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.

Compersion is an important concept for non-monogamous people. Often described as jealousy's opposite, compersion labels positive feelings toward the intimacy of a beloved with other people. Since many people think jealousy is ordinary, intransigent, and even appropriate, compersion can seem psychologically and ethically dubious. I make the case for compersion, arguing it focuses on the flourishing of others and is thus not akin to pride, vicarious enjoyment, or masochistic pleasure. People cultivate compersion by softening their propensity to be jealous and by attending to the flourishing of others, which requires them to tackle entitlement and temper vulnerability. I argue that jealousy is not a valuable emotional disposition; its instrumental benefits are minor, unstable, and have to be traded against the harms of aggression. Arguments that conclude that jealousy is a virtue rest on contentious premises and overlook the practical question as to whether jealousy and compersion could be cultivated together.

Philosophers, archeologists, and other heritage professionals often take a rather negative view of heritage reconstruction, holding that it is inappropriate or even impermissible. In this essay, we argue that taking such hardline attitudes toward the reconstruction of heritage is unjustified. To the contrary, we believe that the reconstruction of heritage can be both permissible and beneficial, all things considered. In other words, sometimes we have good reasons, on balance, to pursue reconstructions, and doing so can be morally acceptable. In defending this claim, we discern a number of arguments made against heritage reconstruction and demonstrate that these arguments are either exaggerated or lack support.

This article evaluates the following four theses about bodily experience and self-consciousness: Descartes's thesis (bodily experience is a form of self-consciousness); Kant's thesis (nothing can count as a genuine form of self-consciousness unless it is consciousness of oneself as a subject); Locke's thesis (in bodily experience we are presented with ourselves as physical objects); and Merleau-Ponty's thesis (the way we encounter ourselves in bodily experience is fundamentally different from how we encounter non-bodily physical objects in outward-directed, exteroceptive perception). I argue that they are all true.

In a 1962 article, ‘On Sensations of Position’, G. E. M. Anscombe claimed that we do not feel our legs crossed; we simply know that they are that way. What about the sense of bodily ownership? Do we directly know that this body is our own, or do we know it because we feel this body that way? One may claim, for instance, that we are we aware that this is our own body thanks to our bodily experiences that ascribe the property of myness to the body that they represent. Here I approach this issue from the perspective of the debate on the admissible content of perception, appealing to the method of phenomenal contrast. After rejecting the myness hypothesis, I criticize alternative accounts of the contrast in somatosensory, cognitive, and agentive terms. I conclude that the phenomenology of ownership consists in the affective awareness of the unique significance of the body for survival.

Philosophical views of responsibility often identify responsible agency with capacities such as rationality and self-control. Yet in ordinary life, we frequently hold individuals responsible who are deficient in these capacities, such as children or people with mental illness. The existing literature that addresses these cases has suggested that we merely pretend to hold these agents responsible or that they are responsible to a diminished degree. In this paper, I demonstrate that neither of these approaches is satisfactory, and I offer an alternative focused on the role relationships play in determining whether it is appropriate to hold someone responsible. I argue that relationships are sources of normative expectations about how parties in that relationship ought to behave and that we can be responsible in virtue of being subject to these norms. This is so not only for those who are impaired or immature, but for all of us.

According to what I call the identity view, omissions are actual events. For example, the nominal ‘Ali's non-jogging’ denotes whatever Ali is doing at the time she is said not to be jogging. Some have objected that omissions (and more generally absences) cannot be events, since the two do not have the same causal relations. I show how advocates of the identity view can offer a pragmatic account of the data the objection relies on.

The debate over rival conceptions of political legitimacy tends to focus on first-order considerations—for example, on the relative importance of procedural and substantive values. In this essay, I argue that there is an important, but often overlooked, distinction among rival conceptions of political legitimacy that originates at the meta-normative level. This distinction, which cuts across the distinctions drawn at the first-order level, concerns the source of the normativity of political legitimacy, or, as I refer to it here, the grounds of political legitimacy. If we focus on the grounds of political legitimacy, there are three main conceptions of political legitimacy: will-based, belief-based, and fact-based conceptions. I present an objection to each of those main conceptions and defend a hybrid account of the grounds of political legitimacy.

Skeptical theism is a popular response to arguments from evil. Many hold that it undermines a key inference often used by such arguments. However, the case for skeptical theism is often kept at an intuitive level: no one has offered an explicit argument for the truth of skeptical theism. In this article, I aim to remedy this situation: I construct an explicit, rigorous argument for the truth of skeptical theism.