The Journal of Philosophy

The animalist says we are animals. This thesis is commonly understood as the universal generalization that all human persons are human animals. This article proposes an alternative: the thesis is a generic that admits of exceptions. We defend the resulting view, which we call ‘generic animalism’, and show its aptitude for diagnosing the limits of eight case-based objections to animalism.

Propositionalism is the claim that all logical relations can be captured by propositional logic. It is usually regarded as obviously false, because propositional logic seems too weak to capture the rich logical structure of language. I show that there is a clear sense in which propositional logic can match first-order logic, by producing formalizations that (i) are valid iff their first-order counterparts are, and (ii) also respect grammatical form as the propositionalist construes it. I explain the real reason propositionalism fails, which is more subtle and more interesting.

In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”, Johan E. Gustafsson attempts to demonstrate that the parties in Rawls’s original position would not choose the difference principle. Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments have failed to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance.