AVOIDING OR CHANGING THE PAST?

Some philosophers argue that any attempt to model changing the past will either be contradictory or really model avoiding the past. Using Nicholas Smith's (1997) argument as a basis, I formulate a generic version of this Avoidance Argument. I argue that the Avoidance Argument fails because (i) it involves an equivocation of what is meant by ‘bifurcation of the time of an event’ and (ii) resolving the equivocation results in the falsity of at least one of the premises. Hence, the Avoidance Argument will not support the claim that changing the past is logically impossible.     

Political Liberalism and Male Supremacy

In Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, Watson and Hartley dispute the claim that Rawls’s doctrine of political liberalism must tolerate gender hierarchy because it counts conservative and orthodox religions as reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I argue that their defense in fact contains two arguments, both of which fail. The first, which I call the ‘Deliberative Equality Argument’, fails because it does not establish conclusively that political liberalism’s demand for equal citizenship forbids social practices of domination, as the authors contend. The second, which I call the ‘Equal Liberties Argument’, fails because it supports a particular version of political liberalism and not the doctrine itself.     

Emerging from the causal drain

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.     

On Parfit’s Ontology

Parfit denies that the introduction of reasons into our ontology is costly for his theory. He puts forth two positions to help establish the claim: the Plural Senses View and the Argument from Empty Ontology. I argue that, first, the Plural Senses View for ‘exists’ can be expanded to allow for senses which undermine his ontological claims; second, the Argument from Empty Ontology can be debunked by Platonists. Furthermore, it is difficult to make statements about reasons true unless these statements include reference to objects in reality. These arguments show the instability of Parfit’s claimed metaethical advantages over naturalism.     

Concerning the resilience of Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument

Against its prominent compatiblist and libertarian opponents, I defend Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility. Against John Martin Fischer, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that an agent can be responsible for an action only if he is responsible for every factor contributing to that action. Against Alfred Mele and Randolph Clarke, I argue that it is absurd to believe that an agent can be responsible for an action when no factor contributing to that action is up to that agent. Against Derk Pereboom and Clarke, I argue that the versions of agent-causal libertarianism they claim can immunize the agent to the Basic Argument actually fail to do so. Against Robert Kane, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that simply the presence of indeterministic factors in the process of bringing an action about is itself what rules out the agent’s chance for being responsible for that action.     

Free will and mystery: looking past the Mind Argument

Among challenges to libertarians, the Mind Argument has loomed large. Believing that this challenge cannot be met, Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, concludes that free will is a mystery. Recently, the Mind Argument has drawn a number of criticisms. Here I seek to add to its woes. Quite apart from its other problems, I argue, the Mind Argument does a poor job of isolating the important concern for libertarians that it raises. Once this concern has been clarified, however, another argument serves to renew the challenge. The Assimilation Argument challenges libertarians to explain how ostensible exercises of free will are relevantly different from other causally undetermined outcomes, outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. In particular, libertarians must explain how agents can have the power to settle which of two causally possible futures becomes the actual future. This will require them to distinguish cases where this power is supposedly present from similar cases where it’s clearly absent.     

On Several Misuses of Sober’s<Emphasis Type="Italic"> Selection for/Selection of</Emphasis> Distinction

Teleological Theories of mental representation are probably the most promising naturalistic accounts of intentionality. However, it is widely known that these theories suffer from a major objection: the Indeterminacy Problem. The most common reply to this problem employs the Target of Selection Argument, which is based on Sober’s distinction between selection for and selection of. Unfortunately, some years ago the Target of Selection Argument came into serious attack in a famous paper by Goode and Griffiths. Since then, the question of the validity of the Target of Selection Argument in the context of the Indeterminacy Problem has remained largely untouched. In this essay, I argue that both the Target of Selection Argument and Goode and Griffiths’ criticisms to it misuse Sober’s analysis in important respects.     

The Union Makes us Strong,but Does it Make Us Free? A Review of Mark Reiff’s In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization

Res Publica - Mark Reiff’s book In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization successfully delivers the promise contained in the title—the case for a version of...     

THE ASSIMILATION ARGUMENT AND THE ROLLBACK ARGUMENT

Seth Shabo has presented a new argument that attempts to codify familiar worries about indeterminism, luck, and control. His ‘Assimilation Argument’ contends that libertarians cannot distinguish overtly randomized outcomes from exercises of free will. Shabo claims that the argument possesses advantages over the Mind Argument and Rollback Argument, which also purport to establish that indeterminism is incompatible with free will. I argue first that the Assimilation Argument presents no new challenges over and above those presented by the Rollback Argument, and second that the Rollback Argument itself neither presents a deep challenge to, nor raises the cost of, accepting libertarianism.     

Pleading ignorance in response to experiential primitivism

Modal arguments like the Knowledge Argument, the Conceivability Argument and the Inverted Spectrum Argument could be used to argue for experiential primitivism; the view that experiential truths aren’t entailed from nonexperiential truths. A way to resist these arguments is to follow Stoljar (Ignorance and imagination. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and plead ignorance of a type of experience-relevant nonexperiential truth. If we are ignorant of such a truth, we can’t imagine or conceive of the various sorts of scenarios that are required to make these arguments sound. While I am sympathetic to this response, in this article I will argue that we have good reason to believe that this particular ignorance hypothesis is false.     

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument share certain structural features, and hence are often discussed together (Bostrom 2003, Are you living in a computer simulation, Philosophical Quarterly, 53:243–255; Aranyosi 2004, The Doomsday Simulation Argument. Or why isn’t the end nigh, and you’re not living in a simulation, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/190/; Richmond 2008, Doomsday, Bishop Ussher and simulated worlds, Ratio, 21:201–217; Bostrom and Kulczycki 2011 A patch for the Simulation Argument, Analysis, 71:54–61). Both are cases where reflecting on one’s location among a set of possibilities yields a counter-intuitive conclusion—in the first case that the end of humankind is closer than you initially thought, and in the second case that it is more likely than you initially thought that you are living in a computer simulation. Indeed, the two arguments do have some structural similarities. But there are also significant disanalogies between the two arguments, and I argue that these disanalogies mean that the Simulation Argument succeeds and the Doomsday Argument fails.     

Evidentialism and skeptical arguments

Cartesian skepticism about epistemic justification (??skepticism??) is the view that many of our beliefs about the external world??e.g., my current belief that I have hands??aren??t justified. I examine the two most influential arguments for skepticism??the Closure Argument and the Underdetermination Argument??from an evidentialist perspective. For both arguments it??s clear which premise the anti-skeptic must deny. The Closure Argument, I argue, is the better argument in that its key premise is weaker than the Underdetermination Argument??s key premise. Next I examine ways of motivating each argument??s key premise. I argue that attempts to motivate them which appeal to one??s having the same evidence in skeptical scenarios, to skeptical hypotheses?? alleged ability to explain our evidence just as well as real world hypotheses, or to the fact that if skeptical scenarios were true everything would appear just as it does all fail to provide any motivation for the premises or for skepticism. But I close by considering a different argument for the key premises and skepticism that lacks the central defect of these other arguments. Future work on skepticism should focus on this final argument at the expense of the others.     

Four models of the functional contribution of mirror systems

In this paper we raise three questions of clarification about Alfred Mele's fine recent book, Free Will and Luck. Our questions concern the following topics: (i) Mele's combination of ‘luck’ and ‘Frankfurt-style’ objections to libertarianism, (ii) Mele's stipulations about ‘compatibilism’ and the relation between questions about free action and questions about moral responsibility, and (iii) Mele's treatment of the Consequence Argument.     

Deprivation and the See-saw of Death

Abstract

Epicurus argued that death can be neither good nor bad because it involves neither pleasure nor pain. This paper focuses on the deprivation account as a response to this Hedonist Argument. Proponents of the deprivation account hold that Epicurus’s argument fails even if death involves no painful or pleasurable experiences and even if the hedonist ethical system, which holds that pleasure and pain are all that matter ethically, is accepted. I discuss four objections that have been raised against the deprivation account and argue that this response to Epicurus’s argument is successful once it has been sufficiently clarified.     

Collective Acceptance and the Is-Ought Argument

According to John Searle’s well-known Is-Ought Argument, it is possible to derive an ought-statement from is-statements only. This argument concerns obligations involved in institutions such as promising, and it relies on the idea that institutions can be conceptualized in terms of constitutive rules. In this paper, I argue that the structure of this argument has never been fully appreciated. Starting from my status account of constitutive rules, I reconstruct the argument and establish that it is valid. This reconstruction reveals that the soundness of the argument depends on whether collective acceptance as such can generate obligations. Margaret Gilbert has argued that it can, and thus far some of her central arguments have not been addressed. The upshot is that the Is-Ought Argument deserves to be taken seriously once again.     

The consequence argument ungrounded

Peter van Inwagen’s original formulation of the Consequence Argument employed an inference rule (rule beta) that was shown to be invalid given van Inwagen’s interpretation of the modal operators in the Consequence Argument (McKay and Johnson in Philos Top 24:113–122, 1996). In response, van Inwagen (Metaphysics. The big questions, Blackwell, Oxford, 2008a, Harv Rev Philos 22:16–30, 2015) recently suggested a revised interpretation of his modal operators. Following up on a debate between Blum (Dialectica 57:423–429, 2003) and Schnieder (Synthese 162:101–115, 2008), I analyze van Inwagen’s revised interpretation in terms of explanatory notions and I argue that van Inwagen faces a dilemma: he either has to admit that beta entails fatalism, or he has to admit that a new counterexample invalidates beta. Either way, it seems reasonable to reject beta and to conclude that the Consequence Argument fails. Further, I argue that Widerker’s (Analysis 47:37–41, 1987) well-known substitute for rule beta is faced with a similar dilemma and, therefore, is bound to fail as well. I conclude that, if the modal operators are interpreted in terms of explanatory notions, neither van Inwagen’s nor Widerker’s rule of inference turns out to be valid.     

Modal Stability and Warrant

Keith DeRose believes that it is a strength of his contextualist analysis that it explains why the recently much-discussed skeptical Argument from Ignorance (AI) is so persuasive. Not only that, however; DeRose also believes that he is able to explain the underlying dynamics of AI by utilizing solely the epistemological and linguistic resources contained within his contextualist analysis. DeRose believes, in other words, that his contextualist analysis functions as a genuinely self-contained explanation of skepticism. But does it? In this paper I argue that DeRose’s analysis does not function as a self-contained explanation of skepticism since, as it turns out, DeRose’s analysis is simply irrelevant to the main concerns of the skeptic. To the extent that DeRose’s analysis is irrelevant in this way, I conclude that such an analysis cannot be considered a satisfactory treatment of AI.     

Unique Best Deserver Theory and Arguments From Misclassification

It is a core commitment of Epistemic Two-Dimensionalism (E2D) that an utterance is 1-necessary iff it is a priori. But Jeff Speaks's Argument from Misclassification proves that, on a natural interpretation, E2D assigns necessary 1-intensions to many utterances that speakers deem a posteriori. Given that 1-intensions are meant to formalize a speaker's own understanding of the words she utters, this proof raises serious difficulties for E2D. In response, Elliott, McQueen, and Weber point out that the Argument from Misclassification presupposes a controversial theory of reference-fixation for proper names and argue that E2Dists ought to reject this theory. They discuss three alternatives to the theory that render E2D immune to the Argument from Misclassification. I demonstrate here that each of these alternatives either (i) replicates the faults of the original theory by assigning necessary 1-intensions to a posteriori utterances, or (ii) makes 1-intensions creatures of darkness. I argue that, although the Argument from Misclassification does indeed rely on a controversial theory of reference-fixation, Elliott, McQueen, and Weber have indicated no promising alternative to this theory.     

Van Inwagen on the Cosmological Argument

Abstract

In his book Metaphysics, Peter van Inwagen constructs a version of the Cosmological Argument which does not depend on the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He goes on to reject the argument. In this paper, I construct an alternative version of the Cosmological Argument that uses some of van Inwagen's insights and yet is immune to his criticisms. If we suppose that for each contingent truth, there is some at least partial explanation, then it follows that there is some necessary truth that explains the conjunction of all the contingent truths.     

DOOMSDAY,BISHOP USSHER AND SIMULATED WORLDS

This paper attempts three tasks in relation to Carter and Leslie's Doomsday Argument. First, it criticises Timothy Chambers' ‘Ussherian Corollary’, a striking but unsuccessful objection to standard Doomsday arguments. Second, it reformulates the Ussherian Corollary as an objection to Bradley Monton's variant Doomsday and Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument. Finally, it tries to diagnose the epistemic/metaphysical problems facing Doomsday‐related arguments. 1