In the above mentioned article on page 376, in the third paragraph, after the sentence ‘These prejudices are not simply the inevitable consequence of our imperfect knowledge, but rather are akin to, in contemporary terms, implicit biases.’, the author would like to add the following footnote: Amy Schmitter, in her “Cartesian Prejudice and Critique of Gender in Poulain de la Barre,” presented at the Pacific APA in March 2016, helpfully aligns Poullain's notion of prejudice with implicit bias. The responsibility of all errors and omissions rests with the author.

We sincerely regret this omission from the original text and any problems that have resulted for the authors and readers.

Some experiences—like the experience of eating cheesecake—are good experiences to have. But when we try to explain why they are good, we encounter a clash of intuitions. First, we have an objectivist intuition: plausibly, the experiences are good because they feel the way that they do. Second, we have a subjectivist intuition: if a person were indifferent to that kind of experience, then it might fail to be good for that person. Third, we have a possibility intuition: for any kind of experience, possibly there is a subject who is indifferent to that kind of experience. The pleasure problem is the problem we face in reconciling these three claims. I explain the problem and argue for a solution. I argue that we ought to reject the most common solutions: rejecting the objectivist or subjectivist intuitions. Instead, we ought to follow Timothy Sprigge in rejecting the possibility claim. We should embrace the view that experiences bear necessary connections to our attitudes.

A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B.

In this article I contrast two opposing forms of essentialism, definitional and transcendental versus productivist and historical, and trace both forms back to Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980). Definitional essentialism, as developed by Fine, centers on kind-membership. Historical essentialism, as anticipated by Prior and developed by Almog, puts origin at its center. The article focuses on the fundamentally distinct manners in which these two views handle the necessity of origin thesis. In the final section of the article, inspired by a Nietzschean genealogical methodology, I pursue a naturalization strategy and conclude that rather than origin being necessary, it is essentialist necessity that reduces to origin.

I argue that a practical deliberator may have good reasons not to consider some option even though that option is what there is most reason, all things considered, for her to do. The most interesting reasons not to consider an option arise in cases where an agent cannot be compensated in kind for the loss of goods that she values. Where this is the case, an attitude of conservatism is warranted: it is reasonable to begin deliberation by considering only ‘no-regrets’ options, and to proceed to considering other possibilities only when the cost of continuing to consider only no-regrets options has become intolerably high. The account that I develop illuminates intuitions that help motivate deontological moral thought, and it can shed light on the complaint that there is something wrong with the way in which schematic thought experiments are frequently used in philosophy to drive moral theorizing.

Kant claims in the third Critique that one can make about wine the merely subjective judgment that it is agreeable but never the universally valid judgment that it is beautiful. This follows from his views that judgments of beauty can be made only about the formal (spatiotemporal) features of a representation and that aromas and flavors consist of formless sensory matter. However, I argue that Kant's theory permits judgments of beauty about wine because the experience displays a temporal structure: the aromas and flavors evolve over the course of a tasting from the bouquet through the palate to the finish. An analogy with music, which Kant describes as ‘a play of sensations in time’, illuminates how wine qualifies as an object of pure judgments of taste: the ‘structure’ of a wine can be compared to harmonic structure, and its development throughout the taste can be compared to the unfolding of melody and harmonic progression.

I argue for an account of acting together that has a particular notion of joint commitment at its core. The account presented offers a compact explanation of four significant aspects of acting together as this is ordinarily understood: the parties have pertinent obligations to one another; each needs the concurrence of the rest with his or her untimely exit from the joint activity; an appropriate collective goal is sufficient to motivate the parties; and the parties may have personal goals contrary to the collective goal. I argue that the simplicity of the account coupled with its explanatory power argue for it in face of concerns that it takes us beyond the concepts we need to explain what it is for an individual to act alone. Indeed, there is reason to invoke joint commitment in many contexts other than acting together in which more than one person is involved. I conclude by noting that the joint commitment account of acting together plausibly accounts for the apparently transformative nature of doing things with others, citing its connection with a sense of togetherness, solidarity, and unity, as in the phrase ‘There is no I in team’.

Self-determination is a central concept for political philosophers. For example, many have appealed to this concept to defend a right of states to restrict immigration. Because it is deeply embedded in our political structures, the principle possesses a kind of default authority and does not usually call for an elaborate defense. In this paper, I will argue that genealogical studies by Adom Getachew, Radhika Mongia, Nandita Sharma, and others help to challenge this default authority. Their counter-histories show that the principle was used to justify, strengthen, and adapt imperial rule in the twentieth century. In particular, the idea that controlling a population's composition through regulating immigration is an essential aspect of self-determination emerged as a response to White anxieties about the migration of negatively racialized groups. Genealogies have not been adequately appreciated as a critical tool within the mainstream of political philosophy. I show that these genealogies have a critical role to play because they unsettle our uncritical attachment to the structures of the nation-state system and raise serious questions about the meaning and emancipatory force of the principle of self-determination.

Despite the prevalence of the virtue of considerateness in everyday moral discourse and the proliferation of philosophical studies of virtue language, considerateness hardly ever appears on philosophical agendas. When discussed in academia, its meaning seems fuzzy and unclear. This article makes amends for this gap by subjecting considerateness to conceptual scrutiny. The author argues that considerateness designates a cluster concept, encompassing three types of virtuousness that share a family resemblance only. One is a hybrid civic-moral social-glue virtue, extensionally equivalent to Aristotle's virtue of agreeableness. The second is an intellectual virtue of phronetic consideration (moral sensitivity and integration). The third is a full-fledged discrete moral virtue with standard Aristotelian features of a golden-mean structure and an emotional component as a motivator. The advantages of identifying these three types of virtuousness are elicited, as are some of the educational ramifications of analyzing the differentia of considerateness in this way.

An abbreviated history of marriage helps motivate the question of whether ancient Roman marriage and contemporary love marriage could qualify as stages of the same (token) institution despite carrying significantly different functions, deontological powers, and constitutive rules. Having raised the question of institutional identity over time, I proceed to answer the question by appealing to Kurt Lewin's notion of genidentity. Lewin intends the notion of genidentity to track the spatiotemporal unfolding of different physical and biological processes, such as ontogenesis. I extend the notion of genidentity to the institutional sphere by identifying two ‘re-anchoring mechanisms’ that would describe the conditions under which institutions with different characteristics could nevertheless qualify as the same institution across time. First, formal institutions can be re-anchored by way of a self-amending secondary rule. Second, informal institutions can be re-anchored by leveraging the inherent indeterminacy of the exemplars that indexically define them. I then argue ancient Roman marriage and contemporary love marriage are genidentical in virtue of the actions of a (mostly) informal re-anchoring mechanism.

In the Laws, Plato argues that the legislator should attempt to persuade people to obey the laws voluntarily. This persuasion is accomplished through use of legislative preludes. In this essay, I argue that Plato's use of persuasive preludes shows that he endorses the core features of a public reason theory of political justification.

The argument from absence of analysis (AAA) infers primitivism about some x from the absence of a reductive analysis of x. But philosophers use the word ‘primitive’ to mean many distinct things. I argue that there is a robust sense of ‘primitive’ present in the metaphysics literature that cannot be inferred via the AAA. Successfully demonstrating robust primitivism about some x requires showing two things at once: that a reduction of x is not possible and that an explanatorily deep characterization of x is not available. In order to secure this second explanatory claim, the AAA must wrongly assume that reductive analysis is our only source of explanatory characterization. I argue that this is false by offering a distinct way of providing explanatory characterizations backed by suitably understood metaphysical constraints. While there remains a minimal sense of ‘primitive’ inferable via the AAA, this sense is exhausted by the denial of reduction. With minimal primitivism as its target, the AAA is uninteresting.

Several theories of causation rule out causation of or by lacks, omissions, or absences of things. They thereby conflict with much of what we think and say about what causes what. This article proposes a modification of one kind of theory, causal dispositionalism, so that it accepts absence causation while retaining a fundamental commitment of dispositionalism.

In this article, I argue that Hegel's complete and mature view of crime and punishment is more robust than many interpretations of the Unrecht passage in the ‘Abstract Right’ section of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right suggest. First, I explain the value of revisiting the interpretation of Hegel as a simple retributionist in the contemporary debate. Then, I look at Hegel's treatment of crime and punishment in the section on abstract right to show the role of punishment in Hegel's account. Next, I argue that this needs to be situated in Hegel's broader social philosophy and that we can accomplish this by looking at how the Unrecht passage fits in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right’s dialectical structure. I do so by building on the sections on civil society and state in the part of Elements of the Philosophy of Right dealing with ethical life (Sittlichkeit), which include considerations of prevention and rehabilitation. I contend that this analysis reveals an account of punishment as more complicated than simple retribution.

The neutral counterpart assumption is widely accepted in the study of slurs. It provides a simple and effective explanation for the meaning of slurs. Slurring terms are coextensional with their neutral counterparts. However, Lauren Ashwell (2016) has questioned this assumption. She argues that gendered slurs refer to a subset of their neutral counterparts. Hence, slurs are not coextensional with their counterparts. She goes on to present a view that is not based on the counterpart assumption. Still, her view is a unifying view of slurs as it also applies to ethnic and racial slurs. In this paper, I defend the counterpart assumption with a generic view of slurs. While being a unifying view, it accommodates the subset argument with its eponymous feature that the meaning of slurs involves a generic component.

Humanism is the view that people treat others inhumanely when we fail to see them as human beings, so that our treatment of them will tend to be more humane when we (fully) see their humanity. Recently, humanist views have been criticized on the grounds that the perpetrators of inhumanity regard their victims as human and treat them inhumanely partly for this reason. I argue that the two most common objections to humanist views (and their relatives) are unpersuasive: not only does the evidence marshaled against these views fail to disprove them, it could threaten them only if some questionable assumptions were granted. By providing necessary conceptual ground clearing and routing common lines of attack, I hope to determine what it would take for a humanist project to succeed, thereby paving the way for a full defense of humanism that fulfills its explanatory ambitions.

The aim of this article is to argue that what is distinctive about aesthetic experiences has to do with what we do -- not with our perception or evaluation, but with our action and, more precisely, with our interaction with whatever we are aesthetically engaging with. This view goes against the mainstream inasmuch as aesthetic engagement is widely held to be special precisely because it is detached from the sphere of the practical. I argue that taking the interactive nature of aesthetic experiences seriously can help us to understand some of the most important features of aesthetic experiences and the role they play in our life: their normativity, their crucial role in the ways in which the aesthetic domain looms large in our self-image and in the social dimension of aesthetic engagement.

What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think ‘I am a philosopher’ by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she is not yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain.

Recent work by Ingmar Persson and Jason Hanna has posed an interesting new challenge for deontologists: How can they account for so-called cases of letting oneself do harm? In this article, I argue that cases of letting oneself do harm are structurally similar to real-world cases such as climate change, and that deontologists need an account of the moral status of these cases to provide moral guidance in real-world cases. I then explore different ways in which deontologists can solve this challenge and argue that the most promising way to conceive of cases of letting oneself do harm is as nonstandard cases of allowing harm, supplemented with an additional argument for the moral relevance of one's own agency. The upshot is that cases of letting oneself do harm are both more theoretically challenging and practically important than has been acknowledged.

An argument is presented for the truth of the conditional, ‘If New York is not in the United States, it's in California’. Several possible objections to this argument are then examined and evaluated. Further argument establishes that if the argument for the truth of ‘If New York is not in the United States, it's in California’ is sound, it follows that an indicative conditional is true if and only if it has either a false antecedent or a true consequent.