Abstract Despite the prevalence of the virtue of considerateness in everyday moral discourse and the proliferation of philosophical studies of virtue language, considerateness hardly ever appears on philosophical agendas. When discussed in academia, its meaning seems fuzzy and unclear. This article makes amends for this gap by subjecting considerateness to conceptual scrutiny. The author argues that considerateness designates a cluster concept, encompassing three types of virtuousness that share a family resemblance only. One is a hybrid civic-moral social-glue virtue, extensionally equivalent to Aristotle's virtue of agreeableness. The second is an intellectual virtue of phronetic consideration (moral sensitivity and integration). The third is a full-fledged discrete moral virtue with standard Aristotelian features of a golden-mean structure and an emotional component as a motivator. The advantages of identifying these three types of virtuousness are elicited, as are some of the educational ramifications of analyzing the differentia of considerateness in this way.
{"title":"Considerateness Differentiated: Three Types of Virtuousness","authors":"KRISTJÁN KRISTJÁNSSON","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.22","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Despite the prevalence of the virtue of considerateness in everyday moral discourse and the proliferation of philosophical studies of virtue language, considerateness hardly ever appears on philosophical agendas. When discussed in academia, its meaning seems fuzzy and unclear. This article makes amends for this gap by subjecting considerateness to conceptual scrutiny. The author argues that considerateness designates a cluster concept, encompassing three types of virtuousness that share a family resemblance only. One is a hybrid civic-moral social-glue virtue, extensionally equivalent to Aristotle's virtue of agreeableness. The second is an intellectual virtue of phronetic consideration (moral sensitivity and integration). The third is a full-fledged discrete moral virtue with standard Aristotelian features of a golden-mean structure and an emotional component as a motivator. The advantages of identifying these three types of virtuousness are elicited, as are some of the educational ramifications of analyzing the differentia of considerateness in this way.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135815609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B.
{"title":"A Functional Analysis of Human Deception","authors":"VLADIMIR KRSTIĆ","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.19","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, certain human behavior is deceptive if and only if its function is to mislead. This solves our problem because if the function of A's behavior was to mislead, B's ending up misled was not an accident or a mere mistake even if A did not intend to deceive B.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136155235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, we present the results of an original study identifying the perceptions of beginning philosophy students at the start of their first introductory course. We surveyed over 1,100 students representing over 40 universities and colleges in the United States regarding their initial perceptions of gender bias, inclusivity, value, understanding, similarities, and enjoyment of philosophy. We analyzed the results based on gender, first-generation status, and student of color status. This work represents the perspectives of a more diverse range of students, reflecting far more first-generation college students (40 percent) and students who identify as people of color (43 percent) than in previous work. Additionally, this study provides novel data as we were able to collect data on the first day of classes, in most cases before students were exposed to syllabi or content that could inform their views about philosophy. Understanding what beginning students think about philosophy before formal exposure to the field might help us to identify concerns, misconceptions, and areas for improvement. Many results are striking, and our project offers insight into the initial perspectives of philosophy students.
{"title":"What Do Beginning Students Think about Philosophy before Their First College Course?","authors":"Bailie Peterson, David Agboola, Kelly Lundberg","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.12","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article, we present the results of an original study identifying the perceptions of beginning philosophy students at the start of their first introductory course. We surveyed over 1,100 students representing over 40 universities and colleges in the United States regarding their initial perceptions of gender bias, inclusivity, value, understanding, similarities, and enjoyment of philosophy. We analyzed the results based on gender, first-generation status, and student of color status. This work represents the perspectives of a more diverse range of students, reflecting far more first-generation college students (40 percent) and students who identify as people of color (43 percent) than in previous work. Additionally, this study provides novel data as we were able to collect data on the first day of classes, in most cases before students were exposed to syllabi or content that could inform their views about philosophy. Understanding what beginning students think about philosophy before formal exposure to the field might help us to identify concerns, misconceptions, and areas for improvement. Many results are striking, and our project offers insight into the initial perspectives of philosophy students.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49243785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Standpoint epistemology is committed to the view that some epistemic advantage can be drawn from the position of powerlessness. Call this the epistemic privilege thesis. This thesis stands in need of explication and support. In providing that explication and support, I first distinguish between two readings of the thesis: the thesis that marginalized social locations confer some epistemic advantages (the epistemic advantage thesis) and the thesis that marginalized standpoints generate better, more accurate knowledge (the standpoint thesis). I then develop the former by appealing to the notion of epistemic peers available in the disagreement literature. I next turn to the latter thesis, arguing that consciousness-raising plays an analogous role in the achievement of a standpoint as training does in the achievement of expertise. The upshot of this analysis is that it clarifies that while marginalization is necessary (though not sufficient) for epistemic advantage, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for epistemic privilege.
{"title":"Standpoint Epistemology and Epistemic Peerhood: A Defense of Epistemic Privilege","authors":"Briana Toole","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Standpoint epistemology is committed to the view that some epistemic advantage can be drawn from the position of powerlessness. Call this the epistemic privilege thesis. This thesis stands in need of explication and support. In providing that explication and support, I first distinguish between two readings of the thesis: the thesis that marginalized social locations confer some epistemic advantages (the epistemic advantage thesis) and the thesis that marginalized standpoints generate better, more accurate knowledge (the standpoint thesis). I then develop the former by appealing to the notion of epistemic peers available in the disagreement literature. I next turn to the latter thesis, arguing that consciousness-raising plays an analogous role in the achievement of a standpoint as training does in the achievement of expertise. The upshot of this analysis is that it clarifies that while marginalization is necessary (though not sufficient) for epistemic advantage, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for epistemic privilege.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44657382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay challenges widespread talk about morality's ‘normativity’. My principal target is not any specific claim or thesis in the burgeoning literature on ‘normativity’, however. Rather, I aim to discourage the use of the word among moral philosophers altogether and to reject a claim to intradisciplinary authority that is both reflected in and reinforced by the role the word has come to play in the discipline. My hope is to persuade other philosophers who, like me, persist in being interested in long-standing questions about our morals to be considerably more suspicious about the word's actual value for us and to see those studying ‘normativity’ itself as having little to offer us when it comes to posing our questions about morals and debating the answers to them.
{"title":"Doing Moral Philosophy Without ‘Normativity’","authors":"Jorah Dannenberg","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.16","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay challenges widespread talk about morality's ‘normativity’. My principal target is not any specific claim or thesis in the burgeoning literature on ‘normativity’, however. Rather, I aim to discourage the use of the word among moral philosophers altogether and to reject a claim to intradisciplinary authority that is both reflected in and reinforced by the role the word has come to play in the discipline. My hope is to persuade other philosophers who, like me, persist in being interested in long-standing questions about our morals to be considerably more suspicious about the word's actual value for us and to see those studying ‘normativity’ itself as having little to offer us when it comes to posing our questions about morals and debating the answers to them.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46281142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In response to widespread use of automated decision-making technology, some have considered a right to explanation. In this article, I draw on insights from philosophical work on explanation to present a series of challenges to this idea, showing that the normative motivations for access to such explanations ask for something difficult, if not impossible, to extract from automated systems. I consider an alternative, outcomes-focused approach to the normative evaluation of automated decision making and recommend it as a way to pursue the goods originally associated with explainability.
{"title":"Explanation and the Right to Explanation","authors":"Elanor Taylor","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In response to widespread use of automated decision-making technology, some have considered a right to explanation. In this article, I draw on insights from philosophical work on explanation to present a series of challenges to this idea, showing that the normative motivations for access to such explanations ask for something difficult, if not impossible, to extract from automated systems. I consider an alternative, outcomes-focused approach to the normative evaluation of automated decision making and recommend it as a way to pursue the goods originally associated with explainability.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46835772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social scripts, like A gives a compliment, B says ‘thank you’, pervade and shape natural language discourse and social interactions. Scripts usually promote cooperation between conversational participants, but not always. For example, if A pays B a ‘compliment’ like ‘nice legs’, A puts B in a double bind of either abiding by the compliment script by saying ‘thank you’ and being humiliated, or breaking the script and risking escalation. In this paper, I take a philosophical lens to the notion of a social script. I give a theoretical overview of what it would mean to disrupt a social script and explain why and when it is prudential to do so. Then I give several examples of disruptions of social scripts. This essay makes four key contributions to the philosophical literature on social scripts: (1) it introduces a new distinction between interpersonal and structural scripts; (2) it illuminates how interpersonal social scripts can be pernicious by creating a double bind; (3) it analyzes what it is to disrupt a social script; and (4) in doing so, it challenges the orthodoxy about the relationship between cooperation and disruption in political action.
{"title":"How to Disrupt a Social Script","authors":"Samia Hesni","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.10","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Social scripts, like A gives a compliment, B says ‘thank you’, pervade and shape natural language discourse and social interactions. Scripts usually promote cooperation between conversational participants, but not always. For example, if A pays B a ‘compliment’ like ‘nice legs’, A puts B in a double bind of either abiding by the compliment script by saying ‘thank you’ and being humiliated, or breaking the script and risking escalation. In this paper, I take a philosophical lens to the notion of a social script. I give a theoretical overview of what it would mean to disrupt a social script and explain why and when it is prudential to do so. Then I give several examples of disruptions of social scripts. This essay makes four key contributions to the philosophical literature on social scripts: (1) it introduces a new distinction between interpersonal and structural scripts; (2) it illuminates how interpersonal social scripts can be pernicious by creating a double bind; (3) it analyzes what it is to disrupt a social script; and (4) in doing so, it challenges the orthodoxy about the relationship between cooperation and disruption in political action.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48952073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
According to the action analogy, emotions and actions have certain structural and normative similarities that no theory of emotions should ignore. The action analogy has recently been used in an objection against the so-called perceptual theory of emotions, often defended by means of an analogy between emotion and perception. Beyond the dialectical significance of the action analogy, one might wonder whether it can support a picture of emotions as fundamentally action-like—what I call an agential theory. This article is a first step in answering this question. After discussing various ways to formulate the agential theory, I sketch a version of it.
{"title":"Emotions and the Action Analogy: Prospects for an Agential Theory of Emotions","authors":"H. Naar","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 According to the action analogy, emotions and actions have certain structural and normative similarities that no theory of emotions should ignore. The action analogy has recently been used in an objection against the so-called perceptual theory of emotions, often defended by means of an analogy between emotion and perception. Beyond the dialectical significance of the action analogy, one might wonder whether it can support a picture of emotions as fundamentally action-like—what I call an agential theory. This article is a first step in answering this question. After discussing various ways to formulate the agential theory, I sketch a version of it.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46217780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Implicit in C. I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is an account of how our ideas undergo a process of social development. Lewis's account of that process resolves a problem with Josiah Royce's theory of ideas. Royce holds that there are both sensuous and symbolic ideas. It is, however, possible for someone to have only a sensuous idea of how middle C sounds and for another person to have only the symbolic idea that middle C is 261.63 Hz. In what sense, if at all, can these two persons have the same idea, namely, the idea of middle C? On Lewis's account, while ideas in individual minds are typically constituted of both sensory correlates and pure concepts, ideas are also social products that individuals inherit through education and language acquisition. For two people to have the same idea is for them both to be heirs to the social development of the idea.
{"title":"C. I. Lewis's Theory of Ideas: Royce's Problem and Lewis's Solution","authors":"R. Atkins","doi":"10.1017/apa.2023.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.15","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Implicit in C. I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is an account of how our ideas undergo a process of social development. Lewis's account of that process resolves a problem with Josiah Royce's theory of ideas. Royce holds that there are both sensuous and symbolic ideas. It is, however, possible for someone to have only a sensuous idea of how middle C sounds and for another person to have only the symbolic idea that middle C is 261.63 Hz. In what sense, if at all, can these two persons have the same idea, namely, the idea of middle C? On Lewis's account, while ideas in individual minds are typically constituted of both sensory correlates and pure concepts, ideas are also social products that individuals inherit through education and language acquisition. For two people to have the same idea is for them both to be heirs to the social development of the idea.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45733939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article I argue that we should be prudentially and morally biased toward earlier events: other things equal, we should prefer for good events to occur earlier and disprefer for bad events to occur earlier. The argument contends that we should accord at least some credence—if only a small one—to a theoretical package featuring the growing block theory of time and that this package generates a presumptive bias toward earlier events. Rival theoretical packages are considered. Under reasonable allocations of credence to them, the presumptive bias escapes defeat. The argument has several corollaries: other things equal, we should be biased toward the past over the future, the further past over the nearer past, and the nearer future over the further future.
{"title":"The Sooner the Better: An Argument for Bias Toward the Earlier","authors":"Bradford Saad","doi":"10.1017/apa.2022.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2022.51","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this article I argue that we should be prudentially and morally biased toward earlier events: other things equal, we should prefer for good events to occur earlier and disprefer for bad events to occur earlier. The argument contends that we should accord at least some credence—if only a small one—to a theoretical package featuring the growing block theory of time and that this package generates a presumptive bias toward earlier events. Rival theoretical packages are considered. Under reasonable allocations of credence to them, the presumptive bias escapes defeat. The argument has several corollaries: other things equal, we should be biased toward the past over the future, the further past over the nearer past, and the nearer future over the further future.","PeriodicalId":44879,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the American Philosophical Association","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41450090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}