The recently released eight-part Japanese docudrama THE DAYS (Netflix 2023) ostensibly concerns the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactor explosions and subsequent meltdowns at Fukushima. We highlight the problematic rendering of this particular Fukushima screen history by analysing THE DAYS' narrative veracity and reliance on ‘heroic’ disaster tropes, absent-presences, the glossing over of the radiological legacy, and the context of related nuclear accident teledramas and docudrama re-enactments.

We study prudence and temperance (next to risk aversion) in social settings. Previous experimental studies have shown that these higher-order risk preferences affect the choices of individuals deciding privately on lotteries that only affect their own payoff. Yet, many risky and financially relevant decisions are made in the social settings of households or organizations. We elicit higher-order risk preferences of individuals and systematically vary how an individual’s decision is made (alone or while communicating with a partner) and who is affected by the decision (only the individual or the partner as well). In doing so, we can isolate the effects of other-regarding concerns and communication on choices. Our results reveal that the majority of choices are risk averse, prudent, and temperate across social settings. We also observe that individuals are influenced significantly by the preferences of a partner when they are able to communicate and choices are payoff-relevant for both of them.

We use a within-subjects design to study how responsibility for the payoffs of different number of others influences the choices under risk, and how choosing together with another person changes these decisions. After controlling for the regression to the mean, we find a weak effect of responsibility for one other person on risk taking as compared to choosing just for oneself. We, however, do find that the number of others influenced by the choice matters: when it increases from one to three, risk averse subjects choose riskier options and risk loving subjects choose more cautiously, which pushes the choices towards the modal risk preferences in the population. Mutual responsibility makes choices for others shift even more in the same direction. The observed behavior is in accordance with the blame avoidance hypothesis: decision makers with responsibility try to reduce the amount of blame for their choices, which is minimal when the choices for others are consistent with what they would have chosen for themselves.

Eggleston claims that my account of harm suffers from more problems than his preferred account. I clarify my account, and explain how his account suffers from some of the supposed problems he charges my account with. Sinnott-Armstrong suggests that his contrastivist approach is preferable to my contextualism. I clarify the role of linguistic context, and suggest that our positions are quite close to each other. Mason worries that my scalar approach does not properly accommodate the notions of blame and moral responsibility. I maintain that such notions have only a derivative status, but are nonetheless important, and I suggest fruitful avenues for the scalar consequentialist to pursue. Kagan claims that the addition of a contextualist account of “right” renders my view not importantly different from maximizing or satisficing views. I explain why this is mistaken, and why neither maximizing nor satisficing versions of rightness can explain its supposed moral significance.

Norcross's recent book has a two-part title: Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands. In this essay I focus on the second part of the title – the idea that there are moral reasons without demands. I do not think that it is at all obvious what this means, and whether it is distinct from Norcross's central (and compelling) idea, that moral reasons come in degrees. I explore several possible ways of cashing out a distinctive claim that morality does not make demands, and argue that we should not accept that morality does not make demands. It does make demands, but it sometimes makes them in degrees.

Heather Battaly has argued that vice-epistemology has a Responsibility Problem. From analysing the ‘card-carrying feminist’ committing testimonial injustice due to implicit gender bias, Battaly argues that non-voluntarist vice-epistemologists are committed to either (1) counting some vices as blameworthy yet not reprehensible, or (2) holding agents equally responsible for cognitive defects as for implicit bias. This in turn implies that (2a) epistemic vices include certain cognitive defects or (2b) that implicit bias is excluded as epistemic vice. This paper aims to deflate the Responsibility Problem, by arguing that vice-epistemologists can embrace route (2b) without problematic implications. In applying Miranda Fricker’s ‘no-fault responsibility’ to the card-carrying feminist case, I defend the following three claims: First, Battaly’s analysis of the card-carrying feminist case is flawed, because it fails to acknowledge that the vice of testimonial injustice and implicit prejudice are conceptually distinct. Second, excluding implicit prejudice as a vice is actually compatible with Fricker’s theoretical commitments. Third, contrary to what much of the literature seems to assume, it isn’t that problematic to exclude (individual) implicit bias as a vice, or to assign equal responsibility for implicit prejudice as for cognitive defects like impaired vision.

It has been argued that rationality consists in responding correctly to reasons. Recent defenses of the normativity of rationality assume that this implies that we always ought to be rational. However, this follows only if the reasons rationality requires us to correctly respond to are normative reasons. Recent meta-epistemological contributions have questioned whether epistemic reasons are normative. If they were right, then epistemic rationality wouldn’t provide us with normative reasons independently of wrong-kind reasons to be epistemically rational. This paper spells out this neglected challenge for the normativity of epistemic rationality by connecting the two bodies of literature. Moreover, it generalizes this challenge to the rationality of desire, intention, and emotion. The upshot is that we can only answer the normative question about rationality if we debate about blame and accountability for holding different kinds of irrational attitudes, as well as about the sources of mental normativity.

What’s the good of getting angry with a person? Some would argue that angry emotions like indignation or resentment are intrinsically good when they are an apt response. But many think this answer is not fully satisfactory. An increasing number of philosophers add that accusatory anger has value because of what it communicates to the blamee, and because of its downstream cultivating effects on the blamee.

Mediators and conflict resolution strategists share an interest with philosophers in the value of reactive attitudes for interpersonal communication, but prominent thinkers from those fields arrive at rather different verdicts about the effects of accusatory anger. On a more therapeutic approach to interpersonal conflict, angry accusation is commonly understood to obfuscate mutual understanding and to have bad downstream effects on the blamee.

Below, I discuss how the compassionate communication approach casts doubt on the purported valuable effects of angry accusation, and I provide empirical support for this worry. I argue that philosophers should reconsider their empirical assumptions about the human psychology of discord, and hypothesize that accusatory anger is unlikely to have the communicative and cultivating effects that it is purported to have. I conclude by highlighting further empirical and ethical questions this hypothesis generates.

Given its role as a legal instrument not only to try superiors but also to prevent both them and their subordinates from committing grave international crimes, the correct understanding and proper application of the doctrine of superior responsibility is of paramount importance. This article aims to illuminate specific and some controversial aspects of the third element of the doctrine—the failure to adopt necessary and reasonable measures—and obtain a clearer and more comprehensive understanding on the superiors’ duties, its limits and main prerequisites under the doctrine. For this purpose, an interdisciplinary study was conducted to investigate whether basic principles and business aspects of corporate governance and compliance management may be applied for a better understanding and refinement of the doctrine. The underlying analysis in corporate governance and compliance covers American (U.S.), German, and international standards.

Objections to the orthodox doctrine of an eternal hell often rely on arguments that it cannot be a person’s own fault that she ends up in hell. The article summarizes and addresses three significant arguments which aim to show that it could not be any individual’s fault that they end up in hell. I respond to these objections by showing that those who affirm a classical picture of sin have Moorean reasons to reject these objections. That classical perspective holds that all (serious) sin involves choosing eternal destiny apart from God and that no sin could possibly be caused by God. Consequently, it is necessary for ending up in hell that someone commit a serious sin, and it is sufficient for ending up damned that one persists forever in sin. Since the objections conflict with Moorean commitments central to the classical perspective, those who hold to such a classical perspective on sin would have good reason to reject all these arguments, which involve assumptions that would entail that such a perspective is false.

Do we have free will? In this interview, Professor Helen Beebee sets out the problem, a key argument for the conclusion that we lack free will, and explores the solutions that have been offered.