Charity Anderson (2022) presents several worries about my views; she focuses on the role played by the notion of cooperativity in my argument, my characterization of the normativity involved in conversation, the methodology employed in the book, and possible extensions of my analysis to other modes of communication. I try to respond to each of these concerns in turn.

I first list what I consider to be the main virtues of Goldberg’s novel and challenging account of epistemic pressure in speech exchange. I then zoom in on proper doxastic responses to assertions in conversations and argue that they comprise four things: (1) one believes the position that is testified to rather than just seeking, ensuring, trying, or aiming to believe the testifier on that proposition; (2) one believes the testifier; in other words, one wrongs the speaker not only if one disbelieves her but also when one simply fails to believe her; (3) one believes the relevant proposition rather than merely accepting, presuming, assuming, or displaying some positive propositional attitude that does not imply belief; (4) one believes the proposition in question to a sufficiently high degree. Finally, I explore how we should make sense of the epistemic partiality that friendship seems to come with. I argue that it is not merely that one seeks evidence in support of the assertion of one’s friend or an interpretation that affirms the testimony of one’s friend. It is also that one actually lowers the evidential bar for rationally or epistemically justifiedly believing their testimony.

Rik Peels (2022) suggests that my account of the normative pressures involved in cases of testimony from a friend need to be supplemented. I respond by accepting the proposed supplements; in fact, I argue that they are implications of the view I defended.

In this brief comment, I aim to engage with Sandy Goldberg’s fruitful discussion of the doctrine of epistemic partiality in friendship (EPF), as it appears in his new book Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech Exchanges (2020), and to explore a seemly small distinction that I think could complicate things for the way Goldberg sees the pressures that are put on us when we are confronted with speech acts that come from or relate to friends of ours. If my distinction is shown to be successful, I believe it will impact the efficacy of Goldberg’s response to EPF. My main argument focuses on the way Goldberg argues against EPF and the tension it supposedly creates with the demands of epistemic rationality. I believe that Goldberg’s argument fails to capture an important distinction between our epistemic behaviors in the face of a friend’s say-so and our epistemic behaviors when we encounter third-party reports about a friend. I’ll argue that the route from the valuing of friendship to the epistemic reasons in support of differential doxastic outcomes when our friends are involved is not satisfactory, given that it involves what I see to be an unauthorized move from our desire to preserve a friendship to a differential doxastic reaction when someone reports negatively about our friends.

Breno Santos (2022) criticizes my account for not having plausible things to say about the difference between cases of hearing something negative about a friend from a third party, and hearing from the friend herself. I deny the charge and respond to this criticism.

I argue that we have good textual reason to read Kant’s notion of “self-conceit,” and his theory of immorality more generally as being founded on the claim that we have the tendency to think that our ability to achieve happiness is our most valuable feature. I explain how this is not the same as the claim that we are arrogant or think we are better than others. Self-conceit (and the standard of assessment it implies) can lead to the opinion that one is worth more than others, when life is going well. When life goes badly, however, it leads to the opinion that one is worth less. I explain how this reading of self-conceit also amounts to a better theory of immorality, since we ought not to hold that interpersonal arrogance is at the heart of all immorality.

I argue that misanthropy is systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be. Such condemnation can be expressed affectively and practically in a range of different ways, and the bulk of the paper sketches the four main misanthropic stances evident across the history of philosophy. Two of these, the Enemy and Fugitive stances, were named by Kant, and I call the others the Activist and Quietist. Without exhausting the range of ways of being a philosophical misanthrope, these four suffice to justify my main claim that misanthropy should not be seen specifically in terms of hatred and violence. We should attend to the varieties of philosophical misanthropy, especially since doing so reveals a deeper phenomenon I call the misanthropic predicament.

With David Cooper and others, I argue that it is conceptually and ethically good to broaden the conception of misanthropy beyond that of hatred of humans. However, I hold that not everyone with misanthropic thoughts is a misanthrope. I propose thinking of a misanthrope as one who appraises the moral perception of misanthropy to be appropriate, weighty, and governing of other aspects of one’s moral outlook or character. I conclude that pessimism without misanthropy may be more ethically appropriate for some of us with misanthropic thoughts who wish to reject the identity of a misanthrope.

Following in the tradition of Montaigne and Rousseau, a number of recent philosophers have argued that reflection on the relationship between humankind and certain animals yields good reasons for a misanthropic verdict on the former. One reason, of course, is the terrible treatment and exploitation of animals by human beings. Another reason—the one focused on and endorsed in this paper—is that humankind does very badly in the moral comparison with animal species that Hume thought was essential to any moral verdict on our species. I argue that animals are favored by such a comparison since they are free of the vices and moral failings of human beings. To the objection that, in that case, they are also without the virtues that we have, my reply is that this objection is mistaken. (Even if it weren’t, animals would come off better than humankind, since it is morally more important to be without vices than to have virtues.) Simply put, the “innocence” of animals—perhaps like that of young children—is incompatible with being morally vicious, but it is not incompatible with manifesting and exercising certain virtues. Innocence does not exclude experiencing benign moral emotions, such as compassion.

Ian Kidd and David Cooper each develop a revisionist conception of misanthropy as the critical judgment and moral condemnation of humanity based on entrenched, ubiquitous, and pervasive human failings. I offer two objections to this revisionist conception since it equates the imputation of humanity with misanthropy and because it fails to address the worse form of misanthropy, which is the hatred and contempt of humanity. In the final section, I argue that we should not become misanthropes or develop a misanthropic stance. Misanthropy fails to make important distinctions about vulnerability and moral responsibility among people, allows for the renunciation of moral responsibility, and undermines the moral community.

Ever since Bernard Williams (1993) made the character Elina Makropulos central to his case against the desirability of immortality, a debate has raged on between philosophers who join him in arguing that immortal life would lack meaning, and those who defend the prospects of meaningful everlasting existence. I will argue that a never-ending existence offers more hope for personal meaning and value than ordinary finite existence does. To illustrate the idea that having a necessary ending spoils life’s meaning, I introduce a new literary example—Leonid Andreyev’s Lazarus—to juxtapose with Elina Makropulos. Lazarus personifies the notion that the transient significance of life simply evaporates in comparison with the infinite nothingness of death. Among other things, dying means the destruction of the first-personal sense of value we build up and attribute to our lives through conscious experience, memories, and agency.

What is it about the concept of absurdity that allows it to be applied to everything from the nature of existence to statistical methodologies to slapstick comedy? This article seeks an answer in the structure of how we experience the phenomena regularly cited to substantiate absurdity claims, namely those putatively labeled ‘confusing,’ ‘humorous,’ or both. Taking its cue from evolutionary and phenomenological accounts of humor and confusion, and responding to the canonical statements of Albert Camus and Thomas Nagel, the essay proposes that certain structures of experience parallel the structure of absurdist arguments.

In trying to decide between two choices, I might try to compare them in order to determine which alternative is better with respect to some appropriate choice value. But could it happen that the two choices fail to compare? Much of the debate about this question has centred on the issue of whether the items could be incomparable. If they are incomparable, then they fail to compare with respect to the relevant choice value. However, what has largely been neglected is the possibility that the choices fail to compare by instead being noncomparable. If they are noncomparable, then they are not covered by any appropriate choice value, such that the formal preconditions for a comparison does not obtain. This paper argues that the concept of noncomparability may be at least as important as that of incomparability for explaining why choices fail to compare, if they do.

A brief synopsis of Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), which introduces the book.

Democracy is in trouble, and it is democracy’s own fault—that is Robert Talisse’s intriguing contention is his recent book, Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place (2019). What gets democracy into trouble, according to Talisse, is the idea that a democratic form of government is intrinsically valuable, which in turn entails a deliberative conception of democracy that, in combination with the social-psychological fact of social sorting, leads to rampant polarization. According to Talisse, we therefore need to put democracy in its place by resisting the expansive view of the scope of democracy and making room for non-political spaces of interaction, in which we can form civic friendships. However, in what follows, I argue that what Talisse has actually provided is an excellent reason for rejecting rather than merely mitigating the detrimental effects of the idea that democracy is intrinsically valuable. Specifically, we ought to stop fetishizing democracy and instead embrace an instrumentalist view of democracy as a social practice that is instituted and maintained for purposes external to itself. Once we do this, democracy no longer needs saving from itself.

Overdoing Democracy is an important contribution to the literature on (deliberative) democracy, as it offers a sobering diagnosis of the risks and pitfalls of (overdoing) democracy in the form of internal critique. But the book does not go far enough in its diagnosis because it is not sufficiently critical towards some of the basic assumptions of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In particular, Talisse does not sufficiently attend to the inevitable power struggles in a society, where different groups and individuals must protect their own (often conflicting) interests instead of working towards a ‘common good.’ In this essay, I contrast two different visions of democracy and politics, one based on ideals of consensus and cooperation, and another on the inevitability of perennial conflict. I then briefly present an alternative to deliberative conceptions of democracy that has gained traction in recent decades, known as agonism. Next, I offer a short reconstruction of Talisse’s proposal, and finally I sketch a critical assessment of some of his main claims and assumptions from an agonistic perspective.

Here are two different explanations for the apocalyptic state of American politics. According to one story, we have been subject to systemic polarization. Social mobility and media filtering have divided us into like-minded enclaves, which irrationally boosts our self-confidence. This turns out to be a deeply symmetrical story. According to the other story, we have been subject to propaganda. Certain media sources have been systematically spreading misinformation. This story is usually told asymmetrically. I argue that current evidence better supports the asymmetrical propaganda story. I then diagnose the popularity of the polarization story. Though many are eager to accept debunking accounts of the political extremes, they often fail to adequately consider analogous debunking accounts of the political center. But the mechanisms of polarization should also effect the center. And the tendency to leap to accept a systemic polarization story, without sufficient empirical evidence, itself bears the mark of motivated reasoning.

I examine the possibility of civic friendship to solve the problem of over-doing democracy, paying close attention to how it can counter affective polarization and social homogeneity. In Section I, I explore civic friendship as a solution to polarization. In section II, I argue that Talisse’s civic friendship—in the context of nonpolitical collaboration—is akin to Aristotle’s utility and pleasure-friendships. Given the nature of civic friendship, in Section III–VI I make amendments to Talisse’s proposal. I argue that if civic friendship is to address not only desaturation but polarization, and it has these Aristotelian features, then the cultivation of taste, equity, and ethical attentiveness are necessary.

The four critical essays responding to Overdoing Democracy exhibit a thematic progression. Some take issue with the conception of democracy that underlies my book, while others emphasize my diagnostic and prescriptive accounts. This essay follows that progression in addressing my critics.

Discussions of loyalty typically focus on its alleged tendency to encourage pernicious attachments to collectivities. The present article intervenes in these discussions by asking how considerations of loyalty in limit-situations (Karl Jaspers) might illuminate neglected ethico-political intricacies. Rather than suggesting that loyalty, independently of circumstances, is always a virtue or a vice this article explores how loyalty’s complex synergies in limit-situations sometimes advance rather than oppose cosmopolitan justice. This perspective, I claim, helps us see that, instead of always making us partial, as many contemporary discourses on loyalty assume, loyalty sometimes makes us partisan in an ethico-politically enabling sense.