Consequentialist theories determine rightness solely based on real or expected consequences. Although such theories are popular, they often have difficulty with generalizing intuitions, which demand concern for questions like “What if everybody did that?” Rule consequentialism attempts to incorporate these intuitions by shifting the locus of evaluation from the consequences of acts to those of rules. However, detailed rule-consequentialist theories seem ad hoc or arbitrary compared to act consequentialist ones. We claim that generalizing can be better incorporated into consequentialism by (...) keeping the locus of evaluation on acts but adjusting the decision theory behind act selection. Specifically, we should adjust which types of dependencies the theory takes to be decision-relevant. Using this strategy, we formulate a new theory, generalized act consequentialism, which we argue is more compelling than rule consequentialism both in modeling the actual reasoning of generalizers and in delivering correct verdicts. (shrink)

The sensory constraint on conscious thought says that if a thought is phenomenally conscious, its phenomenal properties must be reducible to some sensory phenomenal character. I argue that the burgeoning psychological literature on aphantasia, an impoverishment in the ability to generate mental imagery, provides a counterexample to the sensory constraint. The best explanation of aphantasics’ introspective reports, neuroimaging, and task performance is that some aphantasics have conscious thoughts without sensory mental imagery. This argument against the sensory constraint supports the existence (...) of a non-sensory phenomenology of thought. Moreover, this argument can be extended to show that this non-sensory phenomenology determines a thought content. Finally, it can potentially diagnose the disagreement over cognitive phenomenology in the philosophy of mind, as such disagreement may turn on interpersonal variation in mental imagery. (shrink)

Beginning from Hegel's notion of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as a mode of consciousness governed by the norms of a historical community, this essay examines the role of education in shaping contemporary communities of autonomous people. It does so by defending a version of the idea that an educator has, among her other tasks, the role of helping her students appreciate the values that are shared across her community. In the course of the examination I relate this idea to trends in (...) the European Enlightenment, and I draw on research concerning political polarization in Europe and North America today and its impact on the academy. In the process I argue that the modern university educator has the task of cultivating in her students an attitude of critical inquiry whose results are not coerced by the social conditions under which that inquiry takes place, and I offer some pedagogical proposals for the university educator facing the situation we are today. (shrink)

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 2-9.

Stance-independent nonnaturalist moral realism is subject to two related epistemological objections. First, there is the metaethical descendant of the Benacerraf problem. Second, there are evolutionary debunking arguments. Standard attempts to solve these epistemological problems have not appealed to any particular moral epistemology. The focus on these epistemologically neutral responses leaves many interesting theoretical stones unturned. Exploring the ability of particular theories in moral epistemology to handle these difficult epistemological objections can help illuminate strengths or weaknesses within these theories themselves, as (...) well as opening up potentially unexplored avenues for responding to deeply entrenched concerns about our epistemic access to the moral properties. In this paper, I assess the prospects of an empiricist and perceptualist model of moral knowledge for responding to epistemological arguments against non-skeptical moral realism. I argue that such a view has powerful responses to these objections that are not open to other moral epistemologists. The upshot is that if some version of the view is correct, then the realist has less to fear from Benacerraf and evolutionary debunking–style epistemological objections. Insofar as one is already a committed realist, then, this provides some indirect support for moral perceptualism. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive critical study of the work of Paul Feyerabend, one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers of science. The book traces the evolution of Feyerabend's thought, beginning with his early attempt to graft insights from Wittgenstein's conception of meaning onto Popper's falsificationist philosophy. The key elements of Feyerabend's model of the acquisition of knowledge are identified and critically evaluated. Feyerabend's early work emerges as a continuation of Popper's philosophy of science, rather than as a contribution to (...) the historical approach to science with which he is usually associated. In his more notorious later work, Feyerabend claimed that there was, and should be, no such thing as the scientific method. The roots of Feyerabend's 'epistemological anarchism' are exposed and the weaknesses of his cultural relativism are brought out. Throughout the book, Preston discusses the influence of Feyerabend's thought on contemporary philosophers and traces his stimulating but divided legacy. The book will be of interest to students of philosophy, methodology, and the social sciences. (shrink)

The standard formulation of Newcomb's problem compares evidential and causal conceptions of expected utility, with those maximizing evidential expected utility tending to end up far richer. Thus, in a world in which agents face Newcomb problems, the evidential decision theorist might ask the causal decision theorist: "if you're so smart, why ain’cha rich?” Ultimately, however, the expected riches of evidential decision theorists in Newcomb problems do not vindicate their theory, because their success does not generalize. Consider a theory that allows (...) the agents who employ it to end up rich in worlds containing Newcomb problems and continues to outperform in other cases. This type of theory, which I call a “success-first” decision theory, is motivated by the desire to draw a tighter connection between rationality and success, rather than to support any particular account of expected utility. The primary aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive justification of success-first decision theories as accounts of rational decision. I locate this justification in an experimental approach to decision theory supported by the aims of methodological naturalism. (shrink)

It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that our first-person preferences regarding pleasurable and painful experiences exhibit a bias toward the future (positive and negative hedonic future-bias), and that our preferences regarding non-hedonic events (both positive and negative) exhibit no such bias (non-hedonic time-neutrality). Further, it has been assumed that our third-person preferences are always time-neutral. Some have attempted to use these (presumed) differential patterns of future-bias—different across kinds of events and perspectives—to argue for the irrationality of hedonic future-bias. This (...) paper experimentally tests these descriptive hypotheses. While as predicted we found first-person hedonic future-bias, we did not find that participants were time-neutral in all other conditions. Hence, the presumed asymmetry of hedonic/non-hedonic and first/third-person preferences cannot be used to argue for the irrationality of future-bias, since no such asymmetries exist. Instead, we develop a more fine-grained approach, according to which three factors—positive/negative valence, first/third-person, and hedonic/non-hedonic—each independently influence, but do not determine, whether an event is treated in a future-biased or time-neutral way. We discuss the upshots of these results for the debate over the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Philosophers working on time-biases assume that people are hedonically biased toward the future. A hedonically future-biased agent prefers pleasurable experiences to be future instead of past, and painful experiences to be past instead of future. Philosophers further predict that this bias is strong enough to apply to unequal payoffs: people often prefer less pleasurable future experiences to more pleasurable past ones, and more painful past experiences to less painful future ones. In addition, philosophers have predicted that future-bias is restricted to (...) first-person preferences, and that people’s third-person preferences are time-neutral. Philosophers disagree vigorously about the normative status of these preferences—i.e., they disagree about whether first-person future-bias is rationally permissible. Time-neutralists, for example, have appealed to the predicted asymmetry between first- and third-person preferences to argue for the rational impermissibility of future-bias. We empirically tested these predictions, and found that while people do prefer more past pain to less future pain, they do not prefer less future pleasure to more past pleasure. This was so in both first and third-person conditions. This suggests that future-bias is typically non-absolute, and is more easily outweighed in the case of positive events. We connect this result to the normative debate over future-bias. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something _as a news item_ and preferring it _as an object of choice_. Finally, we investigate whether differences in people’s implicit decision theory correlate with differences in their level (...) of _future bias_: the preference for positively valenced events to be located in the future and not the past, and negatively valenced events to be located in the past and not the future. We find that people are overwhelmingly non-causalists. We also find that implicit causalists _do not_ make the distinction between news items and objects of choice, and that there is little to no correlation between people’s future bias and their implicit decision theory. We end by discussing the philosophical upshots of this work. (shrink)

Reflecting on the months leading up to and following the 2016 United States presidential election, in an essay published in January of 2017 I argued that the left/right dichotomy of the Democrats and the Republicans was no longer carving at a joint of American politics (Stovall, 2017). Instead, it seemed a more salient political division in the U.S. was that between what I called the urban globalists and the non-urban nationalists. This essay situates the apparent conflict between urban globalism and (...) non-urban nationalism in the context of a development in European self-understanding owed to German idealism. I will articulate this self-understanding by relating it to the period of the European Enlightenment, and in the process I will argue that a theory of collective intentions may point the way toward a more thorough understanding of the phenomena that lie behind the growing opposition between nationalist and globalist tendencies in Europe and the United States today. (shrink)

In recent years, a disagreement has erupted between two camps of philosophers about the rationality of bias toward the near and bias toward the future. According to the traditional hybrid view, near bias is rationally impermissible, while future bias is either rationally permissible or obligatory. Time neutralists, meanwhile, argue that the hybrid view is untenable. They claim that those who reject near bias should reject both biases and embrace time neutrality. To date, experimental work has focused on future-directed near bias. (...) The primary aim of this paper is to shed light on the debate by investigating past-directed near bias. If people treat the past and future differently with respect to near bias, by being future-directed but not past-directed near biased, then this supports a particular version of the hybrid view: temporal metaphysic hybridism. If people treat the past and future the same with respect to near bias, then this supports a simple version of time neutralism, which explains both future bias and near bias in terms of the functioning of a single mechanism: the anticipatory/retrospectory mechanism. Our results undermine the claim that people are future-directed, but not past-directed, near biased, and hence do not support temporal metaphysic hybridism. They also fail to support simple time-neutralism; instead, they suggest that there are multiple mechanisms that differently shape future- and past-directed preferences. (shrink)

Most of us display a bias toward the near: we prefer pleasurable experiences to be in our near future and painful experiences to be in our distant future. We also display a bias toward the future: we prefer pleasurable experiences to be in our future and painful experiences to be in our past. While philosophers have tended to think that near bias is a rational defect, almost no one finds future bias objectionable. In this essay, we argue that this hybrid (...) position is untenable. We conclude that those who reject near bias should instead endorse complete temporal neutrality. (shrink)

Inquiry into the metaphysics of essence tends to be pursued in a realist and model-theoretic spirit, in the sense that metaphysical vocabulary is used in a metalanguage to model truth conditions for the object-language use of essentialist vocabulary. This essay adapts recent developments in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a nominalist analysis for a variety of essentialist vocabularies. A metalanguage employing explanatory inferences is used to individuate introduction and elimination rules for atomic sentences. The object-language assertions of sentences concerning essences are (...) then interpreted as devices for marking off structural features of the explanatory inferences that, under a given interpretation, constitute the contents of the atoms of the language. On this proposal, object-language essentialist vocabulary is mentioned in a proof-theoretic metalanguage that uses a vocabulary of explanation. The result is a nominalist interpretation of essence as a modality, understood in the grammatical sense as a modification of the copula, and a view of metaphysical inquiry that is closely connected to the explanatory commitments present in first-order inquiry into things like sets, chemicals, and organisms. This result illustrates that some of the presuppositions that have animated analytic metaphysics over the last few decades can be profitably substituted with more practice-oriented conceptions of the forms of reasoning at work in different domains of human knowledge. (shrink)

The careful historical and metaphilosophical attention recently bestowed upon analytic philosophy has revealed that traditional ways of defining it are inadequate. In the face of this inadequacy, contemporary authors have proposed new definitions that detach analytic philosophy from its turn of the twentieth century origins. I argue that this contemporary trend in defining analytic philosophy is misguided, and that it diminishes the likelihood of our coming to an accurate historical and metaphilosophical understanding of it. This is especially unsatisfactory since such (...) understanding is essential to finding an adequate remedy for the widely perceived ills of contemporary analytic philosophy. I suggest that a more fruitful approach to developing such understanding might begin with treating the unity of analytic philosophy as illusory. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 864-886, December 2021.

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about the preference target, third-person (...) preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

The chair of the ethics committee of a major medical center agonized over how he, as a physician, and his organization should deal with Initiative 119, which, if passed, would legalize physician involvement in active, voluntary euthanasia in Washington State. In the end, he said, he could not vote for aid-in-dying because, “However much I want to reduce suffering, I myself just couldn’t do it to one of my patients.” He spoke of a personal distaste for the potential act, of (...) a profound desire not to have to do it. It was not an ethical argument, but an honest and compelling expression of feelings.Why can’t this sincere man do it, even for patients who request such aid? In a 1991 poll, taken in Washington State prior to the vote on Initiative 119, 49 percent of the physicians surveyed supported the initiative, but 75 percent did not want to participate in aid-in-dying. (shrink)

The chair of the ethics committee of a major medical center agonized over how he, as a physician, and his organization should deal with Initiative 119, which, if passed, would legalize physician involvement in active, voluntary euthanasia in Washington State. In the end, he said, he could not vote for aid-in-dying because, “However much I want to reduce suffering, I myself just couldn’t do it to one of my patients.” He spoke of a personal distaste for the potential act, of (...) a profound desire not to have to do it. It was not an ethical argument, but an honest and compelling expression of feelings.Why can’t this sincere man do it, even for patients who request such aid? In a 1991 poll, taken in Washington State prior to the vote on Initiative 119, 49 percent of the physicians surveyed supported the initiative, but 75 percent did not want to participate in aid-in-dying. (shrink)

Bayne and McClelland (2016) raise the matching content challenge for proponents of cognitive phenomenology: if the phenomenal character of thought is determined by its intentional content, why is it that my conscious thought that there is a blue wall before me and my visual perception of a blue wall before me don’t share any phenomenology, despite their matching content? In this paper, I first show that the matching content challenge is not limited to proponents of cognitive phenomenology but extends to (...) cases of cross-modal perception, threatening representationalism about consciousness in general. I then give two responses to the challenge, both of which appeal to intentional modes. The difference in intentional mode between a thought and a visual perception can either explain why we should not expect any phenomenal overlap between the two experiences, or it can make it clear why the phenomenal overlap is easy to overlook. I show that these responses are available to the representationalist about perceptual consciousness, as well as the proponent of cognitive phenomenology. The upshot is that, when it comes to the matching content challenge, both perceptual representationalism and cognitive representationalism stand on equal dialectical footing. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that at least some moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. I argue for this claim using a _contrast argument_, a type of argument commonly found in the literature on the philosophy of perception. I first appeal to psychological research on what I call emotionally empathetic dysfunctional individuals to establish a phenomenal contrast between EEDI s and normal individuals in some moral situations. I then argue that the best explanation for this contrast, assuming (...) non-skeptical moral realism, is that _badness_ is represented in the normal individual’s experience but not in the EEDI ’s experience. I consider and reject four alternative explanations of the contrast. (shrink)

Salient stimuli presented at unattended locations are not always perceived, a phenomenon termed inattentional blindness. We hypothesized that inattentional blindness may be mediated by attentional inhibition. It has been shown that attentional inhibition effects are maximal near an attended location. If our hypothesis is correct, inattentional blindness effects should similarly be maximal near an attended location. During central fixation, participants viewed rapidly presented colored digits at a peripheral location. An unexpected black circle was concurrently presented. Participants were instructed to maintain (...) central fixation and name each color/digit, requiring focused attention to that location. For each participant, the critical stimulus was presented either near to or far from the attended location . In support of our hypothesis, inattentional blindness effects were maximal near the attended location, but only at intermediate task accuracy. (shrink)

Many philosophers have assumed that our preferences regarding hedonic events exhibit a bias toward the future: we prefer positive experiences to be in our future and negative experiences to be in our past. Recent experimental work by Greene et al. (ms) confirmed this assumption. However, they noted a potential for some participants to respond in a deviant manner, and hence for their methodology to underestimate the percentage of people who are time neutral, and overestimate the percentage who are future biased. (...) We aimed to replicate their study using an alternative methodology that ensures there are no such deviant responses, and hence more accurately tracks future bias and time neutrality. Instead of finding more time neutrality than Greene et al., however, we found vastly more past bias. Our explanation for this surprising finding helps to reveal the rationale behind both future and past biased preferences, and undermines the generalisability of one of the most influential motivations for the rationality of hedonic future bias: Parfit’s My Past or Future Operations. (shrink)

Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed out (...) moral epistemology will simultaneously rebut metasemantic objections to non-naturalism. Thus, both the metasemantic and the more widely discussed epistemological challenges in effect amount to one. Before setting out the positive view, the chapter considers why all of the traditional metasemantic theories cause trouble for the non-naturalist. This includes discussions of teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, as well as Schroeter and Schroeter’s “connectedness” model. (shrink)

Historically, the hypothesis that our world is a computer simulation has struck many as just another improbable-but-possible “skeptical hypothesis” about the nature of reality. Recently, however, the simulation hypothesis has received significant attention from philosophers, physicists, and the popular press. This is due to the discovery of an epistemic dependency: If we believe that our civilization will one day run many simulations concerning its ancestry, then we should believe that we are probably in an ancestor simulation right now. This essay (...) examines a troubling but underexplored feature of the ancestor-simulation hypothesis: the termination risk posed by both ancestor-simulation technology and experimental probes into whether our world is an ancestor simulation. This essay evaluates the termination risk by using extrapolations from current computing practices and simulation technology. The conclusions, while provisional, have great implications for debates concerning the fundamental nature of reality and the safety of contemporary physics. (shrink)

According to a posteriori ethical intuitionism, perceptual experiences can provide non-inferential justification for at least some moral beliefs. Moral epistemology, for the defender of AEI, is less like the epistemology of math and more like the epistemology of tables and chairs. One serious threat to AEI comes from the phenomenon of cognitive penetration. The worry is that even if evaluative properties could figure in the contents of experience, they would only be able to do so if prior cognitive states influence (...) perceptual experience. Such influences would undermine the non-inferential, foundationalist credentials of AEI. In this paper, I defend AEI against this objection. Rather than deny that cognitive penetration exists, I argue that some types of cognitive penetrability are actually compatible with AEI's foundationalist structure. This involves teasing apart the question of whether some particular perceptual process has justification-conferring features from the question of how it came to have those features in the first place. Once this distinction is made, it becomes clear that some kinds of cognitive penetration are compatible with the non-inferential status of moral perceptual experiences as the proponent of AEI claims. (shrink)

An adequate semantics for generic sentences must stake out positions across a range of contested territory in philosophy and linguistics. For this reason the study of generic sentences is a venue for investigating different frameworks for understanding human rationality as manifested in linguistic phenomena such as quantification, classification of individuals under kinds, defeasible reasoning, and intensionality. Despite the wide variety of semantic theories developed for generic sentences, to date these theories have been almost universally model-theoretic and representational. This essay outlines (...) a range of proof-theoretic analyses for characterizing generics. Particular attention is given to an expressivist proof-theory that can be traced to 1) work on logical syntax that Carnap undertook prior to his turn toward truth-conditional model theory in the late 1930s, and 2) research on sequent calculi and natural deduction systems that originate in work from Gentzen and Prawitz.1. (shrink)

In his article “On Teaching Logic,” Peter Geach reminds us of a distinction that will prove convenient in the present context, despite the ambiguity on both sides of the distinction.

This paper articulates an Aristotelian theory of professional virtue and provides an application of that theory to the subject of engineering ethics. The leading idea is that Aristotle’s analysis of the definitive function of human beings, and of the virtues humans require to fulfill that function, can serve as a model for an analysis of the definitive function or social role of a profession and thus of the virtues professionals must exhibit to fulfill that role. Special attention is given to (...) a virtue of professional self-awareness, an analogue to Aristotle’s phronesis or practical wisdom. In the course of laying out my account I argue that the virtuous professional is the successful professional, just as the virtuous life is the happy life for Aristotle. I close by suggesting that a virtue ethics approach toward professional ethics can enrich the pedagogy of professional ethics courses and help foster a sense of pride and responsibility in young professionals. (shrink)

The cognitive experience view of thought holds that the content of thought is determined by its cognitive-phenomenal character. Adam Pautz argues that the cognitive experience view is extensionally inadequate: it entails the possibility of mix-and-match cases, where the cognitive-phenomenal properties that determine thought content are combined with different sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. Because mix-and-match cases are metaphysically impossible, Pautz argues, the cognitive experience view should be rejected. This paper defends the cognitive experience view from Pautz’s argument. I build on resources (...) in the philosophy of mind literature to show that cognitive-phenomenal properties are modally independent from sensory-phenomenal and functional properties. The result is that mix-and-match cases, though modally remote, are metaphysically possible. The possibility of mix-and-match cases allows us to move from defensive posture to a critical one: it poses problems for any theory of content that imposes rationality constraints, including Pautz’s positive view, phenomenal functionalism. (shrink)

Moral distress (MD) is well-documented within the nursing literature and occurs when constraints prevent a correct course of action from being implemented. The measured frequency of MD has increased among nurses over recent years, especially since the COVID-19 Pandemic. MD is less understood among nurse leaders than other populations of nurses. A qualitative systematic review was conducted with the aim to synthesize the experiences of MD among nurse leaders. This review involved a search of three databases (Medline, CINAHL, and APA (...) PsychINFO) which resulted in the retrieval of 303 articles. PRISMA review criteria guided authors during the article review and selection process. Following the review, six articles were identified meeting review criteria and quality was assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) Checklist for qualitative studies. No ethical review was required for this systematic review. The six studies included in this review originated from the United States, Brazil, Turkey, and Iran. Leadership roles ranged from unit-based leadership to executive leadership. Assigned quality scores based upon CASP criteria ranged from 6 to 9 (moderate to high quality). Three analytical themes emerged from the synthesis: (1) moral distress is consuming; (2) constrained by the system; and (3) adapt to overcome. The unique contributors of MD among nurse leaders include the leadership role itself and challenges navigating moral situations as they arise. The nurse leader perspective should be considered in the development of future MD interventions. (shrink)

Making a career decision is one of the most complex development tasks faced by high school students who will graduate from school. Students need to believe that they would succeed in their effort to do the necessary tasks during the process of career decision-making. This belief is referred to as a career decision self-efficacy. This study examined the influence of parenting style on career decision self-efficacy through the mediation of proactive personality in senior high school students. A total of 949 (...) participants were involved in this study. Data were collected using Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form, Parental Authority Questionnaire, and Proactive Personality Scale. Data were analyzed using the regression technique with the Macro Process from Hayes. The regression results show that fathers’ and mothers’ authoritative parenting directly affect career decision self-efficacy; fathers’ and mothers’ authoritarian parenting, as well as mother's permissive parenting, affect the career decision self-efficacy only through the mediation of proactive personality. Also, fathers’ permissive parenting did not have a significant effect on career decisions self-efficacy either directly or indirectly through a proactive personality. Therefore parents – both father and mother – need to involve in developing career decision self-efficacy of their children through parenting process, especially authoritative parenting. (shrink)

I find much to like in Craig Callender's [2022] arguments for the rational permissibility of non-exponential time discounting when these arguments are viewed in a conditional form: viz., if one thinks that time discounting is rationally permissible, as the social scientist does, then one should think that non-exponential time discounting is too. However, time neutralists believe that time discounting is rationally impermissible, and thus they take zero time discounting to be the normative standard. The time neutralist rejects time discounting because (...) they think it is rationally impermissible to prefer to live a worse life in expectation because of arbitrariness. Callender’s attack on the time-neutralist position is the following: the time-neutralist’s non-arbitrariness intuition assumes the existence of nonexistent ‘pure’ time preferences. In response, I aim to clarify the time-neutralist position and show that the non-arbitrariness argument does not rely on the existence of pure time preferences. Instead, the debate between time neutralism and permissivism about time discounting boils down to a methodological question: can we ever criticize the content of preferences? If so, we should embrace time neutralism. (shrink)

Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an answer to this question by assessing the relationship between the metaphysical structure of different normative properties and a plausible constraint on which properties are eligible for perceptual awareness which I call (...) the Counterfactual Strengthening Test. Along the way I consider and reject a few other possible constraints on perceptual awareness. I defend the view that moral perception is restricted to the perception of evaluative and pro tanto deontic properties. I conclude with a few gestures toward what this limitation on moral perception may mean for broader moral epistemology. (shrink)