Philosophers' Imprint

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An open access philosophy journal published out of the University of Michigan.

Victims of discrimination are often disadvantaged. Are they necessarily disadvantaged? Many say so: “in discriminating against someone, one is necessarily acting to the disadvantage of that someone” (Gardner 2018: 67); “discrimination against someone simply is disadvantageous differential treatment” (Lippert-Rasmussen 2013: 15). The connection between discrimination and disadvantage is also supposed to play two significant explanatory roles. That you are disadvantaged by the differential treatment of you and me is meant to explain why it was discrimination against you rather than me; and that discrimination necessarily involves disadvantage is meant to unify direct and indirect discrimination. Drawing on cases from the opioid epidemic, I aim to challenge this received view about the connection between discrimination and disadvantage.
What is wrong with violence? This paper explores an under-recognized aspect of violence: its moral significance for parents. For many parents, raising children is part of what gives meaning, structure, and shape to their lives and senses of self—it is a reproductive project. I offer a substantive account of projects which explains their role in our moral lives; and I argue that we have an obligation not to undermine the permissible projects of others without good reasons. Violence harms children and thereby undermines the reproductive projects which they are central to. Thus, violence fails our obligation and is a pro tanto wrong in part for this reason. This is particularly salient to mothers who, taking a global and historical perspective, perform the vast majority of reproductive work. This account has revisionary implications for the autonomy of adult children, self-defense, criminal sanction, and the waging of war.
It is common to see fictional depictions in which one character rejects another's sexual advances but, when their refusal is ignored or overpowered, they seemingly surrender to passion. I term these depictions, which frame this overcoming of refusal as a seduction, eroticised refusal narratives. This paper concerns how these narratives may be harmful: I develop a novel analysis of how these depictions may obstruct recognition of sexual violence. Feminist theorists have long argued that such depictions may promote rape myths and legitimise sexual violence. However, this work has largely neglected scholarship in aesthetics on the persuasive power of narrative. This paper remedies this oversight, analysing how these narratives frame sexual refusal, and connecting research on narrative in aesthetics to social research on 'rape myths'. I draw on the idea that narrative fiction may equip us with new 'perspectives', an open-ended suite of interpretive dispositions, and argue that eroticised refusal narratives prescribe a perspective on which overcoming sexual refusal is erotic and excusable. I then suggest that these narratives may operate as a kind of illustrative example which 'exemplifies' this perspective, enabling viewers to export it. On this proposal, these narratives are exemplars of a standard 'script' for seduction. This perspective obstructs recognition of sexual violence, by disposing one to notice and produce excuses for ignoring sexual refusal: it thereby operates as an implicit, perspectival rape myth.
I propose a novel metaphysical explanation of identity and distinctness facts called the Modal Proposal. According to the Modal Proposal, for each identity fact – that is, each fact of the form a=b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is necessary that the entities involved are indiscernible, and for each distinctness fact –that is, each fact of the form a≠b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is possible for the entities involved to be discernible. I argue that the Modal Proposal has greater payoffs at less cost than any of its competitors. It gives simple, uniform, and intuitive explanations of identity and distinctness that conserve longstanding philosophical insights about identity that go back to Leibniz. It does this while making our fundamental base more parsimonious, determining whether controversial cases of identity or distinctness are possible, and expanding our understanding of these central philosophical relations. It does all this while avoiding controversial ontological commitments.
The concept of the interdependence of all things appears across Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. Jizang (549−623 CE), a prominent Chinese Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, contends that all objects are established by virtue of their mutual dependence. He endorses what can be termed “the interdependence thesis”—the view that the referents of complementary concepts or words are interdependent. In this paper, I clarify this thesis and characterize Jizang’s ontology as a form of metaphysical nonrealism. Drawing on this ontology, I construct an argument for the plausibility of the interdependence thesis. I also respond to several objections to the argument.
Sentences like ⌜δ is indescribable⌝ appear to state that the speaker is unable to do what the speaker just did. This is known as the paradox of ineffability. An explanation for how such sentences can be true is widely thought to be a pre-requisite for showing the coherence of ineffability. This paper offers a dissolution of the paradox. I argue that the relevant sentences are always false. However, I show that the falsity of such sentences does not entail that ineffability is incoherent. That ⌜δ is indescribable⌝ can never be truthfully said does not entail that ineffability cannot be coherently explicated.
On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities ("aliens") would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have consciousness, while similarly behaviorally sophisticated entities elsewhere would be mere shells, devoid of consciousness. However, this Copernican default assumption is canceled in the case of behaviorally sophisticated entities designed to mimic superficial features associated with consciousness ("consciousness mimics"), and in particular a broad class of current, near-future, and hypothetical robots. These considerations, which we formulate, respectively, as the Copernican and Mimicry Arguments, jointly defeat an otherwise potentially attractive parity principle, according to which we should apply the same types of behavioral or cognitive tests to aliens and robots, attributing or denying consciousness similarly to the extent they perform similarly. Instead of grounding speculations about alien and robot consciousness in metaphysical or scientific theories about the physical or functional bases of consciousness, our approach appeals directly to the epistemic principles of Copernican mediocrity and inference to the best explanation. This permits us to justify default assumptions about consciousness while remaining to a substantial extent neutral about specific metaphysical and scientific theories.
Kant argues that states should tax the rich to provide for the poor. Commentators have long struggled to reconcile this claim with Kant's staunch freedom-based defense of property rights. Poverty obviously hinders the poor's welfare, but why does Kant think it violates their freedom? This paper presents a new answer to this question and shows the relevance of that answer to contemporary debates about economic inequality. Against the widely-held view that, for Kant, poverty violates freedom because it allows rich people to dominate poor people, I argue that Kant understands poverty as a structural injustice which arises when the poor cannot participate in the institutions of ownership necessary for free interaction. A Kantian account of structural injustice, I maintain, can speak across the contemporary divide between libertarians and egalitarians. Such an account can do so because it is based on the value of freedom, which both sides share.
What explains the necessary wrong of colonialism? I argue that colonial institutions unfairly treat the colonized as if they are moral inferiors, which consequently diminishes colonized peoples' social bases of self-respect. Because colonizers politically subjugate colonized peoples, colonial institutions permeate colonized peoples' basic structures of society. But colonial institutions degradingly treat the colonized as moral inferiors. So, these institutions unjustly diminish colonized individuals' social bases of self-respect. This result shows that, contra some recent philosophical discussion, colonialism is necessarily wrong for substantive—as opposed to merely procedural—reasons. After replying to several objections, I argue that my self-respect approach is superior to Stilz's (2019), Ypi's (2013), and Ferguson and Veneziani's (2021) accounts of colonialism's necessary wrong. Finally, I describe my view's implications for future work on just war theory, self-determination, and social oppression.
Suppose Sally wants to know whether Matt will be in his office tomorrow and proceeds to answer her question by locking Matt in his office. Is this a case of successful inquiry? This paper develops the Right Way Account of inquiry that respects an intuitive “no”. According to the Right Way Account, the constitutive goal of inquiry is to acquire knowledge (or some related epistemic state) in the right way, specifically, the inquiring way. For a question-answering activity to constitute a case of inquiry, the inquirer must attempt to come to know the answer without intentionally causing an answer to be true so as to know. The upshot of my argument is that epistemology of inquiry has erred in assuming that the goal of inquiry is merely coming to be in a particular state. Instead, the goal of inquiry is coming to be in a particular state in a particular way. Accordingly, the inquiring way is indispensable to theorizing the nature of inquiry.
In this paper, I offer a modern adaptation of a theory of imagination that we can find in the writings of Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (1154–1191) and his followers in the Ishrāqī tradition (‘illuminationism’). I turn to this philosophical tradition because it offers a rare historical example of a type of theory that treats imagination as a primary source of knowledge. That is, on the Ishrāqī account, even an ideal human knower must know certain things via imagination. What I offer is a ‘modern adaptation’ of the theory in that I try to extract the theory of imagination from the cosmological and theological framework of the Ishrāqī thought. The resulting theory is still Ishrāqī in that it relies on a unique form of Platonism about knowledge that, I suggest, we can find in Suhrawardī’s writings. Finally, I discuss how the reconstructed Ishrāqī conception of imaginative knowledge is especially appealing as a theory of moral knowledge.
This paper investigates the relationship between the content of one's intrusive thoughts—such as intentionally swerving into oncoming traffic—and one's values. I first consider two approaches that are already on the table within empirical and philosophical literature – either one's intrusive thoughts indicate a moral failure of the person who has them, or they are to be seen as noise and to be disregarded. After pointing out problems with these approaches, I propose another avenue which builds on the finding that intrusive thoughts often occur in situations of increased uncertainty and social isolation when our agency would otherwise be threatened. By employing a social account of agency, I suggest that some instances of intrusive thoughts could play the role of an 'other.' Under this proposal, at least some intrusive thoughts would serve a surprising function of helping us to manifest our values and uphold our agency.
I argue that morally justified harms collaterally inflicted on civilians in war can yield compensatory duties – and that a failure to compensate post bellum renders in bello attacks retroactively unjust. Such attacks are unjust on the grounds that they violate the constraint of necessity, in the following way: the option of attacking-and-compensating is less harmful relative to the option of attacking-and-not-compensating (and typically no less effective at achieving the war’s aims). In making this point, I argue that we should evaluate the candidate courses of actions diachronically – that is, in a way that mereologically conjoins the ex ante attacks with ex post compensation. I then argue that a foreseeable risk of failing to compensate post bellum can affect the evidence-relative moral liability of those engaged in the in bello attacks. The upshot is that the moral significance of compensation for rights-infringements in war is not limited to jus post bellum, but also has profound effects on jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The US and select allies are in a position, even now, to affect the moral status of some of the military operations undertaken in the Middle East over the past two decades, by deciding whether to compensate those civilians whose rights were infringed. Neglecting to do so retroactively transforms tragic but potentially justified rights-infringements into gratuitously unjustified rights-violations. I end the article by addressing several practical quandaries that such a view seems to raise.
Rasa, or aesthetic emotion, is a central concern of South Asian philosophy. Bhoja, writing in the eleventh century, crafted a unique and intriguing theory of rasa as fundamentally the artistic expression of love. Love, for Bhoja, is a capacity for sensitive attention that grounds self-making and self-awareness. The reason we have to engage with works of art is that they equip us to be who we are.
According to a long philosophical tradition and a potent kernel of common sense, loving partnerships are governed by affection and care, and so not properly evaluated by standards of justice or fairness. In this paper I precisify and challenge this idea. I argue that love and fairness are unified in the sense that some partners are only able to perform particular act-types (loving and expressing love) if their actions are sensitive to considerations of fairness. When loving acts are aimed at “sharing a life”, we properly evaluate more-basic acts of sharing–where this concerns their adherence to standards of fairness–as a way of evaluating them as complex acts of loving. Life-sharing offers an attractive feminist ideal of love, immune to concerns about the alleged imposition of fairness-related considerations where they don’t belong.
Humans have a strong tendency to hedonically adapt to their circumstances, so that something that once brought joy eventually brings only indifference. Does this tendency guarantee a kind of failure on our part? Happiness, like other emotions, seems subject to evaluation in terms of its fittingness. But it’s not clear how hedonic adaptation could possibly maintain fittingness: it involves changing one’s level of happiness in a way that doesn’t track the absolute goodness of one’s circumstances. This paper mounts a defence of hedonic adaptation against this concern. It does so by articulating a key difference between the scale of happiness and the scale of goodness, and shows how that difference guarantees an inability to track absolute levels of goodness with our levels of happiness. Given this background constraint, hedonic adaptation may be the most appropriate way for our happiness to change over time.
This essay identifies a normative function of the concept of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that the concept of intentional action functions to focus our evaluative concern on some doings rather than others. It acts as a proxy for evaluative priority. Two arguments are offered for this thesis. First, we need a concept that functions to focus evaluative concern, and the concept of intentional action exhibits features we'd expect from a concept with this prioritizing function. Second, the thesis is explanatorily powerful: it explains in a unified manner a number of puzzling features of intentional action, including the Knobe effect, the threshold of sufficient control governing intentional action, disagreement over whether knowledge is required for intentional action, cultural variation in ascription of intentionality, and the radical pluralism of ways that intentional action manifests. This second argument also shows what can be gained by attending to the functions of our concepts of agency.
Employers exercise directive authority over their employees; they can issue binding orders and enforce those orders by way of various administrative sanctions. It is generally agreed that this authority is legitimate only when the employee has consented to employment but it turns out that vindicating this idea requires a careful analysis both of the kind of authority employers claim over their employees and of the kind of agreement involved in a contract of employment. It also requires getting clear on the distinctive rationale that informs the employer-employee relationship. Once this has all been done, we can explain why some of us decline any employment because we wish to 'remain our own boss' whilst many others are happy to be employed provided this is something to which we have agreed.
When writing about the metaphysics of social institutions, philosophers rightly emphasize that institutions’ existence and nature are “up to us” in a deep and important way. Objects such as insects and stars could exist with the same basic nature in the absence of human activity; governments and religious institutions could not. But my project is to explore what happens if we begin with ways in which institutions are sometimes relatively less “up to us.” This approach points toward a behavioral theory of institutions: institutions are made up of behavior that clusters into copied roles, and the individuals who engage in that behavior, where all of the roles together promote some particular result(s). I develop and apply the theory in detail, and then show how it differs from other views in the literature by eschewing mental states and precluding metaphysical inconsistency.
We argue for two claims in this paper. First, we argue that existing taxonomies of ideal and non-ideal theory must be expanded. While non-ideal theory is often thought to be transitional in nature - that is, theorizing how agents in structurally unjust circumstances should act so as to bring about a more just state of affairs - we show that some non-ideal theory is in fact static. Static non-ideal theory attempts to guide the actions of individuals while taking background structural injustice as a kind of fixed point, or as a "backdrop" against which individuals can try to ethically interact. Second, we argue that notwithstanding the intentions of theorists, static non-ideal theory often serves ideological purposes by functioning to reinforce the (unjust) status quo. Throughout, we use theoretical debates about exploitation as illustrative of the phenomenon under discussion.
What, ontologically speaking, are best system laws? Should the laws of the best system account be identified with sentences, or propositions, or perhaps something else? These questions differ from more familiar questions about which criteria we should use to pick out the best system laws: regardless of whether laws are picked out using simplicity, informativeness, tractability, predictability, perfect naturalness, or whatever, there remains the question of what, ontologically, the best system laws are. But very little has been written on this issue; and what has been written is often ambiguous. So in this paper, we present and evaluate three ontological options for best system laws: taking them to be sentences, unstructured propositions, and structured propositions. Surprisingly, the two most cited options—sentences and unstructured propositions—face significant problems. Defenders of the best system account might want to take seriously the idea that best system laws are structured propositions.
Haecceitism is the thesis that some truths are not necessitated by the qualitative truths. In this paper I explore a general argument that purports to establish that haecceitism leads to objectionably 'cheap' violations of determinism. In response to this argument, I develop a novel position that combines considerations from metaphysics and the philosophy of language to secure the compatibility of haecceitism and determinism. This position has important parallels to the way haecceitism has been developed within counterpart theory, but, crucially, it makes no use of counterpart theory itself.
Seeing-in is the experience of seeing something in a picture. This experience is present to the subject as a single, unified experience. It is not like the disjoint experience of visualizing something into a scene that one perceives. This is so despite the fact that, like the latter experience, seeing-in is twofold: it involves being visually aware of two distinct objects – an array of ink-marks, on the one hand, and the depicted scene, on the other. Plausibly, it also involves being aware of them in two distinct ways: while we see the ink-marks before us, our manner of visual awareness of the depicted object is not perceptual. In the first half of this paper, I offer an account of the subject’s sense of experiential unity in the face of twofoldness. In the paper’s second half, I demonstrate how my account of unity forces a considerable reconfiguration of the space of possible theories of seeing-in.
Some moral philosophers argue that we hold others and ourselves morally responsible for acting on second-personal reasons. This article connects this idea with the emerging literature on the moral responsibility of groups by exploring in which sense, if any, groups can be held accountable for acting on second-personal reasons. On the developed view, groups are second-personally competent if and only if they possess capacities for sympathy, acting on that sympathy, and related self-reactive attitudes. Focusing especially on loosely structured groups without unifying decision-making procedures, the article goes on to argue that the required group-level capacities can be realized through the interdependent exercise of member-level capacities.
Theorists are divided concerning the productivity of angry blame. Some argue that it has tremendous instrumental values or serves crucial social functions. But some argue that it is counterproductive, and we should thereby eliminate, or drastically revise, blame as a kind of moral practice. In this paper, I raise a new counterproductivity critique of angry blame. In contrast to the existing critiques, my critique does not rely on a negative characterization of blame’s content or functionality. I suggest that angry blame serves two positive social functions—a function of issuing a moral protest and a function of initiating and facilitating a moral dialogue. However, for these two functions to work optimally, they require different psychological stances in tension with each other. Angry blame is thus counterproductive, not because it is inherently bad, but because it is designed to do too much.
Attempts to illuminate the nature of “blame” have shaped recent philosophical discussion of free will and moral responsibility. In this paper I show how, in at least one context, this search for a theory of blame has led us astray. Specifically, I focus on the contemporary debate about the “standing” to blame and argue, first, that theorizing about blame-in-general in this context has assumed an impoverished moral psychology that fails to reflect the range of blaming emotions and that conflates these emotions’ distinctive logics; and, second, that such theorizing has encouraged the propagation of misleading theories of blame’s “norms.” Rather than searching for the nature of blame, I employ and defend an alternative methodological approach that focuses on the psychology and ethics of specific reactive emotions. I then show how an agent’s own bad behavior can alter the appropriateness of these various attitudes in distinctive ways. Marking these distinctions leads to some surprising conclusions. For example, it allows us to move beyond the assumption that the wrongness of standingless blame is fundamentally a matter of hypocrisy.
Those who take visual perception to be transparent face a puzzle: How does one know that she sees given that seeing is not itself an object of awareness? Most solutions to this puzzle are inferentialist in that they claim that one comes to believe that she sees on the basis of a belief that she has about the extra-mental environment. In this paper, I argue for a non-inferential alternative. I show that extant inferentialist accounts are committed to the claim that the contents of vision are inexpressible—quite literally, you can never say what you see. In light of this, I develop a non-inferential solution to the above puzzle that avoids the problem of inexpressibility. Rather than an inferential transition, I suggest that one may simply transition from the having of (but not an awareness of!) a particular visual experience to the belief that she sees thus-and-such. Properly understood, this non-inferential transition is perfectly reliable, always issuing in true belief, thereby underwriting one’s knowledge that she sees.
A person's body is extended in space, and parts of their body occupy spatial regions. In that way, the body has a dimension of breadth in space. Yet, there is another, less appreciated dimension of the body: its depth. Roughly speaking, the depth of the body is the level of abstraction of its parts. Characteristically, and in particular for moral purposes, the depth of the body is rather high-level. Low-level objects and properties, such as individual molecules, do not really fall within the purview of the moral body--the body as it figures in various morally significant rights and interests. As I will argue, the depth of the body becomes more salient and relevant when people come to have partly digital embodiments, such as when brain-computer interfaces are integrated into their bodily processes. The dimension of depth, it turns out, is crucial for properly understanding the moral significance of brain-computer interfaces. Here, I develop a theory of depth to complement existing theories of the body and use it to improve our understanding of the purview of bodily rights and interests.
This article argues that the relations of social and political power that obtain between humans and pets are illegitimate. We begin by showing that pets, a largely neglected population in political philosophy, are subject to socially and politically organised power, which stands in need of justification. We then argue that pets have three moral complaints against the relations of power to which they are subject. First, our power over pets disrespects their moral independence: the fact that they are not simply available to be used to serve the interests or projects of others. Second, our power over pets systematically sets back their interests in exercising control over their own body, actions, and environment. Third, in subjecting pets to asymmetric relations of power in which they are heavily dependent on humans for the satisfaction of their interests, we subject them to objectionable risks of harm. Together, these complaints support our thesis that the power relations central to the insitution of pet keeping are illegitimate. The practical upshot is that we have a strong moral reason to abolish this institution.
The beginning of Plato's Philebus contains a puzzling argument: Socrates says that pleasures are different, and that this somehow supports the contention that not all pleasures are good (contrary to what he hedonist interlocutor, Protarchus, maintains). His argument has a bad reputation in the literature, and more to the point it is confusing. This paper sheds light on Socrates' argument by making use of principles from contemporary metaphysics. I argue that Socrates thinks of pleasure as exhibiting the structure that metaphysicians today associate with determinables and determinates. Specifically, he thinks that what makes each pleasure a pleasure is a unique profile, which simultaneously differentiates it from other pleasures. As a result, the kind, 'pleasure', is really a relational principle of coherence between the different kinds of pleasure. I argue that, based on this metaphysical picture, we can see why Socrates thinks that it is possible that some pleasures are bad, contrary to hedonism. Beyond making sense of the dialectic in the Philebus, my paper advances a growing literature on the interesting metaphysical views developed in this section of Plato's dialogue.
In this paper, I argue that widespread expert disagreement about sufficiently many issues central to a democratic decision-making procedure can nullify the duty to vote. I begin by drawing a distinction between different ways that we might conceive of the duty to vote, i.e. whether it is a duty to vote, no matter how one votes, or a duty to vote well. I then review some prominent arguments in favor of the existence of the duty to vote and suggest that they go through only when the potential voter in question would vote well. So the most promising existing arguments for the duty to vote, if successful, really show not merely that citizens have a duty to vote, but more strongly that they have a duty to vote well. I then discuss the epistemology of expert disagreement to show how circumstances of expert disagreement can nullify such a duty by making it impossible to vote well. To my knowledge, no one has yet brought considerations of the epistemology of expert disagreement to bear on this topic. That is my aim in the main argument of this paper. The remainder of the paper addresses alternative characterizations of 'voting well,' and argues that on other plausible characterizations, expert disagreement will still often nullify the duty to vote.
Some philosophers argue that in order to accommodate a range of our practices we must suppose that causation is not an all or nothing matter: it comes in degrees. We argue for two key claims. First, we can accommodate these practices without positing degree theoretic causation, and we can do so by appealing to various things that clearly do admit of degrees. So, positing causation by degree is unnecessary. Second, not only is positing degree theoretic causation unnecessary, but in fact there is no single thing, causation by degree, that could play the role required of it if it is to accommodate these practices. Thus, we conclude, there is no motivation to posit degree theoretic causation that arises from consideration of these practices.
How do conjunctions relate to their conjuncts? How, for example, does <Snow is white and grass is green> relate to the propositions <Snow is white> and <Grass is green>? This paper explores the unorthodox answer that conjunctions are identical to their conjuncts: throwing grammar to the wind, <Snow is white and grass is green> just 'is' the propositions <Snow is white> and <Grass is green>. I suggest two ways of motivating the view (§1), present my preferred formulation of it (§2), discuss some objections (§3), point out some connections to neighboring issues (§4), and finally, consider how it may be extended to a more comprehensive view of logical complexity (§5).
This article examines the meta-stance choice in the scientific realism debate. I propose that the epistemological aspect of this debate be reframed within an epistemological framework that views our cognitive activities as a trade-off between believing truths and minimizing errors. I identify two main alternatives to this meta-epistemological framework: firstly, the view that the realism debate involves a voluntary choice between incommensurable stances, such as an empirical and a metaphysical stance; secondly, the notion that stance selection is a result of negotiating between explanatory power and error avoidance. My proposal and the two alternatives have in common that they imply a form of epistemic voluntarism and explain the recurring stalemate in the debate. However, I argue that the presented proposal outclasses the competing perspectives due to its enhanced generality, impartiality, a more comprehensive explanation of the anti-realist sentiment, and its potential to mitigate the recurring stalemate.
Normative argumentation theory is a field dedicated to the normative study of argumentation in real-life contexts and to the development of norms meant to guide arguers in the attempt of arguing well. Among argumentation theorists, there exist two widespread assumptions. First, the assumption that ideally, arguers ought to explore the reasons relevant to the topic of their interpersonal arguing without constraints. And second, the assumption that the norms of argumentation should be designed to contribute to the realization of this ideal. In this paper, I question those assumptions. I show that argumentative norms meant to realize the ideal of free exploration, freedom-to-explore norms, reliably clash with morally valuable standing norms that protect privacy, autonomy and legitimate authority. When they so clash, they generate epistemic and other morally relevant harms. I argue that normative argumentation theory ought to resolve this problem by acknowledging the potential legitimacy of standing norms even during argumentation. I show how such a change would impact fallacy theory with respect to the ad hominem and poisoning the well fallacies.
This article argues that consent must be revocable. I present two arguments for this conclusion. On the argument from informed consent, irrevocable consent lacks validity because it cannot be sufficiently informed. On the argument from bodily integrity, irrevocable consent lacks validity because we do not have the authority to deny our future selves the ability to protect our bodily integrity. I explain why the argument from bodily integrity captures unique moral problems raised by irrevocable consent and illuminates an important but undertheorized distinction between autonomy and bodily integrity.
In addition to praising and criticizing works of art, we can and do hold artists responsible for their artistic productions. Building on a suggestion from Susan Wolf, this paper develops a Strawsonian approach to aesthetic responsibility and shows both its attractions and limitations. The proper target of aesthetic reactive attitudes in general is an agent’s quality of aesthetic judgment, and the ‘basic demand’ we make of artists as such is for aesthetic value responsiveness: we expect artists to be counterfactually sensitive to the realization of expected aesthetic value in their productions. In contrast with our moral responsibility responses, we do not expect artists to be able to give their reasons for what they have done, and we allow for fewer artistic exemptions from the basic demand. While this Strawsonian approach sheds light on the nature of creative artistic agency, it fails to capture the full range of our artistic responsibility responses, since it excludes credit and criticism for artists’ (lack of) embodied skill.