Decisions are typically about outcomes that happen later in time. As such they demand comparisons of the value of outcomes now versus outcomes later. Should I buy a new car or save for retirement? Have the last piece of cake tonight or tomorrow? Lower carbon emissions now or suffer greater loss later? Intertemporal decisions have triggered hundreds of studies across many fields. Popular subjects include personal finances, addiction, nutrition, health, marketing, and environmental conservation. In many of these decisions we tend to exhibit what is called a positive time preference; that is, all else being equal, we prefer positive goods, experiences, and states of affairs to be delivered sooner rather than later. Sweets delivered to me tomorrow aren’t as valuable to me as sweets I can eat today. Descriptive and normative inquiries tackle how we make intertemporal comparisons of utility in such cases and how we should. The present paper is about the second issue, the normative question that asks how we ought to translate future utility into present utility. My focus is restricted to individuals and not societies. I want to challenge the conventional wisdom dominating the social sciences and philosophy regarding temporal discounting, the practice of discounting the value of future utility.

Wrongdoing is an inescapable fact of life. We all do wrong and are wronged from time to time and in response we often blame one another. In the broadest sense, moral blame is a personal response to wrongdoing or wrongbeing, which can manifest in a variety of mental states— e.g., judgments, desires, dispositions, and emotions—as well as in behavior. We blame for a variety of wrongs, in a variety of ways, and with a variety of consequences: one expresses disappointment with an unfaithful partner who then apologizes, another rants about injustice thereby alienating part of her Facebook community, a third turns inward in frustration with a neglectful parent who in turn mistakes her withdrawal for indifference. Such conflicts are not the whole or even the greater part of our shared social existence, but they are a defining feature of it.

Ascriptions of irrationality typically constitute a form of criticism, while ascriptions of rationality are a form of praise.1 More specifically, charges of irrationality involve personal criticism, in which the agent is negatively evaluated for having responded in certain ways.2 It is often thought that being criticizable is evidence that one has done something one ought not to do— something one had decisive normative reasons not to do.3 Assuming that this is so, the fact that charges of irrationality constitute a form of criticism suggests that there is a close connection between rationality and what we have reasons to do. This provides motivation for a normative, reasons-based account of rationality.4

The burgeoning debate about the metaethical implications of the Darwinist view of morality focuses on which epistemic principle(s) allegedly support debunking arguments against moral objectivism.1 Moral objectivism is the view that (at least some) moral truths are metaphysically necessary as well as constitutively and causally independent of human attitudes or beliefs.2 Though objectivists must, of course, explain how objectivist moral beliefs can be justified in the first place, a central question is whether objectivist moral beliefs can be undercut, assuming that they are at least prima facie justified.3 So, what is that “something” in virtue of which a Darwinist view of morality creates a problem for objectivist moral beliefs? It has been claimed that evolutionary explanations of morality might show that moral beliefs are prone to error or fail to be modally secure, or that the best explanation of moral beliefs does not entail that they are (mostly) true.4 None of these theses has found widespread support.

Latin American feminism, which in this entry includes Caribbean feminism, is rooted in the social and political context defined by colonialism, the enslavement of African peoples, and the marginalization of Native peoples. Latin American feminism focuses on the critical work that women have undertaken in reaction to the forces that created this context. At present, the context is dominated by neoliberal economic policies that, in the environment of globalization, have disproportionally impacted the most vulnerable segments of society. Against this political backdrop, Latin American feminism is grounded in the material lives of people, often women, as it explores the tensions engendered by the confluence of histories that generate relationships among gender, citizenship, race/ethnicity, sexuality, class, community, and religion.

Moral, legal, and political philosophers have spent a great deal of time thinking about what consent is, and how consent can play the apparently transformative role that it appears to with respect to making some otherwise impermissible and objectionable conduct permissible and unobjectionable. These are hard and important metaphysical and moral questions.

Although a prominent question in ancient Greek political philosophy, the question of political expertise or political skill is one that has received little recent philosophical discussion—particularly outside of debates about exactly how to read and interpret Plato. This is unfortunate, as the idea of political expertise or skill relevant to politics continues to be prominent in popular discussions of political candidates, in empirical research relating to voter and political official competence, and, implicitly, in discussions of what have come to be called technocratic or epistocratic political systems.

Plato’s shorter ethical works show Socrates at work on topics related to virtue, which he believes we should seek for the sake of the soul as we should seek health for the body. Works in this group shows stylistic as well as philosophic affinities and are generally considered to have been written early in Plato’s career. The dialogues in this group are our main source for the philosophical style and teaching of the Platonic Socrates, who is thought by some scholars to be to a reasonable approximation of the historical figure. In this article, “Socrates” always refers to the Platonic figure in the works under discussion here.

At the second United States Presidential Debate in 2004, President Bush was asked whom he would choose to fill a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. He replied: 1 would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. ... 1 would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We’ve got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.1

pectedly at the age of 55. In light of her death, I immediately experienced intense grief. And this seems as it should be: my reason for grief was that my mother had died, not exactly young, but too young. Indeed, if I had not experienced such grief, something would have been wrong with me. Contrast me with Camus’s character Meursault in The Stranger who, a day after his mother’s funeral, goes to the movies with a new love interest (1942/1988).

I have proposed elsewhere that questions of justice are distinctive in being allocative questions. Questions of justice are particularly prominent in the law because there is no law without adjudicative institutions – courts of law – and such institutions face unavoidably allocative tasks. They decide matters in which there must be losers as well as winners, and they are charged with deciding who will fall into which category. Often there are losses that have to be borne by somebody, and a court has to decide who will bear how much of which loss. Often a court has to decide how much to punish whom for what. Often, to do these things and others, a court has to decide how much weight to attach to whose testimony in respect of which disputes about the facts, as well as how to assign which levers of procedural control, which argumentative privileges, and which evidential or probative burdens, to which of the parties to the proceedings.

Those who endorse the harm-based account of the wrongness of discrimination hold that ‘an instance of discrimination is wrong, when it is, because it makes people worse off’. In a co-authored piece with Adam Slavny, I pressed two objections against this view. First, the harm-based account implausibly fails to recognize that harmless discrimination can be wrong. Second, the harm-based account fails to identify all of the wrong-making properties of discriminatory acts. In the light of these failings, we concluded that a more promising account of the wrongness of discrimination must ‘focus not only on the harmful outcomes of discriminatory acts but also on the deliberation of the discriminator and in particular on the reasons that motivate or fail to motivate her action’. In this brief paper, I defend these conclusions against an objection that has recently been pressed against our view by Richard Arneson. This task is important not only because Arneson’s objection is an intriguing one, but also -- and more importantly -- because my response sheds further light on the content and structure of an attractive theory of wrongful discrimination, as well as on more fundamental ideas in moral philosophy.

At the heart of meta-ethics is a debate about whether people’s moral claims (e.g., statements such as “Abortion is wrong!”) assert moral facts— and if they do, whether it is assumed that those moral facts are non-relative or mind-dependent. This debate not only involves the question about what is in fact the case about moral claims, but also the question of what ordinary, competent language users (the “folk”) take to be the case when they utter moral statements. That is, when people say things like “Abortion is wrong!”, do they take themselves to be merely expressing their positive/ negative feelings toward abortion, or other “pro/con” attitudes or affective affiliations with community norms? Or, do they take themselves to be conveying beliefs about matters of fact? And, if the latter, do they consider those facts to be objective or non-objective in nature? Philosophers have long been divided on this issue. Cognitivists maintain that people take themselves to be stating moral facts, though they disagree about whether people take those facts to be objective or mind-dependent/relative (Mackie 1977; Brink 1989; Smith 1994; Harman 1996; Darwall 1998; Shafer-Landau 2003). Non-cognitivists maintain that people take themselves to be expressing attitudes when they engage in the best analysis of our ordinary moral discourse.

Eye-tracking technology allows researchers to record and analyse a range of information about what people visually attend to and how they process visual information. For example, eye-tracking technology can be used to document the order in which people attend to different features of a visual image, whether they gaze at (i.e. fixate on) particular elements of an image (or completely avoid them), and, if so, the frequency and duration of these gazes. It can also be used to track more basic processing information, such as pupil dilation (see Chapter 2 in this volume) and gaze ‘directionality’ (i.e. whether people’s eyes tend to gaze in particular directions first or most dominantly). There are a variety of ways that researchers can track people’s eye movements and gaze direction. For example, there are free-standing systems that are typically placed in front of the person – and, thus, require that the person remain still in one location, typically while viewing visual stimuli on a screen – as well as systems that can be secured to a person’s head, and are thus more mobile, able to move with the person and track eye movement and gaze more organically, during motion (see suggested readings for reviews).

We want to know what gender is. But metaphysical approaches to this question solely have focused on the binary gender kinds men and women. By overlooking those who identify outside of the binary–the group I call ‘genderqueer’–we are left without tools for understanding these new and quickly growing gender identifications. This metaphysical gap in turn creates a conceptual lacuna that contributes to systematic misunderstanding of genderqueer persons. In this paper, I argue that to better understand genderqueer identities, we must recognize a new type of gender kind: critical gender kinds, or kinds whose members resist dominant gender ideology. After developing a model of critical gender kinds, I suggest that genderqueer is best modeled as one such kind. In particular, I propose that its members are united by resisting ‘the binary assumption’, or the prevalent assumption that they must comply with binary gender classification.

This paper attempts to develop an ethico-aesthetic framework for enriching one’s life and ethical outlook. Drawing primarily from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger, an argument is made that Heidegger’s understanding of this issue was mistaken. The ontological crisis of modernity is not the overt influence of mathematics as a worldview over poetics and more traditionally aesthetic approaches. It is the rampant mis- and over-application of abstraction within one's view of the world while denying the material realities of life as we live it. This runaway abstractive worldview leads to the misapplication of mathematics and other sciences which in turn facilitate the dehumanization of life and those within it. When we try to solve the real problems of our material human lives through overly abstractive means, then we arrive at inauthentic arguments that fuel popular disdain for philosophy as irrelevant and nothing more than the purview of the elite. The goal is a recalibration of the argument toward addressing the denial of materiality within Modernism.

Aurelius Augustinus [more commonly “St. Augustine of Hippo,” often simply “Augustine”] (354–430 C.E. ): rhetor, Christian Neoplatonist, North African Bishop, Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. One of the decisive developments in the western philosophical tradition was the eventually widespread merging of the Greek philosophical tradition and the Judeo-Christian religious and scriptural traditions. Augustine is one of the main figures through and by whom this merging was accomplished. He is, as well, one of the towering figures of medieval philosophy whose authority and thought came to exert a pervasive and enduring influence well into the modern period (e.g.

Ancient political philosophy is understood here to mean ancient Greek and Roman thought from the classical period of Greek thought in the fifth century BCE to the end of the Roman empire in the West in the fifth century CE, excluding the development of Jewish and Christian ideas about politics during that period. Political philosophy as a genre was invented in this period by Plato and, in effect, reinvented by Aristotle: it encompasses reflections on the origin of political institutions, the concepts used to interpret and organize political life such as justice and equality, the relation between the aims of ethics and the nature of politics, and the relative merits of different constitutional arrangements or regimes.

May argues successfully that many claims about the causal influence of affect on moral judgment are overblown. But the findings he cites are compatible with many of the key arguments of philosophical sentimentalists. His account of rationalism, in turn, relies on an overly broad notion of inference, and leaves open crucial questions about how we reason to moral conclusions.

This essay covers two criticisms of Brennan’s Against Democracy. The first charges that the public political ignorance findings upon which Brennan relies are not epistemically nuanced to the degree required by his argument. The second covers an internal difficulty with his trio of political personae, hobbits, Vulcans, and hooligans. As it is part of the nature of hooligans to take themselves to be Vulcans, any epistocratic arrangement that does not favor the hooligans’ perspectives will be met by them with hostility. Thus, it is not clear whether any epistocratic order could be stable if Brennan’s tripartite scheme of political personalities is correct. Finally, the paper raises the possibility that Brennan’s favored forms of epistocracy are ultimately not truly anti-democratic at all, but rather forms of democracy epistemic enhancement.

This entry carves out two central segments of the meaning of “political affect” without aspiring to an exhaustive analysis. In the first half of the text, we will explore the ontological proximity between “affect and the political” in a philosophical key, drawing on Spinoza’s considerations on the affect-politics nexus. Spinoza sketches a vision of a radically democratic polity in which individuals realize their potential by forming affective alliances that jointly strive for insights into what enables or hinders their thriving. However, such active affects of allegiance present only one possible way to flesh out the philosophical meaning of “political affect” – other options will be discussed as well. In the second half of the entry, we draw on Foucault, Ann Stoler and others to explore ways in which affective phenomena get mobilized and regimented in order to support and sustain political rule. This rubric – “affects in politics” – includes a broad range of official and unofficial techniques of governance that target or involve affect, as well the affective modes of resistance that these efforts often evoke.

I have elsewhere given three arguments for the claim that there can be a reason for a person to perform an action only if this person can perform this action. Henne, Semler, Chituc, De Brigard, and Sinnott-Armstrong make several objections to my arguments. I here respond to their objections.

It is a great privilege to have an opportunity to engage the wonderful papers by Esa Díaz León, Jennifer Saul, and Rachel Sterken. All of them have raised important challenges to my work and this has helped me think through the issues more deeply. There are many points and arguments that deserve more attention than I can give them here. However, in an effort to provide some unity to my response, I’m going to focus on issues of explanation, since they are raised, in some way or other, by all of them.

Building, restoring and maintaining well-placed trust between scientists and the public is a difficult yet crucial social task requiring the successful cooperation of various social actors and institutions. Philip Kitcher’s (2011) takes up this challenge in the context of liberal democratic societies by extending his ideal model of “well-ordered science” that he had originally formulated in his (2001). However, Kitcher nowhere offers an explicit account of what it means for the public to invest epistemic trust in science. Yet in order to understand how his extended model and its implementation in the actual world address the problem of trust as well as to evaluate it critically, an explicit account of epistemic public trust in science needs to be given first. In this article we first present such an account and then scrutinize his project of building public trust in science in light of it. We argue that even though Kitcher’s ideal model and his proposals for its implementation in the real world face a number of problems, they can be addressed with the resources of our account.

When we say something is legitimate, what do we mean? Although the idea of legitimacy is commonplace and political philosophy takes state legitimacy in particular as one of its central concerns, the concept of legitimacy has received little attention. In this paper I propose a new understanding of the concept of legitimacy.

The focus of this chapter will be on the epistemic and normative questions at issue in debates about cancer screening, with a special focus on mammography as a case study. Such questions include: How do we know who needs to be screened? What are the benefits and harms of cancer screening, and what is the quality of evidence for each? How ought we to measure and compare these benefits and harms? What are the sources of uncertainty about our estimates of benefit and harm? Why are such issues so contested? What are the major drivers of dissent and consensus on the data and their interpretation? How, if at all, do values play a role in debates surrounding mammography screening? In sum: In what ways do inductive risk, broadly conceived, come into play in the science behind cancer screening, and mammography screening in particular?

Legalism is a popular—albeit quite inaccurate—designation of an intellectual current that gained considerable popularity in the latter half of the Warring States period (Zhanguo, 453–221 BCE). Legalists were political realists who sought to attain a “rich state and a powerful army” and to ensure domestic stability in an age marked by intense inter- and intra-state competition. They believed that human beings—commoners and elites alike—will forever remain selfish and covetous of riches and fame, and one should not expect them to behave morally. Rather, a viable sociopolitical system should allow individuals to pursue their selfish interests exclusively in ways that benefit the state, viz.