it renders parent-offspring (reproduction) relations between clades impossible. He reasons that since clades cannot reproduce, it is not coherent to speak of natural selection operating at the clade level. We argue, however, that when species-level lineages and clade-level lineages are treated consistently according to standard cladist commitments, clade reproduction is indeed possible and clade selection is coherent if certain conditions obtain. Despite clade selection’s logical coherence, however, we share some of Okasha’s pessimism. Whether or not clades are a unit of selection is ultimately a question of empirical support and theoretical import, but we offer reasons to be skeptical about clade selection as a research programme.

When confronting the religious diversity and the plurality of apparently competing religious truth-claims, three general responses are possible: a committed particularism that holds one religion (invariably, the particularist’s religion) to be the Truth, and all others in error; second, some form of skepticism that holds either that all religious view are likely to be unreliable, or else that the question is rationally undecidable; or third, some form of pluralism that various religious traditions are more or less on a par in terms of both truth and efficacy In his essay, “The Religion of The Matrix and the Problems of Pluralism,” Gregory Bassham further classifies pluralism into four varieties: Extreme Pluralism, which (incoherently) holds all religious systems to be true; Fundamental Teachings Pluralism, which holds all the major religions to be congruent in their fundamental teachings, discounting their differences as secondary characteristics (and thereby forcing actual religious belief and practice into a Procrustean bed); “Cafeteria” Pluralism, which eclectically picks and chooses themes and doctrines from the various religious traditions to create an idiosyncratic personal religion; and Transcendental Pluralism (which Bassham especially identifies with John Hick) the view that the all the major religious systems, with their apparently conflicting concepts and practices, are phenomenal representations of a single, noumenal, transcendental reality. As Bassham’s agenda seems to be to defend a form of Christian religious exclusivism, he proceeds to offer critiques of all four varieties of pluralism in order. This author mostly agrees with three of Bassham’s four critiques, but takes exception to the points he makes against Cafeteria Pluralism. In this essay, Bassham’s objections to the “Cafeteria” approach are examined in order, and then supplemented with a couple additional objections. It is argued that while some specific versions of eclecticism may be vulnerable to one or more of these objections, an eclectic approach to religion may theoretically be more defensible than Bassham claims.

2e. How many Seattlites must like rain before "Seatlites like rain"? Analyzing collective ascription

Politicians, pundits, and political scientists continually ascribe beliefs and to large groups of people with phrases such as “New Yorkers like bagels.” But what should we conclude when we hear such phrases? It is not clear how they should be interpreted, unless we know the social/linguistic rules concerning how many X group members must do Y before such a phrase is permissible in our language. In this paper, I examine these rules.

Because Nietzsche associates pleasure with the increase of power, it is often thought that the Nietzschean subject’s happiness requires domination of the external world, including domination of other persons. However, I argue that this view is not necessitated by Nietzsche’s theory of pleasure. Moreover, such a view is inconsistent with his repeated suggestion that pleasure may be found in activity, tension, and resistance. I suggest that Nietzsche’s various statements about pleasure can only be consistently interpreted by viewing resistance, rather than the overcoming of resistance, as the basis of pleasure. Finally, I argue that because resistance is essential to the feeling of pleasure, the Nietzschean subject’s happiness can only be continually maintained in social conditions where domination is absent—where each subject’s independence is preserved through the promotion of a balance of powers.

Sometimes laws of nature will be different in the closest counterfactual worlds than they are in the base world. The counterfactual, “if NASA developed a shuttle that traveled at twice the speed of light, space exploration would be greatly enhanced,” clearly requires examining worlds with different laws than our own. Nevertheless, there is something strange about that counterfactual. Namely, it has a physically impossible antecedent. Do counterfactuals, which are not also counterlegals, ever force us to consider worlds with different laws than the base world? Following David Lewis, most writers on this question have concentrated on deterministic systems. Nevertheless, this tendency has allowed the position that closest worlds never contain different laws to appear more coherent than it actually is. In indeterministic settings, maintaining that the closest worlds never contain different laws leads to destroying the connection between laws and prediction, explanation, induction and observation. Since these connections are vital to the concept of lawhood, we should maintain that the closest worlds sometimes contain different laws.

This paper argues that Parkinson’s objections to Hegel’s criticisms of Spinoza fail.

In “Of Miracles”, section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume offers his famous argument to the conclusion “...that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish....” I consider the applicability of Hume’s argument as well as its Bayesian rivals to near-death experiences. I argue that neither Humean nor Bayesian approaches provide an adequate dismissal of near-death experiences as evidence for an afterlife. I forward an alternative neo-Humean argument against a paranormal construal of these experiences and outline the relevant neurophysiological mechanisms thought to induce them.

4a. The Problem of the Socratic Elenchus: Must Socrates to Give Reasons for the Premises He Uses in His Elenctic Arguments?

In this paper, I address what Vlastos calls “the problem of the Socratic elenchus.” Vlastos states the problem as follows: “how is it that Socrates claims to have proved a thesis is false when, in point of logic, all he has proved is that the thesis is inconsistent with the conjunction of agreed-upon premises for which no reason has been given in that argument?”

It is important to solve this problem, for it strikes at the heart of two main features of Socratic philosophy: the Socratic method and Socratic ethics. The Socratic elenchus is Socrates’ main method of philosophical inquiry, and Socrates thinks his elenchus is sufficient to genuinely prove his interlocutor’s thesis is false. If Socrates does not accomplish this aim, then there is a serious flaw in the Socratic method, for it does not accomplish what he thinks it does. This raises a problem for Socratic ethics because Socrates often thinks the elenchus not only refutes his interlocutor but also establishes his own moral doctrines. Often Socrates’ own moral doctrine is either the negation of the interlocutor’s initial claim or is implied by it. Hence, if Socrates shows the interlocutor’s thesis is false, he shows his own doctrine is true. If indeed his elenchus does not prove his interlocutor’s thesis false, then Socrates cannot legitimately think he establishes his own moral doctrines.

This problem, however, has been the subject of a good deal of controversy: not only is there controversy about how to solve the problem but also there is controversy about whether there is a problem in the first place. The purpose of this paper is to address the latter controversy, part of which centers around an important assumption which seems to require that Socrates give or have reasons for the truth of the premises he uses to refute the interlocutor. In this paper, I will argue that, when properly understood, this assumption is justified; I will thereby argue that the problem is well-grounded, at least with respect to this assumption.

To do this, I will first present the problem and the assumption upon which this paper will focus; second, I will show how scholars have interpreted this assumption, and show how objections to these interpretations raise a serious dilemma for the legitimacy of the problem; third, I will argue that this assumption escapes this dilemma. I will also argue that, when properly understood, this assumption is justified and thereby that the problem is well grounded with respect to it.

As a number of philosophers have emphasized, the situation or context in which people deliberate and choose should not be taken as unproblematically given. Much morally relevant work occurs prior to making choices. The way one’s situation appears—the way one describes and perceives it, the features of it which seem most salient—heavily condition the possibilities revealed by deliberation and made available for choice.

This paper investigates one of the perceptual states that influence deliberation and choice: self-centeredness. The goals of the paper are to determine what characteristics distinguish self-centered perception and what causes contribute to it. This is accomplished by 1) providing a portrait of a self-centered person (Hjalmar of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), and 2) by differentiating self-centeredness from three ethical failings with which it can be easily confused: inattention, selfishness, and, lastly, the incapacity to see that produces the invisibility in Ellison’s Invisible Man.

4d. Epistemological Analysis of Historical Subjects: The Implications of Empirical Study for Epistemic Theories

The natural environment is perceived in distinctive ways in diverse cultures. As the integrity of the natural environment becomes recognised as a global concern, we need to ask how culture and nature are, and can be, related. In many societies nature and culture are not considered as opposites. The recent adoption of “cultural landscapes” as a category for protection in the World Heritage Convention calls for a re-evaluation of the distinction between natural and cultural heritage, and, in this context, of the relation between nature and culture. In this paper I propose that nature can be understood as an important, distinctive category, even while granting the constitutive role of the cultural categories in the recognition of a realm of nature in the first place.

I begin by considering the notion of natural heritage, as developed in relation to the World Heritage Convention, the questions that have been raised regarding the idea of nature, and the supposed contrast between nature and culture. I continue by taking note of the manner in which the idea of culture functions, how nature and artifice relate to culture, and show what it means to speak of a culture of nature. I conclude with a sketch of the consequences that these considerations have for natural heritage conservation, and for our understanding of the relation between natural and cultural heritage.

5a. Procedural vs. Substantive Theories of Autonomy: Reinterpreting the Connection Between Good Values and Autonomy

Those who posit procedural theories of autonomy aim to account for moral responsibility in terms of the structural and/or historical components of an agent’s capacity for critical self-reflection. Proponents of substantive theories of autonomy, however, criticize purely procedural theories for their seeming disregard for the negative effects of the internalization of oppressive norms on autonomy. My task in this paper is to determine whether procedural or substantive theories of autonomy are better equipped to serve as accounts of responsible agency in situations where persons have internalized oppressive norms. My inquiry leads to two interesting outcomes: first, I suggest that procedural type theories that take historical factors into account are more apt to assess agent autonomy in such cases; and secondly, what could be considered a substantivist point, that there is a connection between good values and autonomy. In order to reconcile these seemingly opposing outcomes I suggest that a solution lies in the distinction between optional values and internalized norms. Optional values are the possible moral choices made live to a person by means of presentation and reflection. Internalized norms are simply those resident values that a person chooses, or is forced to adopt. My idea here is that the connection between good values and autonomy pertains only to the former. That is, good values are necessary for autonomy because they must be present to an agent in the form of moral options from which she can choose her values. There does not appear, however, to be any significant connection between the content of an agent’s internalized norms and her degree of autonomy. For this reason, I argue that the connection between good values and autonomy can be accounted for on purely procedural terms, and thus, it is procedural, and not substantive theories of autonomy that both, appropriately handle cases in which persons have internalized oppressive norms, and are consistent with a proper account of the connection between good values and autonomy.

John Etchemendy argues that the model-theoretic definitions of logical truth and logical consequence fail as conceptual analyses of these notions since they depend on an assumption about the size of the universe. I’ll argue that this argument is fallacious but for a reason which independently entails that the model-theoretic definitions fail as conceptual analyses.

The paper comes in two parts. In the first part, I’ll raise both the question whether Tarksi intended model-theoretic semantics to provide an analysis of logical truth and consequence and the more interesting question whether model-theoretic semantics can provide such an analysis. Here I’ll argue that, far from model-theoretic semantics providing an analysis of logical truth and consequence, it employs notions of logic, consequence and modality.

In the second part of the paper, I’ll rehearse Etchemendy’s argument in more detail and respond to Etchemendy by drawing on the result in the first section. If the model theoretic definitions employ certain modal notions then there’s a sense of “the size of the universe” where our views on the size of the universe do carry commitments for what sentences we take to express logical truths.

This paper begins with a story from Thomas Hill’s important article, “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving the Natural Environment.” In the story, a man destroys a garden because he is annoyed at taking care of it and wants more sun. Hill remarks that this leaves “even apolitical observers with some degree of moral discomfort,” and Hill asks how to account for this discomfort. Hill rejects various approaches to answering this question that depend on the “untenable” claim that “plants have rights or morally relevant interests.” He suggests virtue ethics as a better approach to environmental problems, but he does not give much detail about the nature of virtues in general. In this paper, I show how Adam Smith’s account of virtues can be a valuable resource in environmental ethics.

Analysis of continuous causal processes yields a form of causal concept special to the structure of these processes. This structure is necessarily dense – between any two terms in the series there lies another. In order to conceive causal relations holding through such series, some theorists advance a “non-discrete” form of the causal relation. This form of the relation avoids the use of a direct causal relation – such a relation is thought to be incompatible with the structure of the continuous series. I argue, however, that our only genuine concept of causation is a concept of a dyadic relation – i.e., all causal relations are direct. There is thus a tension in the concept of causal process as between the concept of continuity and that of causal connection. Analysis provides us the capacity to recognize this tension. We should resist, however, the temptation to eliminate this tension, for by doing so we lose our capacity for representation of what must be a dialectical whole – the nature of the causal process can be understood only dialectically. Causal processes are dynamic, occurring in time: our capacity so-to conceive them requires that we keep closely together what analysis might otherwise take apart.

How can sentences that differ from each other only with respect to co-referential names differ in their informativeness? I argue that such sentences convey different information by conveying different presuppositions, and I explain how this behavior is consistent with the claim that proper names are devices of direct reference.

According to Buddhism’s four noble truths, we are in anguish because we habitually crave for life to be other than it is; and this craving will cease only if we cultivate Buddhist practice. Buddhism is all about curing craving. The cure involves the realization that one has no self as a permanent changeless identity. According to Stephen Batchelor, “I am not a fixed essence but an interactive cluster of processes.” He suggests that this cluster includes various social structures.

In this essay I examine the role of technological structures in the cluster of processes that embody us. I will suggest that a cyborg is just such a cluster of processes, that we indeed are cyborgs, and that realizing this might help us to make more sense of what craving is and how to cure it.

I get the idea that we are cyborgs from Andy Clark’s book Natural-Born Cyborgs. Clark maintains that we are cyborgs in the “sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological and nonbiological circuitry” (3). My essay is about how we might usefully re-interpret some key Buddhist doctrines if we take seriously the idea that we are cyborgs.

6b. The Problem with Principles: Towards an Alternative Conception of Mature Moral Agency

The conception of mature moral agency upheld by most dominant normative ethical theories is one in which mature moral agents, when faced with a moral situation, engage in a process of moral deliberation that is guided by moral principles in order to arrive at moral judgments that involve both an evaluation of the situation at hand and a decision about the right action to take. This conception of moral maturity is normatively anchored by the tenets of rationality: it both consists in and is achieved through a process of principled moral deliberation in accordance with norms of good reasoning (e.g. rational deliberation, impartiality, full-informedness, universality, etc.).

In this paper, I will argue that this conception of moral maturity fundamentally misconstrues both that in which mature moral agency consists and the means by which it is achieved. Accordingly, in the first section, I argue that we must abandon the idea that moral principles can provide moral guidance for, or impose normative authority on, the lives of mature moral agents. Then, in the second section, I develop the insights of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, John Dewey, and Francisco Varela into the outline of an alternative conception of mature moral agency.

In response to certain intractable metaphysical puzzles and to issues in quantum mechanics many philosophers have proposed that there can be vague objects, i.e., objects x where for some y it is neither true nor false that x=y. Others have argued that vague objects are impossible. In this paper I provide a new problem for the claim that vague objects are possible. Terence Parsons and Peter Woodruff in their 1999 paper “Set Theory with Indeterminacy of Identity” attempt to provide a set theory that can allow for vague objects and for sets containing them. I show that it follows from some of the commitments of their system that there cannot be any finite sets containing vague objects, and so their attempt is a failure. Furthermore, I argue that the same conclusion follows from the lone assumption that the truth of P follows from P. Since this is a plausible assumption, the person who thinks there can be finite sets containing vague objects is in trouble. Yet if there could be vague objects, it seems there also could be such sets. So, all defenders of vague objects are apparently in trouble too.

It is tempting to try to isolate the elements of philosophical thought, or consider what might set it apart from other forms. One possibility is that distinctions, or the making of distinctions, characterize philosophical thought. Certainly, distinctions are important in philosophical thought. Still, there are problems in trying to locate the core of philosophical thought in a mental activity like distinction-making, or a linguistic artifact like Adistinction.@ For example, distinctions are not restricted to philosophical thinking; they seem essential for many other (possibly all) forms of structured, deliberate mental activity. In addition, several terms (e.g., differentiate, contrast) could substitute for distinction, which suggests that we might not be talking about a unitary phenomenon, but rather a cluster of mental activities and related terms. Philosophical thought does have features that make it unique, yet it also has much in common with thought that we would never describe as philosophical. These facts do not make the search for an identifying feature of philosophical thought misguided. But that search is complicated by ambiguities in language and mental activity.

We need an understanding of the physical in order to examine in what ways the world is physical and to assess the various theses of physicalism that have been advanced. The aim of this paper is to show how a popular broad notion of physical property may be built up from a core notion of microphysics. The principal challenges are to avoid giving ad hoc definitions and to avoid giving a definition that trivialises physicalism.

In his chapter on art criticism in the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (2001), Roger Seamon of the University of British Columbia describes five different categories or kinds. In this paper, I focus on the appreciative description of art and its relationship to art reviews. I am puzzled by some of his claims and disagree with others, especially where his own examples of criticism are concerned. In particular, Seamon believes that the reader does not place a lot of importance on whether the appreciative critic persuades him or her to agree with the critic’s comments. He writes that “What we want from a critic is description that permits us to understand how it could be seen that way, even if we disagree with the appraisal” (Seamon, p. 322). But in that case, I don’t see how reviews are to be understood primarily in terms of appreciative description because the appraisal (that is, a verdict, evaluation, or assessment) seems to be an important part of many of them. His analysis appears to be especially flawed or incomplete when applied to journalistic reviews, that is, the reviews that appear in newspapers and general audience magazines. In this paper, I will discuss Seamon’s claims on these matters and offer my reservations and objections to them.

What is the appropriate way to treat higher order vagueness of the sort associated with the Sorites paradox? Intuitively, introducing a sharp cutoff between the extension and antiextension of a vague predicate is impermissible, insofar as it is unclear where such a cutoff would stand. Crispin Wright provides a proof showing that distinctively higher order vagueness is paradoxical and capable of indefinite iteration, but there is a concern that his treatment of the problem does not take higher order vagueness seriously. In this paper, I reject a crucial inference in Wright’s proof of the paradoxicality of higher order vagueness, thus demonstrating that the problem is worse than even Wright imagined. In doing so, I also motivate a move toward “concepts without boundaries” as a potential way of understanding vagueness and avoiding the paradox associated with distinctively higher order vagueness.

In this essay, I argue that the proverb, “the proof of the pudding is in the tasting,” expresses a philosophical truth in the sense that it enjoins us to modify the conceptual framework we use to judge our “pudding.” Furthermore, it can be used as a lens through which to evaluate certain closely related styles of argument, styles that appeal to both philosophers and non-philosophers alike. I begin by canvassing a number of attempts to give the meaning of this saying; as we will see, it is slippery and difficult to pin down. We leave the first section with three determinants of meaning that we further develop and augment in the second section. After serving up a detailed analysis of the saying, we proceed to distinguish several important common uses of the saying. With our analysis and this distinction in hand, we use the saying to frame an examination of various argument styles, focusing primarily on philosophical arguments. We conclude by considering whether we as philosophers should have such high regard for the advice the proverb gives.

8a. From Aristotle to Classicality to Paraconsistency: A History of Avoiding Explosions

The question “what is a paraconsistent logic?” is being discussed with more and more frequency and seriousness, especially during the past few years. Very good treatment of this subject is found, for instance, in the works of Slater [1995] ,Bésiau [2000] and Bremer. Often an effort is made to adequately describe what the essential features of a particular variety of logic ought to be, while at the same time attempting to ensure that a system not of that variety can still be reasonably considered a ‘logic’. This is done, it seems, in the spirit of following the da Costa tradition. I suggest that such an enterprise is unnecessarily complicated. Instead, I consider the primary metalogical goal of any system of logic, which is simply to be a tool for carrying out inferences in a non trivial fashion. This goal has persisted, unaltered, since Aristotelian logic, through to classical logic, and onto paraconsistent systems of logic. Although the methodology and theoretical motivations for each are widely divergent, the only relevant difference between these logics is the variety of explosion which is avoided.

8b. Self-Ascriptions as Self-Expressions: An Explanation of First-Person Authority?

What explains first-person authority? What explains the presumption that an utterance is true when it is a sincere determinate first-person singular simple present-tense ascription of intentional state? Jacobsen (1996) offers a novel suggestion, one that combines elements from minimalism and expressivism. Minimalism holds that the disquotational schema tells us all there is about truth. Expressivism holds that self-ascriptions typically express rather than describe aspects of one’s own psychology. The novelty consists in reconciling truth-assessability with expressiveness and assigning both to self-ascriptions. According to Jacobsen, self-ascriptions each enjoy a presumption of truth because they are systematically reliable. They are systematically reliable because they are typically both expressive and truth-apt. Such a self-ascription if sincere is certain to be true. My paper provides two objections against Jacobsen. First, the typicality of expressive self-ascriptions is at best contingent. Thus Jacobsen fails to explain how a speaker’s ability to provide reliable self-ascriptions is unalienable. Second, Jacobsen’s model fails to accommodate the intuition that, all else being equal, the more authority one has regarding one’s own mental states, the more knowledge one enjoys regarding their existence and character. The connection between first-person authority and first-person knowledge thus finds no place in the expressivist scheme.

In this paper I shall consider three strategies for solving a standard Cartesian skeptical puzzle: the Moorean solution, the contextualist solution, and the solution of those who would deny that knowledge is closed under known deductive inference (for convenience sake I’ll refer to this as the nonclosure position). Both the Moorean and the contextualist respond to the skeptic by arguing that in non-skeptical contexts the standards for knowledge are sufficiently low as to warrant the attribution of knowledge to normal epistemic agents. I’m going to argue that focusing on standards for knowledge simpliciter or on standards for knowledge in a given context in this way is problematic. A few problem cases will raise a puzzle for the Moorean and the contextualist, which the nonclosure theorist is easily able to handle. My further conclusion will be that these problem cases provide a prima facie reason to favor the nonclosure theorist.

Uncontroversial moral knowledge is hard to come by, and any adequate account of moral factuality should explain why. In this paper, I endeavor to provide such an account. It is largely because of the relational nature of moral properties, and the corresponding externalistically determined normative content of moral property terms, I argue, that uncontroversial moral knowledge is so hard to acquire. The metaphysics of moral factuality does a lot to explain the infamous elusiveness of moral knowledge, but in ways that are surprisingly mundane.

8e. Is Analytic Philosophy of Science Any Help to Science?: The Case of Peter Achinstein’s Book of Evidence

In The Book of Evidence Peter Achinstein attempts to show that philosophy of science is important for science. He proposes to do so by providing an account of a central feature of scientific practice, the use of evidence to establish hypotheses. His aim is to provide an analytic understanding of evidential inference that is scientifically adequate. He does so by providing precising, clarifying and supplementary definitions of the concept of evidence. I focus on the latter, examining his interpretation of evidential probability as epistemic and objective. I argue that his understanding of the objectivity of the evidential relation fails to be of help to scientists. This is so because the relation, as he defines it, holds quite independently of the inferential processes that might be used by scientists. Consequently, it fails to show how inferences based on evidence are justified. Because the evidential relation is independent of inferential processes, its constitutive epistemic norms and ideals have no root in scientists in-built or learned inferential epistemic capacities. The problems with Achinstein’s analytic approach to issues in philosophy of science adds further weight to the view that a scientific naturalistic account of scientists’ epistemic practices would be more helpful to scientists.

Moral conflicts are now often analyzed in terms of conflicting moral reasons rather than conflicting obligations. In one form such analyses can take, an agent both acts wrongly and is subject to moral sanctions if she acts against the best moral reason she has. This suggests (though it does not imply) an analysis of wrongness that equates wrongness with sanctionworthiness. But however intuitively appealing it may be to equate wrongness with sanctionworthiness, such an analysis seems subject to serious objections. I defend this analysis from objections leveled by consequentialists, and from general objections, including seemingly fatal counterexamples. I argue that whether or not “wrongness as sanctionworthiness” is ultimately defensible, it at least can survive the initial salvos. I conclude that if one is attracted to the reasons picture of moral deliberation, wrongness as sanctionworthiness is both an intuitively pleasing and (provisionally) a theoretically viable analysis of wrongness

Humans show a unique curiosity in trying to figure out the actions of others. We explain and predict the behaviour of our fellow humans by attributing to them mental states including beliefs, desires, wants, and emotions. In most philosophical and psychological circles it’s said our belief/desire psychology is universal; hence cultures will explain behaviour the same way. The ubiquity of such claims, I argue, is mistaken for one important reason: we have seriously over-generalized the extent of our Western psychology. Human cultures can vary radically and recent evidence supports the idea that behavioural explanations by virtue of beliefs, desires, etc. are not universally accepted. In fact, many cultures don’t acknowledge the mind as significant causes of behaviour, or else they explain behaviour with little reference to the mind at all. I argue that we should expect to find cultural variations in folk psychology which are not commensurable with current philosophical views.

9d. Can Political Liberalism Deliver Equality in the Social-Bases of Self-Respect?

This paper examines Rawls’ important notion of equality in the social bases of self-respect and the pivotal role of his paradigm of self-respect as equal democratic rights. Can a Rawlsian respond to the objection that this paradigm ignores inequalities in economic position that can undermine self-respect (e.g. unemployment, demeaning conditions of work, unpaid domestic labor)? I examine reformulations of Rawls’ principles that seem to accommodate the objection. I argue that the more promising approach is to treat his paradigm of self-respect as a normative notion concerning the proper social bases of self-respect in an ideally just society. Rawls’ political liberalism succeeds in justifying such a notion based on a democratic ideal of free and equal persons implicit in our fundamental institutions. But it ignores rival political ideals of persons implicit in these institutions, which political liberalism needs to reconcile in order to deliver equality in the proper bases of self-respect.