In A Theory of Justice and elsewhere John Rawls writes that the basic structure of any society affects the life prospects of those growing up in different ‘starting places,’ yet his conception of equal opportunity seems to require that one's opportunities not be affected by the class position of one's birth. Here I explicate this apparent contradiction and reconcile these assertions. In Rawlsian fair equality of opportunity children from working-class families have lesser opportunity to attain advantaged positions.

Rawls's view cannot be easily revised to allow equal prospects for all children. Within the framework of Rawls's understanding of a just society, he is right to say that his own conception of fair equality of opportunity allows deep inequalities in life prospects.

It has been argued that the attribution of intentional actions is sensitive to our moral judgment (Knobe 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, see also Mele 2003, Phelan & Sarkissian 2008). I will examine these arguments and Suggest an alternative explanation for the experiments they are based on.

Joshua Knobe conducted the following experiment (Knobe 2003) to support this claim. Subjects were given two vignettes that differed only in one small detail and this difference influenced their attribution of intentionality. The first vignette was the following:

A characteristic move of what is known as ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (OLP), as exemplified by J.L. Austin's discussion of knowledge in ‘Other Minds,’ is to appeal to the ordinary and normal use(s) of some philosophically troublesome word(s), with the professed aim of alleviating this or that philosophical difficulty or dispelling this or that philosophical confusion. This characteristic move has been criticized widely on the grounds that it rests on a conflation of ‘meaning’ and ‘use’; and that criticism has been quite successful in its effect: OLP is widely held nowadays within the mainstream of analytic philosophy to have somehow been refuted or otherwise seriously discredited. However, that the words in question do indeed have something referable to as ‘their meaning,’ which is not only conceptually distinguishable from their ordinary and normal uses, but also theoretically separable from these uses, in a way that renders misguided the ordinary language philosopher's characteristic appeal and validates the traditional concerns OLP set itself out to dispel, has for the most part merely been presupposed and insisted on, as opposed to argued for, by detractors of OLP.

The argument from causal overdetermination (‘the CO-argument’) is considered to be the shortest route to token monism. It only assumes that:

1. 1. Efficacy: Mental events are causes of physical events.

2. 2. Closure: Every physical event has a sufficient physical cause (if it has any sufficient cause).

3. 3. Exclusion: Systematic Causal Overdetermination (CO) is impossible: if an event x is a sufficient cause of an event y then no event x* distinct from x is a cause of y.

4. 4. Identity: Therefore, mental events are physical events.

Exclusion does not deny the possibility of two gunmen that fi re at a victim at the same time. But event-dualism is like a systematic fi ringsquad case — whenever I want to raise my arm, my arm is raised, and that is intolerable.

There are two constraints on any functionalist solution to the Mind-Body Problem construed as an answer to the question, ‘What is the relationship between mental properties and relations (hereafter, simply mental properties) and physical properties and relations?’ The first constraint is that it must actually address the Mind-Body Problem and not simply redefine the debate in terms of other, more tractable, properties (e.g., the species-specific property of having human-pain). Such moves can be seen to be spurious by the very multiple-realizability intuitions that motivate functionalism in the first place. For, according to those intuitions, it is possible for a being to experience pain, have beliefs, etcetera, and yet not only to be of a different species, but to have an entirely different material constitution from human beings. Such intuitions imply that our ordinary mental concepts are not species-restricted.

There has been much recent interest in questions of value in epistemology (for a thorough overview of this work, see Pritchard 2007), and in what follows I argue that epistemologists concerned with the value of true beliefs and knowledge would do well to devote attention to the enduring nature of beliefs, and in particular to the essential role that they play in constituting agents themselves.

I begin by considering an analogy commonly drawn by epistemologists between acts in the domain of ethics and beliefs in the domain of epistemology, and argue that it is fl awed in important respects. I propose that a better, more fruitful analogue for belief would be desire, or a similarly enduring state of an agent. This revision of a commonly used analogy may be of some value in itself, but I further consider how focusing excessively upon the belief-act analogy (with its implicit emphasis on the process of belief-formation) can lead to flaws or shortcomings in our epistemic value theorizing.