PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"<i>Depicting Deity: A Metatheological Approach</i>","authors":"Graham Oppy","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10317580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10317580","url":null,"abstract":"Johnathan L. Kvanvig describes this book as an exercise in metatheology: an attempt to provide a framework for evaluating competing views about what is fundamental in theology. At the core of Kvanvig’s framework is the idea that ‘starting points’ for theologies ‘generate’ aspects of theologies, to which more must be added in order to arrive at adequate complete theologies.Kvanvig focuses on three starting points for theology, expressed as claims about divine essence:(CT) Fundamentally, a god is an asymmetric source of all else.(WWT) Fundamentally, a god is a being that is maximally worthy of supreme worship.(PBT) Fundamentally, a god is a supremely perfect being.Kvanvig takes these central claims to be, respectively, descriptive, evaluative, and normative.In order to assess the adequacy of these starting points, Kvanvig proposes two criteria: first, these starting points should ‘generate’ monotheism, personality, and (maybe) lack of embodiment; and, second, these starting points should ‘generate’ their competitors.The bulk of the book is devoted to an argument for the claim that, assessed against just these criteria, (PBT) comes in last, with (CT) either tied with or perhaps narrowly ahead of (WWT).Kvanvig does discuss a fourth option, which he calls ‘metatheological anti-fundamentalism’ (MAF). There are many forms that this option might take: perhaps a ‘combination’ of more than one of (CT), (WWT), and (PBT); perhaps a ‘subset’ containing more than one of (CT), (WWT), and (PBT); or perhaps even the view that no features of God are more basic or more fundamental than others. I think that, ultimately, Kvanvig evinces sympathy for something like the following view: (KV) Fundamentally, a god is an asymmetric source of all else that is maximally worthy of supreme worship.With this brief synopsis in hand, we turn to some of the worries that one might have about the views that Kvanvig develops.First, it is not clear that ‘metatheology’ is a good label for Kvanvig’s project. In particular, it seems odd in light of the analogy that Kvanvig tries to draw with metaethics. If we took that analogy seriously, we might suppose that the key question for metaethics concerns the choice between the following starting points:(C) Fundamentally, we should maximize good.(D) Fundamentally, we should act rightly.(V) Fundamentally, we should act virtuously.But, at least on many accounts, this choice is one of the central concerns of (normative) ethics rather than metaethics. And, at least on this analogy, it seems that what Kvanvig offers is squarely located in theology, rather than in anything that deserves to be called ‘metatheology.’Second, the idea that particular theologies have (potentially different) ‘starting points’ is one that admits of examination. Since Kvanvig draws explicit parallels between theological theorizing and scientific theorizing, it is worth recalling two prominent distinctions that philosophers of science draw: (i) the distinction between theori","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality</i>","authors":"Christopher Janaway","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10294474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10294474","url":null,"abstract":"In Bernard Reginster’s account of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche’s genealogical exercise is ‘functional.’ Nietzsche aims, in his view, to expose the functional role of moral beliefs in serving particular emotional needs of agents. The focus on this theme is tight, to the exclusion of some traditional topics, including perspectivism or truthfulness, as Reginster himself notes. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 tackle essays 1, 2, and 3 of the Genealogy, but virtually the first half of the book is devoted to Reginster’s overarching argumentative frame, which I will briefly sketch. Reginster sees Nietzsche’s demand that the value of moral values be called into question as a call to understand the function of moral beliefs, by providing a naturalistic explanation of them. History plays no role in Reginster’s analysis. He concentrates on the internal dynamics of a more or less timeless, generic, individual human agent. If this is Nietzsche’s focus, Reginster argues, then it is legitimate for some of his genealogical accounts to be fictional, because the target is generic types of psychological condition and because in real life the explanatory emotional factors are concealed from agents themselves. Function is the key notion here: what psychological work do moral beliefs perform for the agent? For Reginster, Nietzsche is not principally out to challenge the epistemic reliability of the route by which we have acquired our moral beliefs; rather he uncovers how moral beliefs affect the agent’s ‘emotional economy,’ in particular how they impact the agent’s sense of self, otherwise described as the agent’s ‘standing in the world,’ or sense of being ‘somebody.’Some well-known phrases haunt the literature on Nietzsche. One is ‘Moralities are only a sign language of the affects.’ Reginster gives a convincing reading of this slogan. He distinguishes between expressive and functional readings of the relation between value judgements and affects. On an expressive (or sentimentalist) reading, ‘evaluative experience is constituted by affective experience: what it is to experience something as “good” or “bad” is (roughly) to feel “inclination” or “aversion” toward it’ (25). Here there is a noncontingent and transparent relation between the evaluation and the affect: necessarily, if you are finding something good, you have a positive affect towards that same thing. But Nietzsche’s conception of ‘sign language’ is different: the affects that do the explanatory work are often related neither constitutively nor transparently to the object of the surface evaluation. For example, one’s making the judgement that it is right to help the needy may be explained not by a positive affect towards the needy, but by disgust, or by a feeling of one’s own superiority. Reginster is right that Nietzsche’s characteristic explanations are typically of this nature (though this fact is compatible with Nietzsche’s possibly holding the expressive view.)In its overall form, Reginster’s ‘pragmat","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"328 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Modal Future</i>","authors":"David Boylan","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10317567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10317567","url":null,"abstract":"Cariani’s The Modal Future is a book about future language. At its heart is a challenge to the received symmetric picture of temporal language. Many think past tense and future auxiliaries are mirror images of each other: one simply has “later” where the other has “earlier.” The Modal Future aims to supplant this symmetric picture with an asymmetric one, where future thought and talk is modal, and explores issues in the pragmatics, epistemology, and cognition of future claims in the light of this asymmetric picture.Cariani motivates the asymmetric picture with a dilemma. “Will” appears to have properties characteristic of modal expressions. But existing modal accounts face a variety of extremely serious problems. Take the Peircean view, where “will φ” is true at w and t if and only if φ is true in all futures that are possible at w and t. Cariani shows this view makes a mess of our future credences. If I am about to toss a fair coin, what should my credence be that the following is true?(1) The coin will land heads.It is 0.5, of course. But the Peircean predicts it should be 0: I should be certain this universal claim has a counterexample. Cariani argues, convincingly in my view, none of the standard modal views ultimately do better.Cariani’s alternative, building on Cariani and Santorio 2018, is the selection semantics for “will.” This theory draws on the selection functions from Stalnaker’s theory of conditionals, which, given a world and a proposition, select the closest world where that proposition is true. On Cariani’s semantics, “will φ” is true at w just in case φ is true at the selected world with the same history as the actual world. Of course, this selected world just is the actual world, so, in simple unembedded contexts, “will φ” is simply equivalent to φ. (This equivalence is broken in various embedded contexts, such as conditionals, which add further information to input proposition for the selection function.) We get a nice account of the dilemma: “will” is indeed a modal, but its true modal nature is hidden in simple, unembedded claims.After sketching the basic idea, Cariani addresses important technical questions for the semantics. A particularly pressing question is how to secure the future orientation of “will” without disrupting the scope relations between “will” and negation. Cariani solves this issue by adapting Condoravdi 2001 account of future orientation in modals. This involves an event semantics, where verbs quantify over events and tenseless clauses are interpreted relative to worlds and intervals. In this framework, “will” effectively shifts the interval of evaluation: the embedded tenseless clause is evaluated relative to the interval starting at the time of utterance and continuing into the future indefinitely. This accounts for the future orientation of “will” without unwanted scope relations.From here, the book addresses a range of related questions, and the selection semantics becomes an important background assu","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136186047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Plato’s Statesman: A Philosophical Discussion</i>","authors":"Chris Bobonich","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10294435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10294435","url":null,"abstract":"In her introduction to a translation of the Statesman, Julia Annas remarks that as ‘stimulating as Plato’s political ideas in the Statesman are, it is not surprising that the dialogue has been relatively neglected by comparison with the Republic and the Laws’ (Annas and Waterfield 1995: x). A glance at Dimas et al.’s bibliography shows that the situation has improved since then, although the Statesman remains underdiscussed. Thus, the current volume is very welcome.The dialogue is divided into eleven passages running consecutively from its beginning with a chapter devoted to each. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Rachel Barney, Gábor Betegh, David Bronstein, Amber Carpenter, Christoph Horn, Rachana Kamtekar, Gavin Lawrence, Fabián Mié, and Franco Trivigno. Melissa Lane also writes a chapter. There is a lengthy and substantive introduction, to which each editor contributes a section. Although the chapters are more discursive than, for example, the typical Clarendon commentary, each remains tightly focused on the set passage. Given the space available to me, I discuss only two essays. The topics covered in the other chapters range over Plato’s epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, methodology, political philosophy, and psychology.In his fine chapter on Statesman 297B5-303D3 (hereafter, Stephanus numbers without titles refer to the Statesman), Christoph Horn tackles one of the dialogue’s most difficult passages and one of the most difficult issues in Plato’s political philosophy, that is, the topic of changing the laws. The central question that Horn addresses is whether Plato thinks that the legal structures of cities without philosophical rulers are equally worthless or whether he allows at least some genuine value to the legal structures of those cities that (a) have constitutions preserving the actual written instructions left by a knowledgeable lawgiver, or (b) forbid ever changing the legal order, regardless of its quality, or (c) improve their laws by revising them through informed true opinion (177, 186–91). Horn argues that legal structures satisfying one of (a), (b), or (c) have some genuine value.1(c) has the most important implications for Plato’s political philosophy, and Horn makes an excellent case for it. I would add two points as friendly suggestions. First, we might ask what Plato would have to believe if he held that the legal structures of nonphilosophical cities are equally worthless. It seems that he would have to hold that at no point in a city’s history is it possible (i) for an individual or a group to believe justifiably, but fallibly, that a particular legal change would produce a better outcome, and (ii) to bring about such change without its consequences producing a worse outcome. Since some cities’ laws may be deeply unjust, it seems hard to deny (i). Bad laws may foster worse desires in citizens, and Plato thinks that satisfying such desires makes them both stronger and worse. But it is hard to believe tha","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness</i>","authors":"Angela Mendelovici, David Bourget","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10317619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10317619","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Tye is perhaps best known for his defense of tracking representationalism, a view that combines representationalism (the view that an experience’s phenomenal character is determined by its representational content) with a tracking theory of representation (the view that mental representation is a matter of causal covariation, carrying information, or, more generally, tracking). In Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness, Tye takes an unexpected turn, endorsing a combination of tracking representationalism and panpsychism, which is understood here as the view that phenomenal consciousness is a primitive feature of the fundamental constituents of reality. While Tye takes both panpsychism and tracking representationalism to fail as theories of consciousness, he argues that their combination—-panpsychist representationalism—-can avoid the problems of both.Chapter 1 of Tye’s book frames the discussion in terms of the problem of vagueness for materialist theories of consciousness (theories that identify or ground consciousness in physical or functional properties). The problem is that the properties that materialist theories identify consciousness with (or ground consciousness in) are vague in that they admit borderline cases.1 For example, functional properties are vague since there are borderline cases in which it is indeterminate whether something plays the relevant role. Since materialism identifies consciousness with (or grounds it in) vague properties, it is committed to the vagueness of consciousness. The problem is that it is not vague whether something is conscious. In brief, assuming consciousness exists, it seems we are forced to reject one of these two claims, both of which are highly plausible according to Tye: (1) Materialism is true of consciousness.(2) Consciousness is sharp (i.e., not vague).Chapter 2 considers a possible resolution of the problem that rejects neither materialism nor the sharpness of consciousness: Russellian monist panpsychism (or panpsychism for short), the view that consciousness is the intrinsic, categorical nature of the physical. This broadly materialist view appears to avoid vagueness by taking all fundamental entities to be determinately conscious.Tye rejects panpsychism, citing several well-known problems. The main problems center around panpsychism’s alleged inability to offer an intelligible explanation of nonfundamental conscious experiences (such as, presumably, our conscious experiences), where an intelligible explanation of A in terms of B is one in which B a priori entails A. It seems that the facts about fundamental instances of consciousness, even in combination with the causal dispositional facts that define our internal organization and relationships to the environment, do not a priori entail that there are nonfundamental experiences like ours.Tye also claims that, aside from panpsychism’s internal difficulties, the view does not actually help with the problem of vagueness: the panpsych","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Theory of Structured Propositions","authors":"Andrew Bacon","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10294409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10294409","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that the theory of structured propositions is not undermined by the Russell-Myhill paradox. I develop a theory of structured propositions in which the Russell-Myhill paradox doesn’t arise: the theory does not involve ramification or compromises to the underlying logic, but rather rejects common assumptions, encoded in the notation of the λ-calculus, about what properties and relations can be built. I argue that the structuralist had independent reasons to reject these underlying assumptions. The theory is given both a diagrammatic representation and a logical representation in a novel language. In the latter half of the paper I turn to some technical questions concerning the treatment of quantification and demonstrate various equivalences between the diagrammatic and logical representations and a fragment of the λ-calculus.","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Moral Habitat</i>","authors":"Helga Varden","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10294487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10294487","url":null,"abstract":"Those who love philosophy books that present new, exciting, and complex theories have been given a gift in Barbara Herman’s The Moral Habitat. In my view, it is also a gift to Kant, since it develops a deeply Kantian account of deliberation as part of showing how perfect and imperfect duties can be seen as working together in a dynamic moral (eco)system of duties of right and of virtue. In the process of doing this, Herman develops a new, intriguing account of imperfect duties and replaces many of Kant’s bad examples with good ones, providing an ideal model for how to argue by example, whether one is Kantian or not. Moreover, by her many intriguing and rich examples, Herman makes many of Kant’s ideas, as well as her revisionary Kantian ideas, available as resources in our shared philosophical practice. Of course, Kantians and others will disagree with some of her arguments and proposals, but many of these discussions yet to come will themselves become important additions to the existing scholarship. Fortunately, too, for a book that presents a new and complex Kantian theory, it does not get bogged down in specific scholarly disputes on particular topics; instead, it stays focused on developing and communicating the big moves, the big picture. Finally, as with all Herman’s brilliant writings, The Moral Habitat is beautifully written—with care, wit, and wisdom. It is, in other words, among the best of gifts: a reliable friend to think with about some very complex and difficult topics—philosophical and human—from now on.The moral habitat is defined as “a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living together,” and Herman consequently puts “the deliberating and morally active person at the center of a generative moral enterprise” (ix). Herman’s book is furthermore divided into three parts: part 1 “Three Imperfect Duties,” part 2 “Kantian Resources,” and part 3 “Living in the Moral Habitat.” Part 1 serves to rid readers of some ingrained expectations they are likely to have of Kantian discussions of imperfect duty, such as the expectation that this will mostly be a discussion of beneficence or that it will assume a specific, historically prominent interpretation of motive or incentive. In these ways, Herman helps us to open our philosophical minds and stimulates our philosophical curiosity and imagination. More specifically, after the first chapter, focused on “Framing the Question (What We Can Learn From Imperfect Duties),” Herman provides chapter-length discussions of gratitude, giving, and due care (chaps. 2, 3, and 4, resp.). Her main strategy throughout these chapters is to develop each idea from the bottom up, working from many rich and intriguing examples to a summary section in each chapter—called “middle work”—where she draws our (philosophically trained minds’) attention to her main findings. For example, the main focus of chapter 3 is the puzzle of why giving too much—such as paying too much when repaying a loan or givi","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Fragmented Mind</i>","authors":"Sara Aronowitz","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10317606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10317606","url":null,"abstract":"This excellent volume contains 14 chapters exploring the idea of fragmentation: the division of a belief state into parts (“fragments”) that can represent the world in distinct, jointly incoherent ways. For instance, I might know that sea cucumbers are a type of animal related to starfish when I am asked in a biological context, but when I am at a restaurant and see them on the menu, I think that sea cucumbers are a vegetable. I have two ways of thinking of sea cucumbers, two fragments that are both sets of beliefs about the world but are in some sense separate from each other. Most of the contributions concentrate on whether fragmentation is a good model of belief and how a fragmented state of mind can be rationally evaluated, though the final section contains a paper by Gertler (chap. 13) applying a case of fragmentation and subsequent belief change to a question about agency.While fragmentation theories share the commitment to multiple (potentially) incoherent belief states, this volume reveals a deep divide between two families of views. The first, dispositionalism, holds that what it is to have a fragment is just to be disposed to exhibit a pattern of actions1 that is best explained by more than one set of beliefs (given one’s background beliefs and desires). On this view, fragments are by definition coherent within themselves, and also by definition at odds with one another. For Elga and Rayo (chap. 1) and Greco (chap. 2), at odds means picking out a different set of possible worlds whereas for Yalcin (chap. 6), it means partitioning possible space differently. Representationalists, on the other hand, such as Bendaña and Mandelbaum (chap. 3) or Murez (chap. 7) hold that a fragment is a psychologically real entity. This means that in principle we can ask whether fragments are internally coherent without triviality.This distinction between representationalism and dispositionalism is not just important to broader questions about belief, but directly bears on fragmentation. This is most clear when we consider that many of the questions raised in one of the two frameworks in this volume are not even able to be formulated on the alternative framework. I’ll give two examples.Bendaña and Mandelbaum ask: when do new fragments arise? Their answer is the “Environmental Principle”: new environments open up new fragments, so that if in my Portuguese class, I saw a chart of types of pastry, I might encode these separately (and potentially incoherently) from my stored knowledge of pastries acquired in other contexts. But notice that on the dispositionalist view, fragments arise if and only if one’s behavior is at odds with other parts of behavior, given background beliefs and desires. We can of course ask when behavior comes to be at odds in this way, and perhaps the answer might appeal to contexts. But this is not the same question at all, since Bendaña and Mandelbaum treat the creation of a new fragment as a mental event happening at a particular time. ","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Target Centred Virtue Ethics</i>","authors":"Liezl van Zyl","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10294500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10294500","url":null,"abstract":"Christine Swanton is, without question, one of the leading scholars in contemporary virtue ethics. Nevertheless, and somewhat surprisingly, her target-centered account of virtue ethics, which was developed in Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic Account (2003) and a series of articles, has not garnered much support. Part of the reason has to do with the sheer popularity of Aristotelian virtue ethics, in particular Rosalind Hursthouse’s book On Virtue Ethics (1999). However, I suspect that the main reason for its comparative lack of popularity is the complexity of her work. Swanton’s analyses tend to be much deeper and more detailed than her competitors’ work. She draws from, and assumes a familiarity with, a wide range of scholarly literature as well as different philosophical traditions, with the result that her work is inaccessible to students. As George Harris (2004) writes in his review of Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic Account, the book is “[w]ritten for advanced specialists in moral theory [and] … framed within a technical vocabulary that requires concentrated effort to master before its contributions can be appreciated. Even those who are already familiar with a good bit of the virtue-ethics literature will have to orient the issues to her terminological framework.” Target Centred Virtue Ethics is no exception. It is aimed at advanced specialists in normative theory and metaethics. However, I was pleased to see that some of the chapters are accessible to students. In particular, Chapter 5, in which Swanton explains and defends the basic features of target-centered virtue ethics, can (and should!) be incorporated into an upper-level ethics syllabus alongside the standard introductory readings on Aristotelian virtue ethics.I give a summary of the main features of Swanton’s account and then comment on the structure of the book.Target-centered virtue ethics shares two features with other forms of virtue ethics: it takes thick evaluative concepts, such as generous, kind, callous, and cruel, as central, and it evaluates actions and agents through the notions of virtue and vice. It has two distinguishing features. The first is its account of right action. On the Aristotelian view proposed by Hursthouse (1999), an action is right if it is what an ideally virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances. Swanton rejects this view on the grounds that a virtuous agent—someone with practical wisdom—is fallible. Instead, she proposes that an action is right if it hits the target(s) of the relevant virtues. The basic idea is fairly simple: The target of benevolence is to promote the good of others, so an action is right if it succeeds in doing so. Swanton further develops this idea with the help of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. Aristotle takes the mean to be multidimensional: It is not simply a matter of hitting the mean between, say, giving too much and giving too little, but also of “acting in the right circumstance, in the right manner, at t","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their State’s Wrongdoings?</i>","authors":"Stephanie Collins","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10294513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10294513","url":null,"abstract":"Anyone who has lived abroad knows the frustration of being held liable for the misdeeds of their country. Israelis get grilled about Palestine, Chinese receive disbelief over Xinjiang, and Britons are berated for colonialism. ‘It’s not my fault!’ some are tempted to reply. ‘I attend protests; or I am politically repressed; or I wasn’t even born yet!’ Sometimes, the effects of our states’ wrongdoings hit us materially. When states pay compensation to the victims of their wrongdoings, these payments almost always detract from what would otherwise be enjoyed by those living in the state. Is this effect justified?Avia Pasternak answers: “in democracies, usually, at least for most residents; in non-democracies, usually not.” Her answer emerges from her consideration of several possible justifications for making residents pay for their states’ wrongdoings. Ultimately, Pasternak endorses a checklist (150–51). First, costs should be distributed according to residents’ personal levels of blameworthiness for the wrongdoing, if that is practical (which, she says, it almost never is [31–40]). Second, if the wrongdoing resulted from the state’s reasonable attempts to protect residents’ rights, then a roughly equal distribution of costs is best. (Some unjust wars might qualify here, but this category will rarely be used since it requires the wrongdoing itself to be reasonable.) Third, if residents are rich and the wrongdoing was egregious, then an equal distribution is again fine. Pasternak does not say so, but surely this category mandates a strongly progressive distribution—so, an unequal distribution. In any case, Pasternak says this category won’t cover impoverished states or nonegregious wrongdoing (143–45), though I am unsure why compensation for states’ nonegregious wrongdoings cannot be financed on a capacity-relative basis. Fourth, if residents benefitted from the wrongdoing, these beneficiaries should pay up. Again, Pasternak says, it will rarely be feasible to target beneficiaries alone; however, I would suggest progressive taxation will often be a good proxy, at least for wrongdoings that generally enrich the economy, such as colonialism or forced labor. Fifth, if there is a special association between residents and victims, then all residents are on the hook for an equal distribution. As Pasternak interprets associative obligations, they apply only to domestic wrongdoing (146). But there is a different sense of ‘associative,’ on which “me being resident in state that wronged you (a foreigner)” is associative. This association might imply that me and my co-residents are the only people in the world who are able to bear costs that truly facilitate the repairing of the relationship between my state and you (see Collins 2016: 356–57).Suppose these five categories leave us wanting (perhaps a bigger ‘if’ than Pasternak argues, as my side remarks above suggest). In that case, we must utilize Pasternak’s core conceptual innovation: genuinely intentional c","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135673480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}