Can we hold agents responsible for their implicitly biased behavior? The aim of this text is to show that, from the nurturing stance, holding subjects responsible for their implicitly biased behavior is justified, even though they are not blameworthy. First, I will introduce the nurturing stance as Daphne Brandenburg originally developed it. Second, I will specify what holding somebody responsible from the nurturing stance amounts to. Third, I show how and why holding responsible can help a subject develop an impaired capacity. Fourth, I analyze empirical data about holding prejudiced subjects responsible and highlight that the internal motivation to control prejudiced reactions decreases implicit attitudes’ influences. Furthermore, the data show that in order to be appropriate moral demands have to acknowledge the target's autonomy and competence. In sum, from the nurturing stance, holding implicitly biased subjects responsible is appropriate if they can adequately respond to the moral demands.

A central feature of being a celebrity is experiencing a divide between one's public image and private life. By appealing to the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we analyze this experience as paradoxically involving both a disconnection and alienation from one's public persona and a sense of close connection with it. This ‘uncanny’ experience presents a psychological conflict for celebrities: they may have a public persona they feel alienated from and that is at the same time closely connected to them and shapes many of their personal interactions. We offer three ways in which a celebrity might approach this conflict: (i) eradicating the divide between their public and private selves, (ii) splitting or separating their private and public selves, or (iii) embracing the arising tension. We argue that it is only this third approach that successfully mitigates the negative effects of the alienation felt by many celebrities.

Can Muslim values be reconciled with a feminist outlook? The question is pressing on both an individual level—for Muslim feminists—and on a political level—for the project of making Islamic practice compatible with the ideals of a just and liberal society. A version of this question arises specifically for the central Muslim text, the Quran: Can the message of the Quran be reconciled with a feminist outlook? There have, broadly speaking, been two approaches to this more specific question. I argue that both are inadequate. I then develop a novel approach to reconciliation that does not threaten the objective and universal normative force Muslims attribute to the Quran. My approach is revolutionary rather than apologetic and carves out a central role for moral understanding in Islam-as-practiced.

A dealbreaker, in the sense developed in this essay, is a relationship between a person's psychology and an aspect of an artwork to which they are exposed. When a person has a dealbreaking aversion to an aspect of a work, they are blocked from embracing the work's aesthetically positive features. I characterize dealbreakers, distinguish this response from other negative responses to an artwork, and argue that the presence or absence of a dealbreaker is in some cases an appropriate target of moral evaluation. I then use the concept of dealbreakers to develop a new approach to the question of our moral obligations with respect to the work of immoral artists, arguing that there is no general obligation binding us to cultivate or eliminate a dealbreaking aversion to their work. I conclude by suggesting several other philosophical debates that could benefit from a focus on dealbreakers.

Several recent studies devote themselves to Mary Astell's feminist theory of virtue—her ‘serious proposal to the ladies’ to help women obtain wisdom, equality, and happiness, despite the prejudices of seventeenth-century custom. But there has been little scholarship on Astell's conception of heroic virtues, those exceptional character traits that raise their bearers above the ordinary course of nature. Astell's appropriation of heroic virtue poses a number of philosophical difficulties for her feminist ethics—heroic virtues are characteristically masculine, exceptional, and individualistic, ill-suited to a community-oriented feminism aimed at ordinary women. In this paper, we seek to investigate—and then dispel—these key difficulties. Our intention is to generate a new understanding of Astell's theory of virtue as a unique and sophisticated theory that equalizes and naturalizes heroic virtue for women.

It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important. Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful life does need valuable projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the ordinary life.

This essay focuses on conceptual engineers who aim to improve other people's patterns of inference and attention by shaping their concepts. Such conceptual engineers sometimes engage in a form of epistemic paternalism that I call paternalistic cognitive engineering: instead of explicitly persuading, informing and educating others, the engineers non-consultatively rely on assumptions about the target agents’ cognitive systems to improve their belief forming. The target agents could reasonably regard such benevolent exercises of control as violating their sovereignty over their own belief formation. This is a pro tanto reason against such engineering. In addition to the relevant projects of conceptual engineering, paternalistic cognitive engineering plausibly includes certain kinds of nudging and evidence suppression. I distinguish the sovereignty-based concern from other ethical worries about conceptual engineering and discuss how one might justify the relevant conceptual engineering projects despite the sovereignty-based reason against them.

Quassim Cassam has argued that psychological and epistemological analyses of conspiracy theories threaten to overlook the political nature of such theories. According to Cassam, conspiracy theories are a form of political propaganda. I develop a limited critique of Cassam's analysis.

This paper advances two core theses. First, acceptance of conspiracy theories requires a rejection of epistemic authority that renders conspiracy theorists susceptible to co-option by certain political programs while insulating such programs from criticism. I argue that the contrarian nature of conspiracy theories partially accounts for the prominence of such theories in populist movements.

Second, the contrarian nature of conspiracy theories partially accounts for their attractiveness, especially among those to whom populism already appeals. I argue that for those who resent what appears from their perspective as the shaping of the epistemic landscape by alien perspectives, conspiracy theorizing may facilitate the reassertion of epistemic autonomy.

Moral equality—the idea that ‘we’ all have equal moral worth, our interests ought to count for the same, and we possess the same bundle of basic rights—is one of the most central principles of liberal thought, being regularly drawn on as a presupposition of moral and political inquiry. Perhaps because it is so often relied on as a presupposition, however, moral equality is more often assumed than argued for. When moral equality is argued for, the most common tactic is to appeal to some inherent property. As is well established, however, such property-based defenses of moral equality face two significant challenges: the problem of exclusion and the problem of inequality. In light of these challenges, in this article I put forward a new, revisionist account of moral equality. Taking inspiration from recent work in the social metaphysics of human kinds, I argue that moral equality ought to be seen as a component of a status that we confer on one another, rather than (grounded in) a property inherent in certain individuals. Conceiving of moral equality this way, I argue, side-steps both the problem of exclusion and the problem of natural equality.

To hold that artworks are valuable for their own sake—regardless of whatever secondary value they may have, such as entertainment, formation, education, or a pleasurable experience—is to hold that their final worth is not derived from external or secondary ends. I call this collective set of views the end-in-itself view (or EI view). Nicholas Stang recently leveled a twofold charge of reductio ad absurdum and operating from a double standard against the EI view. In this article, I refute Stang by showing that the charges do not obtain for at least one variation of the EI view that holds artworks to be valuable for their own sake as internally purposive ends-in-themselves (the IP view).

Orthodoxy holds that the difference between weakness of will and compulsion is a matter of the resistibility of an agent's effective motivation, which makes control-based views of agency especially well equipped to distinguish blameworthy weak-willed acts from non-blameworthy compulsive acts. I defend an alternative view that the difference between weakness and compulsion instead lies in the fact that agents would upon reflection give some conative weight to acting on their weak-willed desires for some aim other than to extinguish them, but not to their compulsive desires. This view allows identificationist theorists of moral responsibility to explain why weak-willed actions, but not compulsive actions, are attributable to agents such that they can, in theory, be praised or blamed for them. After motivating and presenting the view in detail, I show how it has unique resources for explaining the ethics of managing one's compulsions.

Some philosophers working on the epistemology of disagreement claim that conciliationist responses to peer disagreement embody a kind of intellectual humility. Others contend that standing firm or ‘sticking to one's guns’ in the face of peer disagreement may stem from an admirable kind of courage or internal fortitude. In this paper, we report the results of two empirical studies that examine the relationship between conciliationist and steadfast responses to peer disagreement, on the one hand, and virtues such as intellectual humility, courage, grit, and actively open-minded thinking, on the other. We observed positive correlations between measures of conciliationism, intellectual humility, and actively open-minded thinking but failed to find any reliable association between steadfastness, courage, and grit. Our studies reveal that there are at least two important intellectual virtues associated with conciliationist responses to peer disagreement (viz., intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking) and two vices associated with steadfast responses (intellectual arrogance and myside bias). These findings shed new light on the overall epistemic goodness of the conciliationist perspective.

A dominant claim in the philosophical literature on trust is that we should stop thinking in terms of group trustworthiness or appropriate trust in groups. In this paper, we push back against this claim by arguing that philosophical work on trust would benefit from being brought into closer contact with empirical work on the nature of trust. We consider data on reactive attitudes and moral responsibility to adjudicate on different positions in the philosophical literature on trust. An implication of our argument is that the distinction between different kinds of groups—mere groups versus institutional groups—deserves more attention than is currently recognized in the philosophical literature on trust.

In the first section of the paper, we draw some basic philosophical distinctions concerning the nature and kinds of trust. In section two, we present the positions taken by Hawley (2017), who argues against trust in groups, and Faulkner (2018), who argues in favor of trust in groups. In section three, we introduce some empirical data and suggest that, albeit tentatively, this looks to undermine Hawley's position and is compatible with Faulkner's approach. We thus suggest, on the basis of the evidence that we have available, that we have reasons to prefer the position taken by Faulkner (2018) over that taken by Hawley (2017). We end by discussing some implications for distinctions between different kinds of groups relevant for future philosophical work on trust.

Landmark Supreme Court rulings determine American law by adjudicating among competing reasonable interpretations of basic political rights. Jeremy Waldron argues that this practice is democratically illegitimate because what determines the content of basic rights is a bare majority vote of an unelected, democratically unaccountable, elitist body of nine judges. I argue that Waldron's democratic critique of judicial review has implications for real-world reform, but not the implications he thinks it has. He argues that systems of legislative supremacy over the judiciary are democratically preferable to the American one. I provide reasons why his argument is unsound and explain that, properly construed, Waldron's premises support implementing a system where ordinary citizens chosen by lottery participate in a deliberative mini-public to vote on which reasonable interpretation of a basic political right will become the law of the land.

My aim in this essay is to reorient our understanding of the Kantian ethical project, especially in relation to its assumed rivals. I do this by considering Kant's relation to eudaimonism, especially in its Aristotelian form. I argue for two points. First, once we understand what Kant and Aristotle mean by happiness, we can see that not only is it the case that, by Kant's lights, Aristotle is not a eudaimonist. We can also see that, by Aristotle's lights, Kant is a eudaimonist. Second, we can see that this agreement on eudaimonism actually reflects a deeper, more fundamental agreement on the nature of ethics as a distinctively practical philosophy. This is an important result, not just for the history of moral philosophy but for moral philosophy as well. For it suggests that both Kantians and Aristotelians may well have more argumentative resources available to them than is commonly thought.

There has recently been a focus on the question of statue removalism. This concerns what to do with public history statues that honor or otherwise celebrate ethically bad historical figures. The specific wrongs of these statues have been understood in terms of derogatory speech, inapt honors, or supporting bad ideologies. In this paper I understand these bad public history statues as history and identify a distinctive class of public history-specific wrongs. Specifically, public history plays an important identity-shaping role, and bad public history can commit specifically ontic injustice. Understanding bad public history in terms of ontic injustice helps understand not just how to address bad public history statues, but also the value of public history more broadly.

In this essay, I argue that it is morally wrong for police to lie to suspects in interrogations and that it should be legally prohibited. I base my argument on broadly Kantian considerations about respect for autonomy: Respect for rational agency forbids lying to suspects and there is no plausible and compelling rationale for allowing police to lie to suspects in typical cases of interrogation.

Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare function with individual utility functions characterized by Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory. I will argue that, once prospect utilitarianism is on the table, Rawls's original arguments in support of justice as fairness as well as his arguments against utilitarianism are, at best, inconclusive. This shows that how implausible a choice for utilitarianism in the original position is heavily depends on what one assumes to be general knowledge of human psychology that the original contracting parties know.

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, and ‘homophobic’ are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation as well as responses to it are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how ‘racist’ and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive.

Intuitively, a speaker who uses slurs to refer to people is doing something morally objectionable even if no one is measurably affected by their speech. Perhaps they are only talking to themselves, or they are speaking with bigots who are already as vicious as they can be. This paper distinguishes between slurring as an expressive act and slurring as the act of causing a psychological effect. It then develops an expression-focused ethical account in order to explain the intuition that slurring involves an effect-independent moral wrong. The core idea is that the act of expressing a morally defective attitude is itself pro tanto morally objectionable. Unlike theories that focus only on problematic effects, this view is able to shift the moral burden of proof away from victims of slurring acts and onto speakers. It also offers moral guidance with respect to metalinguistic and pedagogical utterances of slurs.