‘Cultural racism’ is central to understanding racism today yet has receded into the background behind the focus on attitudinal racism. Even the turn to structural racism is largely circumscribed to inclusion without substantive challenge to existing processes or profit margins. When portions of the racist public are targeted, it is often the least elite members of society. Without question, the concept of cultural racism requires some clarification, but it will help bring the continued influence of colonialism forward and reveal the alibis given in mainstream and elite circles that justify exclusion, resource extraction, and domination.

Can metaphysics yield the consolations of philosophy? One possibility, defended by Derek Parfit, is that reflection on the nature of identity and time could diminish both fear of death and grief. In this paper, I assess the prospect of such consolation, focussing especially on attempts to console a grieving third party. A shift to a reductionist view of personal identity might mean that death is less threatening. However, there is some evidence to suggest that such a shift does not necessarily translate into less death anxiety. Moreover, applied to grief at loss of another, such a perspective may be misdirected. A temporally neutral perspective offers a theoretically powerful way of reducing the sense of loss at being separated in time from a loved one. However, it is unclear whether it is psychologically possible to achieve. Even if it were possible, it may not diminish the pain of separation.

I identify a serious challenge to philosophical consolation for grief. The greater the consolation that is offered, the greater the risk of losing important attachments and the less it may be psychologically accessible.

This paper argues that Aristotelian ethical naturalism can combine two commitments that are often held to be incompatible: (a) a commitment to a strong form of ethical objectivity and (b) a thoroughgoing historicism about ethical value. The notions of species and life-form invoked by ethical naturalism do not, I argue, rely upon an ahistorical picture of human nature. I develop this idea by building upon Philippa Foot's defence of ethical naturalism in Natural Goodness. I go on to argue that linguistic changes in the ways we articulate the conditions of human flourishing can be understood, in some cases, as transforming those very conditions.

The problem of creeping minimalism threatens the distinction between moral realism and meta-ethical expressivism, and between cognitivism and non-cognitivism more generally. The problem is commonly taken to be serious and in need of response. I argue that there are two problems of creeping minimalism, that one of these problems is more serious than the other, and that this more serious problem cannot be solved in a way that all parties can accept. I close by highlighting some important questions this raises for how to distinguish between theories, and noting some of the troubling consequences it may entail for realism and its rivals, in meta-ethics and beyond.

Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that, despite appearances, the success of Don Marquis's well-known future-like-ours argument against abortion does not turn, in an important way, on the metaphysics of identity. I argue that this is false. The success of Marquis's argument turns on precisely two issues: first, whether it is prima facie seriously wrong to deprive something of a future like ours; second, whether, in a counterfactual circumstance in which an abortion does not occur, the foetus is numerically identical with something that, later on, experiences a life like ours. Since the former claim is plausible (albeit disputable), the success of Marquis's argument does turn on the metaphysics of identity in an important way. Before defending a positive argument for this position, I consider what I take to be the most promising way of challenging it. This involves a recent objection to Marquis by Tim Burkhardt (2021). Burkhardt claims that his objection floats free of the metaphysics of identity. I argue that it fails to do so, and that in fact it fails outright. I end by considering the relationship between my arguments and the question of what matters in survival.

This paper discusses two important emphases of epistemology – of virtue and vice epistemology in particular – one concerning agency and patiency, and the other concerning self-regard and other-regard. The paper offers, for the first time in the literature, a framework in which four types of epistemological work can be categorized according to their respective dual emphases: Type 1 (agent/self-regarding), Type 2 (agent/other-regarding), Type 3 (patient/self-regarding), and Type 4 (patient/other-regarding). The paper also shows how four ways of doing epistemology can be categorized in terms of these four types and draws particular attention to one dubbed other-centering.