On the Content of Experience*

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. Fred Dretske (1995) , Mike Thau (2002) , Michael Tye (1995) and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we take advantage of this fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions.     

HEAVENLY SEMANTICS: SOME LITERARY-CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SCRIPTURAL REASONING

This essay i) shows how certain key virtues of the practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) offer correctives to a mode of western rationality that regards itself as “supra‐traditional” and universally valid; and ii) illuminates those virtues with the help of literary theory which shares SR's concern with how texts and their interpretation affect possibilities for human life in any given context. It identifies four “marks” of SR (particularity, provisionality, sociality and surprise) and works with three conversation partners who use literary theory (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mikhail Bakhtin and John Beer), to offer a positive account of SR's traditioned, critically imaginative character.     

Sex Discrimination, Gender Balance, Justice and Publicity in Admissions

This paper examines the problem of selecting a number of candidates to receive a good (admission) from a pool in which there are more qualified applicants than places. I observe that it is rarely possible to order all candidates according to some relevant criterion, such as academic merit, since these standards are inevitably somewhat vague. This means that we are often faced with the task of making selections between near-enough equal candidates. I survey one particular line of response, which says that we should allow our choice of borderline candidates to be guided by non-relevant criteria such as gender-balancing. I argue that this would not, as commonly objected, be a case of sex discrimination if it is to be applied either in favour of men or women. Nonetheless, I argue that such policies are problematic because they violate the demand for publicity, which is required for legitimacy and to assure everyone that discrimination has not in fact taken place. Instead, I suggest that, if we are concerned to avoid discrimination, there may be a case for using lotteries as tie-breakers, not on grounds of fairness but to prevent taint of bias.     

The Consequences of Individual Consumption: A Defence of Threshold Arguments for Vegetarianism and Consumer Ethics

As a moral foundation for vegetarianism and other consumer choices, act consequentialism can be appealing. When we justify our consumer and dietary choices this way, however, we face the problem that our individual actions rarely actually precipitate more just agricultural and economic practices. This threshold or individual impotence problem engaged by consequentialist vegetarians and their critics extends to morally motivated consumer decision‐making more generally, anywhere a lag persists between individual moral actions taken and systemic moral progress made. Regan and others press just this point against Singer's utilitarian basis for vegetarianism; recently Chartier criticizes act‐consequentialist vegetarianism by identifying many factors weakening the connection between individual meat purchases and changes in animal production. While such factors are relevant to act‐consequentialist moral reasoning, I argue, they need not defeat the act‐consequentialist case for vegetarianism and consumer ethics. This is shown by offering a probabilistic account of the threshold issue and discussing the positive and negative role‐modelling effects of our morally motivated dietary and consumer choices.