I discuss a remark made by Gitta Sereny about Treblinka Kommandant Franz Stangl that questions the role and scope of moral authority, viz. “I don’t know now at which point one human being can make the moral decision for another that he should have the courage to risk death.” I provide an illustrative elaboration from her remark of a role for moral authority and a limit on its scope. First, I use the idea of supererogation to introduce the idea and role of moral authority. Second,I argue that there is a parallel understanding of Sereny’s remark that shows moral authority operative in a similar role in Stangl’s case. Third, I make four refinements to what she has expressed about Stangl, each of which further illuminates the nature of moral authority. Finally, I address objections and consider the implications of my account.

This article offers a critique of moral individualism. I introduce the topic of moral individualism by discussing how its characteristic assumptions play an organizing role in contemporary conversations about how animals should be treated. I counter that moral individualism fails to do justice not only to our ethical relationships with animals but also to our ethical relationships with human beings. My main argument draws on elements of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of psychology, and in presenting the argument I address the case of human beings before returning to the case of animals. Given that moral individualists frequently defend what I call the ethical view of animals, i.e., the view that animals are in themselves proper objects of ethical concern, it is worth stressing that it is no part ofmy project to undermine this view. On the contrary, the critique of moral individualism I develop makes available a better understanding of what is right about the idea that animals as such merit certain forms of respect and attention.

Imagine that you find yourself in a situation of considerable adversity and apparent permanence. Does it make sense for me to advise you to learn to love your situation? I argue that such advice is capable of a robust meaning beyond the mere expression of compassion, and far beyond the pragmatic advice to ‘accept it’ or ‘make the best of it’. I respond to the objections that love cannot be commanded, and that I am counselling pernicious forms of self-deception or self-deprecation. The key, I suggest, is to understand what it means to lead a life ‘from the inside’.

Slavery seems to us to be a paradigm of a morally wrong institutionalized practice. And yet for most of its millennia-long historical existence it was typically accepted as a natural, necessary, and inevitable feature of the social world. This widespread normative consensus was only challenged toward the end of the eighteenth century. Then, within a hundred years of the emergence of radical moral criticism of slavery, the existing practices had been dismantled and the institution itself “abolished.” How do we explain such a “profound transformation in moral perception” (Davis 1975)? It may seem obvious that the moral agency and character of the leaders and activists of the abolition movement, their supporters, and their governmental representatives were the primary motors of change.That is to say, the various actors involved came to see, recognize, or acknowledge the true (morally evil) nature of slavery and were thereby motivated to act against it. This “commonsense,” “moral explanation” is endorsed by most of the philosophers who have reflected on the morality of slavery. But despite the intuitiveness of thinking that it was the moral agency of the actors, pitted against the evil and injustice of slavery, that brought about the latter’s downfall, I will endeavor to show that such thinking is inadequate both to the facts and to the explanatory desiderata. I contend that it was not ignor ance of the supposedly inherent moral status of slavery that maintained people’s complicity with it, but practical barriers to them conceiving it dispensable.

There are intriguing hints in the works of Stanley Cavell and Stephen Mulhall of a possible connection between ethics and Wittgenstein’s remarks on private language, which are concerned with expressions of Empfindungen: feelings or sensations. The point of this paper is to make the case explicitly for seeing such a connection. What the point of that is I will address at the end of the paper. If Mulhall and Cavell both know their Wittgenstein and choose their words carefully, which I will take as given, then the (to me) irresistible inference is that they see a connection between Wittgenstein’s thoughts on ethics and his thoughts on private language. Yet this connection has not, as far as I know, been made explicit. Can it be? Should it be? These are my questions. Even if no one ever intended a connection between the “Lecture on Ethics” and the remarks on private language, those remarks do at least touch on issues raised in the lecture, and it is worth thinking about what the author of those remarks would say about the lecture. So in this paper I summarize the “Lecture on Ethics” (in part I), look at the private language remarks themselves (in part II), and then apply some ideas from these remarks to the “Lecture on Ethics” in part III. My conclusion will be that Wittgenstein’s later remarks are largely consistent with his earlier ones, the main difference being that some of what he first called nonsense he later called secondary meaning. One result of this change is that attempts to express the feelings that Wittgenstein regards as fundamental to ethics, aesthetics, and religion are first treated as doomed to result in nonsense but later as risky. Like cries of pain, they might or might not find a sympathetic audience.

One of Iris Murdoch’s most characteristic philosophical ideas is that any way of understanding what moral philosophy is and how it may be practised will be shaped by deep-going conceptual attitudes, of which moral philosophers themselves may be unaware. In her own philosophical writings she tried to bring out the role played by these attitudes, and to unsettle accepted ideas about the subject. I examine some of the elements in her thought which open up different ways of understanding the subject, and I discuss the relevance of these ideas to contemporary moral philosophy.

The standard view in philosophy and psychology claims that mentalizing is necessary and sufficient for social understanding. Mentalizing (also known as “mindreading”) is the name given to the cognitive capacities humans employ in explaining and predicting their own and other’s actions. The standard view is rejected by philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition. They have argued that mentalizing is neither necessary nor sufficient for social understanding. They suggest instead that most of the time we understand each other through what Shaun Gallagher has called “embodied practices.” My aim in this paper is to clarify and defend the claim that social understanding is grounded in embodied practice.

A line of research within embodied cognition seeks to show that an organism’s body is a determinant of its conceptual capacities. Comparison of this claim of body determinism to linguistic determinism bears interesting results. Just as Slobin’s (1996) idea of thinking for speaking challenges the main thesis of linguistic determinism, so too the possibility of thinking for acting raises difficulties for the proponent of body determinism. However, recent studies suggest that the body may, after all, have a determining role in cognitive processes of sentence comprehension.

The theses of embodied and extended cognition are usually regarded as recherché doctrines, at odds with common sense. They are also, typically, regarded as theses that must be evaluated by way of their implications for the development of cognitive science. If they cohere with the likely trajectory of cognitive science they can be accepted. If they do not, they must be rejected. This paper argues against both these claims. At the conceptual heart of the theses of embodied and extended cognition is an analysis of intentionality as revealing activity, and the theses are mundane implications of this analysis. Moreover, since the analysis is not something that can be gleaned from cognitive science or philosophical reflections on cognitive science, the theses of embodied and extended cognition arenot ones that can be adjudicated by appeals to what cognitive science does or is likely to do in the future. The theses of embodied and extended cognition are philosophical theses—not theses of cognitive science—and none the worse for that.

We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world. Thus, what the thought experiment actually shows is that the brain and body are so deeply entangled, structurally and dynamically, that they are explanatorily inseparable. Such entanglement implies that we cannot understand consciousness by considering only the activity of neurons apart from the body, and hence we have goodexplanatory grounds for supposing that the minimal realizing system for consciousness includes the body and not just the brain. In this way, we put the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment to a new use, one that supports the “enactive” view that consciousness is a life-regulation process of the whole organism interacting with its environment.

I argue that an older debate in phenomenology concerning Husserl’s notion of hyletic data can throw some light on contemporary debates about qualia and phenomenal consciousness. Both debates tend to ignore important considerations about bodily experience and how specific kinds of bodily experience can shape one’s consciousness of the world. A revised and fully embodied conception of hyletic experience enriches the concept of enactive perception.

Precisely how and precisely where is human conscious experience located in the natural world? The Extended Conscious Mind Thesis says this:The constitutive mechanisms of human conscious experience include both extra-neural bodily facts and also extra-bodily worldly facts.Recently, in “Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness Is (Probably) Still in the Head,” Andy Clark has argued for what I call The Cautious Consciousness-Is-All-Neural Thesis:Because the arguments currently on offer for The Extended Conscious Mind Thesis fall short of decisive proof, then, all things considered, we should conclude that the constitutive mechanisms of human conscious experience are all either in the brain or the central nervous system.I agree with Clark that The Extended Conscious Mind Thesis is (probably) false. But I also think that there is sufficient reason for rejecting Clark’sCautious Consciousness-Is-All-Neural Thesis, and for accepting what I call The Body-Bounded Conscious Mind Thesis:Human conscious experience occurs everywhere in our living bodies, constitutively including the brain and the central nervous system, and ALSO constitutively including all the other vital systems of the living body, right out to the skin, but no further out than that.If what[ever] consciousness [there is] spreads all over human bodies, then there won’t be any temptation to use the [Cartesian] word ‘ego’. —L. Wittgenstein

What is it for a bodily movement to be effortless? What are we appreciating when we admire a dancer’s effortless leaps, a basketball player’s effortless shot, or even a seagull’s effortless soar? I propose to explore the notion of effortlessness by distinguishing various kinds of effortless bodily movements, examining the idea that effortless movements are smooth, predictable ones, discussing the relations between effortlessness and difficulty and effortlessness and actual ease, and speculating briefly about how we perceive and why we take pleasure in watching effortless movements.

In this paper, I claim that extant empirical data do not support a radically embodied understanding of the mind but, instead, suggest (along with a variety of other results) a massively representational view. According to this massively representational view, the brain is rife with representations that possess overlapping and redundant content, and many of these represent other mental representations or derive their content from them. Moreover, many behavioral phenomena associated with attention and consciousness are best explained by the coordinated activity of units with redundant content. I finish by arguing that this massivelyrepresentational picture challenges the reliability of a priori theorizing about consciousness.

In this paper I evaluate embodied social cognition, embodied cognition’s account of how we understand others. I identify and evaluate three claims that motivate embodied social cognition. These claims are not specific to social cognition; they are general hypotheses about cognition. As such, they may be used in more general arguments for embodied cognition. I argue that we have good reasons to reject these claims. Thus, the case for embodied social cognition fails. Moreover, to the extent that general arguments for embodied cognition rest on these premises, they are correspondingly uncompelling.

Moral condemnation has become the public narrative of our criminal justice practices, but the distribution of criminal sanctions is not and should not be guided by judgments of what individual wrongdoers morally deserve. Criteria for evaluating a person’s liability to criminal sanctions are general standards that are influenced by how we understand the relative social urgency and priority of reducing crimes of various types. These standards thus depend on considerations that are not a matter of individual moral desert. Furthermore, the moral desert is doubtful when members of socially disadvantaged groups face unequal prospects for being subjected to criminal justice sanctions. Social injustice is an intolerable context for distributing punishment according to individual desert. A rightsprotectingscheme of criminal justice might permissibly burden individual offenders, but not as an expression of what they morally deserve.

This paper takes a fresh look at Elizabeth Anderson’s democratic egalitarianism and its relation to luck egalitarianism in the light of recent trends toward greater socioeconomic inequality. Anderson’s critique of luck egalitarianism and her alternative ideal of democratic equality are set out. It is then argued that the former is not very powerful, and that the latter is vulnerable to many of Anderson’s criticisms of luck egalitarianism. The paper also seeks to show that, on many of the issues over which Anderson disagrees with luck egalitarians, the latter can adopt the view she canvasses without abandoning their luck egalitarianism. At most, her critique shows that we have reason to prefer some views within the luck egalitarian family over others—not that we have reason to reject luck egalitarianismas such.

In contemporary society, private debt has substituted for other ways of financing the consumption of basic social goods like housing, education, and medical care. This is at least partially due to increased inequality, which has allowed costs to rise faster than median incomes, as well as due to stagnating public provisions. Debt-financed access to basic goods is problematic because it creates new kinds of unfreedom and undermines the value of the freedoms that the indebted do manage to keep or acquire. Debt-financing qualifies freedom in this way by placing certain kinds of conditions on our acquisition and consumption of the goods that we buy. These conditions compromise the very freedom that we seek and value when acquiring and consuming these goods. It does so, first, by transferring the burden of providing basic goods from the public to private individuals, thereby further constraining those who already face the most constraints in accessing basic goods. And, second, the conditional character of debt-financed consumption undermines the value that we attach to having basic social goods. At the very least, this gives us strong reasons to want to regulate the conditions that creditors can place on debtors, at least with respect to basic social goods. Further, at best, the most desirable alternative to debt-financed consumption is the unconditional public provision of basic goods like housing, education, and medical care.

This essay argues that we ought to think differently about unequal opportunity. Instead of focusing only on overall prospects in life, we ought to train our attention on the particular moments of decision and the particular developmental processes that shape, in different respects, the trajectories of people’s lives. A new wave of research in the social sciences makes possible this shift in focus, which will have profound implications for our understanding of both the concept of equal opportunity itself and its applications in public policy and law.

Inequality causes a variety of social ills, which give egalitarians reasons for concerns of justice. In particular, inequality is deemed to undermine people’s fundamental moral capacity of self-respect. In this paper, we explore the complex relationship between inequality and self-respect from a philosophical and an empirical angle, arguing that a theory of justice should take both into account. To this purpose, we first clarify the normative objection to inequality from the alleged erosion of self-respect. Then, we elaborate on empirical findings showing the crucial role that ‘relative deprivation’ plays in the causal mechanism that connects inequalities to the erosion of self-respect. We conclude that this role is best understood in philosophical terms as a form of deprivation that affects thesignificance that people attach to the value of the choices they make.