The familiar irony of ‘real existing socialism’ is that it never was. Socialist ideals were used to legitimize regimes that fell far short of realizing those ideals—indeed, that violently repressed anyone who tried to realize them. This paper suggests that the derogatory concept of ‘the criminal’ may be allowing liberal ideals to operate in contemporary political philosophy and real politics in a worryingly similar manner. By depoliticizing deep dissent from the prevailing order of property, this concept can obscure what I call the ‘legitimation gap’. This is the gulf between (a) liberal accounts of state legitimacy, and (b) the actual functioning of liberal states. Feminists have long pointed out that the exclusion of what is deemed ‘personal’ from political consideration is itself a political move. I propose that the construction of the criminal as a category opposed to the political works similarly to perpetuate unjust forms of social power.

A significant debate has developed around the question: What are the moral limits of the market? This paper argues that this debate proceeds on a mistake. Both those who oppose specific markets and those who defend them, adopt the same deficient approach. Participants illicitly proceed from an assessment of the transactions making up a market to a judgment of that market's permissibility. This inference is unlicensed. We may know everything there is to know about the transactions in a specific market—they might all be absolutely bad—but we will not yet know whether that market should be prohibited. To discern this, to establish that intervention into some specific market is justifiable, one must supply a rather different assessment. One must compare the outcome in which that market is permitted with the best outcome available in its absence. None in this debate has offered such a judgment.

Memory blunting is a pharmacological intervention that decreases the emotional salience of memories. The technique promises a brighter future for those suffering from memory-related disorders such as PTSD, but it also raises normative questions about the limits of its permissibility. So far, neuroethicists have staked out two primary camps in response to these questions. In this paper, I argue both are problematic. I then argue for an alternative approach to memory blunting, one that can accommodate the considerations that motivate rival approaches even while avoiding the problems these rivals face. In addition to arguing for this primary thesis, the paper also aims to suggest something about neuroethics generally: despite what some neuroethicists claim, new discoveries in neuroscience may not typically upend traditional views of morality. Rather, discoveries in neuroscience often provide us with new occasions to reflect on enduring questions about what it means to be human.

Meursault, the protagonist of Camus's The Stranger, was unable to experience grief at his mother's death—and was in fact condemned for this inability. Should Meursault's inability to grieve be pitied, or should it be welcomed inasmuch as grief is a painful and highly distressing experience? With the assistance of Augustine's remarks on grief in his Confessions, I argue that Meursault's plight is to be pitied. The emotional pains of grief are genuine and cannot be recast either as masochistic pleasures or as instrumental costs to be borne in exchange for grief's benefits. These pains are instead experienced as good inasmuch as they are components of a complex valuable experience. More specifically, because we experience grief at the deaths of those with whom we stand in identity-constituting relationships, grief is both a powerful source of, and motivator for, substantial self-knowledge.

Are face-to-face perception and picture perception different perceptual phenomena? The question is controversial. On the one hand, philosophers have offered several solid arguments showing that, despite some resemblances, they are quite different perceptual phenomena and that pictures are special objects of perception. On the other hand, neuroscientists routinely use pictures in experimental settings as substitutes for normal objects, and this practice is successful in explaining how the human visual system works. But this seems to imply that face-to-face perception and picture perception are very similar, if not actually the same. How can we decide between these two opposite intuitions? Here I offer a regimentation of the notion of picture perception that can reconcile these two apparently conflicting ideas about pictures. It follows that philosophers and neuroscientists can maintain their respective stances without any theoretical conflict.

Typical accounts of imagistic content have focused on the apparent analog character or continuous variability of images. In contrast, I consider the distinctive features of digital images, those composed of finite sets of discrete pixels. A rich source of evidence on digital imagistic content is found in the content-preserving algorithms that resize and reproduce digital images on computer screens and printers. I argue that these algorithms reveal a distinctive structural feature: digital images are always compositional (their parts contribute systematically to overall content), but never inverse compositional (atomic parts may be replaced nonsynonymously without changing content). This indicates a sharp contrast with linguistic representations, which may or may not be compositional, and may or may not be inverse compositional. I argue this result sheds new light on the claim that imagistic content is inherently perspectival.

It is widely held that the experience machine is the basis of a serious objection to hedonistic theories of welfare. It is also widely held that desire satisfactionist theories of welfare can readily avoid problems stemming from the experience machine. But in this paper, we argue that if the experience machine poses a serious problem for hedonism, it also poses a serious problem for desire satisfactionism. We raise two objections to desire satisfactionism, each of which relies on the experience machine. The first is very much like the well-known experience machine objection to hedonism. The second asks whether someone who accepts desire satisfactionism should want to form a desire to plug into the experience machine.

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.