This article defends the proposal that voters be permitted to choose whether to cast a vote for a candidate or against a candidate: a vote for a candidate would increase their total number of votes by one, as it does at present, whereas a vote against a candidate would decrease their total number of votes by one.

Do we need justification in order to know God exists? Must we infer God exists, if we are to know that he is there? How might religious experience ground belief in God?

If a benevolent and all-powerful God exists, how can there be so much suffering? Could God have created a better world? Or is evil the price we pay for freedom of the will?

What is the best way to respond to monuments in our communities if they represent people who stood for harmful ideas and/or societal structures? I start with the assumption that it would be best for everyone if all of the harmful monuments were removed from our public squares. The more interesting question is: Why would it be best? I will examine critically two different explanations as to why it would be best: one, Plato's, which rests on the harmful non-intellectual influences of images and the other, Socrates’, which rests on the harmful intellectual influences of those images. In the end, I shall argue that Socrates got it right and Plato wrong due to the former's ability to explain human behaviour and the latter's surprising lack of that same ability, despite how widely it is believed. If the argument is correct, it will have deep and widespread implications for how we educate our children and ourselves about every important aspect of the human condition.

If you believe in the existence of an infinitely good, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity (‘God’), how do you explain the reality of evil – including the inexpressible suffering and death of innocents? Wouldn't God be forced to vanquish such suffering due to God's very nature? Alvin Plantinga has argued, convincingly, that if the possibility of ultimate goodness somehow necessarily required that evil be allowed to exist, God, being omnibenevolent, would have to allow it. But as John Hick has noted, the mere logical possibility of such a situation might not be enough to console the doubting theist. We need a positive reason to believe that evil as we know it is compatible with God's existence. So, Hick offers a ‘soul-making’ theodicy – or vindication – of God, suggesting that the human soul cannot fully progress to spiritual maturity (a kind of ultimate good on his account) without grappling with evil. In this short piece I argue that, if we accept Hick's premises about souls and soul-making, we can indeed make sense of evil to some extent. But, I suggest, his account cannot justify the type or amount of evil we see in the world, so his theodicy does not succeed

When exactly does life end? When can we justifiably said to be ‘dead’. How we answer this question has important ethical and medical consequences.

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.

There's heated debate around whether people who did terrible things in the past, at a time when there was widespread acceptance of such actions, are appropriately blamed by us, on the grounds they weren't really morally ignorant, or their ignorance was itself culpable. I point to puzzles that arise if we blame them. We need to explain how they could act so badly if they weren't fully ignorant. I argue that plausible answers to that question entail that they're not blameworthy, or that we lack standing to blame them.

‘You are overthinking that!’ The article argues against the popular idea that too much of the activity of thinking is bad for individuals. Wrong thinking, I argue, is what is bad or unhealthy, irrespective of the length of time it is done for. Wrong thinking can lead to worrying, stress, and impedes practical action. But if thinking is done right, then you can't have too much of it.

Graduation is supposed to be a time to be happy and celebrate. So why does it often feel so terrifying, so empty? The work of existentialist philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre can shed some light on why graduation is a rupture that is so disruptive.

One of Berkeley's best-known arguments for the view that there are no material objects is the so-called Master Argument. There are several good critical discussions of it. That invites the question: is there anything new to say? Well, it will be argued, there are a few things to say. First, although refutations by logical analogy have been advanced against the Master Argument, the strongest such refutation, one which demonstrates its incoherence, has not been. It is here. Second, there are few formal reconstructions of the Master Argument – the great majority of discussions treat it discursively – but a formal reconstruction, and one not found elsewhere, is offered here. Third, the formal reconstruction makes possible identification of the essential mistake of the argument. That mistake is equivocation. The common complaint that Berkeley illicitly introduces the act of conceiving into the content of the concept conceived is not quite correct; but to the extent that it is correct, it's explicable in terms of an underlying equivocation. Fourth, the article presupposes no acquaintance with Berkeley's work and is written in a conversational, easy-to-read style. Given that Berkeley himself wrote in a similar style, he could at least agree that the fourth point is a merit of the article.

Among the people who have been hailed for being particularly authentic are notorious liars. But this seems like a contradiction. Can you be authentic if you lie about what you value, believe, or feel? This brief article explores this question and the unique stances on honesty that different notions of authenticity take.

Philosophy has overwhelmingly approached climate breakdown in terms of the ethical obligations to the future which it is supposed to involve. This review of a recent book by Rupert Read shows him bringing philosophy to bear on why and how it matters in the first place – as an already present disaster which could reconnect us deeply with ourselves.

Is childhood something that we can leave behind, or indeed should? In their latest article for Think, Emma Swinn and Steven Campbell-Harris challenge the conventional understanding of children and adults, revealing how these rigid categories create problems in our education system, democracies and personal lives. Through the revolutionary education movement ‘Philosophy for children’ (P4C), they explore how retaining the ‘childlike’ qualities of questioning, playing and embracing uncertainty can transform our approach to learning and paradoxically help us to live more fulfilled adult lives.

OpenAI is a research organization founded by, among others, Elon Musk, and supported by Microsoft. In November 2022, it released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot, that is, a computer system with which humans can converse. The capability of this chatbot is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence and even whether one could be conscious. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider that the most interesting question in this direction is whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We put to it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance.

Philosophers dispute whether an effect can be earlier than its cause (i.e. whether backwards causation can occur). For example, could a trainwreck cause a psychic to have earlier knowledge of it? Max Black tried to show backwards causation to be impossible but he failed to do so, or so I will argue. Nonetheless, his famous article can still teach us something important about certain cases of backwards causation.

This short article aims to strengthen Hume's case against the rationality of believing in religious miracles by incorporating certain lessons borrowed from the growing literature on the history and psychology of magic tricks.

People have often thought that Kant left no room for compassion in the virtuous life, because virtue for him is about doing the right thing when you don't feel like it. However, compassion is an important virtue in Kantian ethics, where it is understood as a form of moral cognition grounded in a commitment to act for the good of others. Though this means that the Kantian virtue of compassion is primarily intellectual in nature, contrary to what people have thought, the virtuous person can experience great feelings of compassion, affection and pleasure. And yet, these feelings are not strictly necessary for someone to have the virtue. For this reason, some, for example neurodiverse, agents who would not qualify as virtuous on the Aristotelian picture do qualify as virtuous on the Kantian picture. This expands the traditional virtue label in a good way.

In a short article, Saul Smilansky (THINK 60, 2022) provides an argument in favour of the belief in social progress. He considers the ‘probability of losing a child’ to be a pivotal element among various criteria to be assessed in order to evaluate human progress and as this probability has decreased considerably in the modern era, he believes humanity is today in a better situation than in previous generations. In this article, I criticize Smilansky's argument and try to show that his criterion of progress is superficial.

It is commonly recognized that the modern capacity for mass online communication carries various dangers: fake news, rampant conspiracy theories, trolling, and so forth. It is less commonly realized that moral problems remain when the contents of online communications are completely innocuous. This article discusses one of the noteworthy features of modern digital technology, the fact that it is possible to precisely target specific audiences, and argues that this can make mass communications such as advertising and political campaigns morally problematic. What is more, this holds even if the communicator is using only rational persuasion. In being selective about who sees which arguments, one becomes liable to mislead the audience despite sticking to honest, evidence-based, rational argumentation.