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I describe a case involving two countries at war, Benevolentia and Malevoran. Malevoran is an unjust aggressor, which does not follow the requirements of the prevailing morality of warfare. The leadership and army of Benevolentia closely follow those requirements, and as a direct result Benevolentia loses. I claim that this is a reductio of the prevailing morality of warfare: in the victory of Malevoran...
Debate between Humean contingentists and anti‐Humean necessitarians in the philosophy of science is ongoing. One of the most important contemporary anti‐Humeans is Alexander Bird. Bird calls the particular version of Humeanism he is opposed to ‘categoricalism’. In his paper (2005) and in Chapter 4 of his book (2007) Bird argues against categoricalism about properties and laws. His arguments against...
Though Socrates can easily look like a cosmopolitan in moral and political theory, a closer reading of the relevant texts shows that, in the most important sense of the term as we now use it, he turns out – disappointingly, perhaps – not to be. The reasons why not are instructive and important, both for readers of Plato and for political theorists; they have to do with the phenomenon that I shall...
Sidgwick's defence of esoteric morality has been heavily criticized, for example in Bernard Williams's condemnation of it as ‘Government House utilitarianism.’ It is also at odds with the idea of morality defended by Kant, Rawls, Bernard Gert, Brad Hooker, and T.M. Scanlon. Yet it does seem to be an implication of consequentialism that it is sometimes right to do in secret what it would not be right...
Suppose a person who is agnostic about most philosophical issues wishes to have true philosophical beliefs but equally wishes to avoid false philosophical beliefs. I argue that this truth‐seeking, error‐avoiding agnostic would not have good grounds for pursuing philosophy. Widespread disagreement shows that pursuing philosophy is not a reliable method of discovering true answers to philosophical questions...
In explicating his version of the Organism View, Eric Olson argues that you begin to exist only after twinning is no longer possible and that you cannot survive a process of inorganic replacement. Assuming the correctness of the Organism View, but pace Olson, I argue in this paper that the Organism View does not require that you believe either proposition. The claim I shall make about twinning helps...
Cognitivism is the view that the primary function of moral judgements is to express beliefs that purport to say how things are; expressivism is the contrasting view that their primary function is to express some desire‐like state of mind. I shall consider what I call the freshman objection to expressivism. It is pretty uncontroversial that this objection rests on simple misunderstandings. There are...
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