In a recent exchange with prominent skeptical theists, Paul Draper has argued that skeptical theism bears no relevance to Humean versions of the argument from suffering. His argument rests, however, on a particular way of construing epistemically rational updating procedures that is not adopted by all forms of skeptical theism. In particular, a perspectival variety of skeptical theism, I argue, is relevant to his Humean arguments. I then generalize this result and explain how any argument from evil employing probabilistic premises is similarly threatened.

Crispin Wright’s judgment-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgments about those intentions. The judgments are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the question about what the intention is, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, nontrivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one of the main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this article, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated.

In this article I argue that the mechanical inexplicability of natural ends in the third Critique is best understood against the background of a fairly traditional picture of the metaphysics of living things, one embraced by Kant himself. On this picture, the distinctive unity of a living thing was to be explained by a soul, form, or monad. The constraints placed on the understanding in the first Critique, however, make such an explanation impossible: because the principle of a living thing in virtue of which it constitutes a whole—rather than a mere aggregate of things—is simple, it cannot be met with in space. By ruling out a widely accepted explanans for a well-recognized explanandum, in other words, Kant’s first Critique makes living things inexplicable in precisely those ways suggested by the third.

This article addresses three interpretive errors that are common with respect to Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of malice. The first error concerns the interpretation of malice as consisting in the preference or choice of a lesser good over a greater good. I argue that malice instead consists in a disorder of the will, and where that disorder results in the choice of a spiritual evil. The second error occurs when one charges Thomas with inconsistency: it is claimed that Thomas’s view of the will is incompatible with malicious actions. I argue that such claims rest on a mistaken understanding of the role of choice in Thomas’s thought. The third error is one of translation: some scholars caution against translating Thomas’s malitia as “malice.” The reasons that are usually given for this view do not hold up to scrutiny.

I raise skeptical doubts about the prospects of Bayesian formal epistemology for providing an adequate general normative model of epistemic rationality. The notion of credence, I argue, embodies a very dubious psychological myth, viz., that for virtually any proposition p that one can entertain and understand, one has some quantitatively precise, 0-to-1 ratio-scale, doxastic attitude toward p. The concept of credence faces further serious problems as well—different ones depending on whether credence 1 is construed as full belief (the limit case of so-called partial belief) or instead is construed as absolute certainty. I argue that the notion of an “ideal Bayesian reasoner” cannot serve as a normative ideal that actual human agents should seek to emulate as closely as they can, because different such reasoners who all have the same evidence as oneself—no single one them being uniquely psychologically most similar to oneself—will differ from one another in their credences (e.g., because they commence from different prior credences). I argue that epistemic probability, properly understood, is quantitative degree of evidential support relative to one’s evidence, and that principled epistemic probabilities arise only under quite special evidential circumstances—which means that epistemic probability is ill suited to figure centrally within general norms of human epistemic rationality.

Belief and credence are often characterized in three different ways—they ought to govern our actions, they ought to be governed by our evidence, and they ought to aim at the truth. If one of these roles is to be central, we need to explain why the others should be features of the same mental state rather than separate ones. If multiple roles are equally central, then this may cause problems for some traditional arguments about what belief and credence must be like. I read the history of formal and traditional epistemology through the lens of these functional roles, and suggest that considerations from one literature might have a role in the other. The similarities and differences between these literatures may suggest some more general ideas about the nature of epistemology in abstraction from the details of credence and belief in particular.

So-called “traditional epistemology” and “Bayesian epistemology” share a word, but it may often seem that the enterprises hardly share a subject matter. They differ in their central concepts. They differ in their main concerns. They differ in their main theoretical moves. And they often differ in their methodology.However, in the last decade or so, there have been a number of attempts to build bridges between the two epistemologies. Indeed, many would say that there is just one branch of philosophy here—epistemology. There is a common subject matter after all.In this paper, we begin by playing the role of a “bad cop,” emphasizing many apparent points of disconnection, and even conflict, between the approaches to epistemology. We then switch role, playing a “good cop” who insists that the approaches are engaged in common projects after all. We look at various ways in which the gaps between them have been bridged, and we consider the prospects for bridging them further. We conclude that this is an exciting time for epistemology, as the two traditions can learn, and have started learning, from each other.

Deduction is important to scientific inquiry because it can extend knowledge efficiently, bypassing the need to investigate everything directly. The existence of closure failure—where one knows the premises and that the premises imply the conclusion but nevertheless does not know the conclusion—is a problem because it threatens this usage. It means that we cannot trust deduction for gaining new knowledge unless we can identify such cases ahead of time so as to avoid them. For philosophically engineered examples we have “inner alarm bells” to detect closure failure, but in scientific investigation we would want to use deduction for extension of our knowledge to matters we don’t already know that we couldn’t know. Through a quantitative treatment of how fast probabilistic sensitivity is lost over steps of deduction, I identify a condition that guarantees that the growth of potential error will be gradual; thus, dramatic closure failure is avoided. Whether the condition is fulfilled is often obvious, but sometimes it requires substantive investigation. I illustrate that not only safe deduction but the discovery of dramatic closure failures can lead to scientific advances.

There is a trade-off between specificity and accuracy in accounts of belief. Descriptions of agents in the tripartite account, which recognizes three doxastic attitudes—belief, disbelief, and suspension—are accurate, but not specific. The orthodox Bayesian account, which requires real-valued credences, is specific, but often inaccurate. I argue that a popular attempt to fix the Bayesian account by using sets of functions is also inaccurate; it suffers from a problem analogous to higher order vagueness. Ultimately, I argue, the only way to avoid these problems is to endorse a principle with the surprising consequence that the trade-off between accuracy and specificity is in-principle unavoidable. However, we can nonetheless improve on both the tripartite and existing Bayesian accounts. I construct a new framework that allows descriptions that are much more specific than those of the tripartite account and yet remain, unlike existing Bayesian accounts, perfectly accurate.

Ideal agents are role models whose perfection in some normative domain we try to approximate. But which form should this striving take? It is well known that following ideal rules of practical reasoning can have disastrous results for non-ideal agents. Yet, this issue has not been explored with respect to rules of theoretical reasoning. I show how we can extend Bayesian models of ideally rational agents in order to pose and answer the question of whether non-ideal agents should form new degrees of belief in the same way as their ideal counterparts. I demonstrate that the epistemic and the practical case are parallel: following ideal rules does not always lead to optimal outcomes for non-ideal agents.

The value-free ideal for science holds that values should not influence the core features of scientific reasoning. We defend the difference-to-inference model of value-permeation, which holds that value-permeation in science is problematic when values make a difference to the inferences made about a hypothesis. This view of value-permeation is superior to existing views, and it suggests a corresponding maxim—namely, that scientists should strive to eliminate differences to inference. This maxim is the basis of a novel value-free ideal for science.

The Rational Substance View is a pro-life position which maintains that all humans are moral equals and have a right to life in virtue of their kind membership. Healthy embryos, newborns, children, adults, and as the cognitively impaired all essentially have a root or radical capacity for rationality, though it may not be developed or have its operations blocked. Their being substances with a rational nature is the basis of their moral status and what makes it wrong to kill them. I will argue that the view is committed to some bad biology, and suspect metaphysics, and is unable to escape all the reductios of potentiality. I will offer the Healthy Development View as an alternative to the Rational Substance View. It is a pro-life view that avoids the problematic biology and metaphysics and reductios of potentiality. It understands our rational development to be a contingent rather than an essential trait.

Socio-cultural shifts during the 1960s and 1970s included widespread secularization, challenges to authority and tradition, and an emphasis on individual choice. Healthcare and biomedical research advances accompanied these social changes, giving rise to numerous ethical and policy questions. The contemporary bioethics project emerged in this context with (at least) three aims: (1) to offer practical answers to these questions (often) in ways that (2) facilitate or support particular practices or goals (e.g., organ donation or human research) and that (3) appear broadly applicable and legitimately enforceable. Philosophical thinking, which involves investigating and disambiguating concepts and categories, articulating conceptually clear definitions, and mapping arguments to identify premises, detect fallacies, and describe their logical implications, can undermine the practical goals of the bioethics project. This tension between the goals of bioethics and philosophical thinking might help to explain what some scholars see as a disinterest in philosophical thinking in bioethics today.

Most people think that, other things being equal, you are at liberty to decide for yourself whether to have children. However, there are some people, aptly called anti-natalists, who believe that it is always morally wrong to have children. Anti-natalists are attracted to at least two types of arguments. According to the Positives Are Irrelevant Argument, unless a life contains no negative things at all, it is irrelevant that life also contains positive things. According to the Positives Are Insufficient Argument, while life does contain some positive things, as a matter of fact, almost everyone’s life contains more negative things than positive things. In this article, I first offer new reasons to reject these arguments. I then offer a positive, human rights account of why not only is it not wrong to bring people into existence, but parents in fact have a human right to do so.

The research enterprise depends on trust, especially trust in data reliability and ethical conduct of research. This trust is accomplished via systems, or “architectures,” that do the work of ensuring trustworthiness in research when individuals are not able to assess it for themselves. In the United States and many other countries, national laws or regulations constitute the research ethics trust architecture. But new research methods, such as citizen science, DIY biology, biohacking, or corporate research, avoid such regulations because they draw on new means of funding, disseminating, and conducting research. This challenges the sufficiency of the traditional approach and requires us to revisit how we generate trust in the research enterprise. In this article, I discuss how new research challenges the existing trust architecture, offer some necessary elements of trust architecture in general, and use citizen science as a case study to illustrate how new, ethically meaningful trust architectures could be built.

A person of good character treats other sentient beings with care and compassion. Yet virtue ethics apparently has trouble accounting for the moral status of nonhuman animals because of its focus on excellent character traits, rather than the moral “patient,” and because of its non-codifiability, at least in some forms. The task of this article is to answer the question: How can virtue ethics account for the moral value of nonhuman animals in the context of biomedical research? I argue that it can do so through attention to animal good lives, human-animal bonds, and the virtues themselves. The virtue ethics resources I draw on to support nonhuman animal value are not the same as those typically brought to bear in moral status discussions, but I suggest that moral status as usually conceived has its own problems as a tool for use in practical contexts like animal research.

In this article, I examine Leibniz’s criticism of Spinoza’s notion of priority by nature based on the first proposition in Spinoza’s Ethics. Leibniz provides two counterexamples: first, the number 10’s being 6+3+1 is prior by nature to its being 6+4; second, a triangle’s property that two internal angles are equal to the exterior angle of the third is prior by nature to its property that the three internal angles equal two right angles. Leibniz argues that Spinoza’s notion cannot capture these priority relations. Although this text has received some scholarly attention, Leibniz’s objection in this text has not been fully explained yet. I argue that evaluating Leibniz’s objection relies on how to understand Spinoza’s notion of conception: first, whether conception is co-extensive with inherence and causation; second, whether conception is mental.

Heidegger’s thought presents us with the possibility of, as well as a call for, a “retrieval” (Wiederholung) of what is “unthought” (das Ungedachte) and “unsaid” (das Ungesagte) in the political philosophy of the ancient Greeks. A successful retrieval would lead to an “originary” (ursprünglich) political thinking that enables the “enactment” (Vollzug) of an originary politics, consistent with the possibility of a “second beginning” such as Heidegger deemed necessary and imminent. The task here is to identify “hermeneutic signposts” present in Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s Sophist as a basis for a “prolegomenon” to thinking the unthought. After the signposts are identified, a “Postscript” engages briefly several salient queries that arise from the effort to think about the political with reference to Heidegger’s thought, thus pointing to what remains to be thought beyond the signposting of this prolegomenon.

In Beyond Language (Oltre il linguaggio), Emanuele Severino argues that “language reveals the meaning that man confers to the world.” Accordingly, this article infers that reflecting on the meaning of the most important words of philosophy will enable us to understand the foundation of the concrete history of our civilization. Severino offers a unique analysis of these words and their history, and consequently an original framework for interpreting the world. What follows thus presents a discursive glossary according to Emanuele Severino with the aim to open new outlooks for understanding not only Severino’s thought, but also the problems of philosophy and our relationship with existence.