Southwest Philosophy Review

According to anti-luck approaches to the analysis of knowledge, knowledge is analyzed as unlucky true belief, or unlucky justified true belief. According to virtue epistemology, on the other hand, knowledge is true belief which a subject has acquired or maintained because of the exercise of a relevant cognitive ability. ALE and VE both appear to have difficulty handling some intuitive cases where subjects have or lack knowledge, so Pritchard (2012) proposed that we should take an anti-luck condition and a success-from-ability condition as independent necessary conditions on knowledge. Recently, Carter and Peterson (2017) have argued that Pritchard’s modal notion of luck needs to be broadened. My aim in this paper is to show that, with the modal conception of luck appropriately broadened, it is no longer clear that ALE needs to be supplemented with an independent ability condition in order to handle the problematic Gettier cases.

There are at least two ways to explain the presence of political obligations – by appeal to general duties (like a duty of justice) or by appeal to authority (a power to create duties through commands). The fi rst sort of account is familiar but, according to some, is defeasible by the Particularity Problem – the problem of showing why there is a duty of persons to obey the laws of a particular State exclusively. Authority accounts can seem promising in this light but bring a few problems of their own. In this essay, I will examine one such possible solution – the Districting Solution – and outline a few considerations that limit the possibility of its success.

Public reason liberalism has been challenged by religious critics who make the “Integrity Objection.” That is, they argue that public reason’s stringent limits on the kinds of reasons which can serve as justificatory prevent them from living lives of integrity wherein their political activity and personal commitments are in sync. Convergence forms of public reason liberalism adopt this critique and respond to it by rejecting the dominant model of public reason, consensus justification, replacing the Rawlsian standard of shared reasons with merely intelligible ones. In this paper I look at two formulations of the integrity objection and make brief rebuttals of both, ultimately arguing that convergence liberalism cannot claim to provide a more compelling response to religious critics than consensus liberalism.

Most incompatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility require, for a person to count as morally responsible for an action, that specific events leading up to the action be undetermined. One might think, then, that incompatibilists should remain agnostic about whether anyone is ever free or morally responsible, since whether there are such undetermined events would seem to be an empirical question unsettled by scientific research. Yet, a number of incompatibilists have suggested that the phenomenological character of our experiences already gives us good reason to believe that much of our behavior is freely undertaken, so that we are justified in believing that the free will condition for moral responsibility is often satisfied. I argue, however, that on the assumption that free will is incompatible with determinism, reflections on the character of our experiences do not provide good support for the claim that we ever act freely.

The phenomenal character of a perceptual experience describes ‘what it is like’ for an agent undergoing it. This is a familiar notion when it comes to our sensory states. Recently, there has been increased discussion about how certain cognitive states can also have phenomenal characters. A further, more interesting question asks what links, if any, might between what the phenomenal character of a mental state and when that mental state is considered rational. I will assume that some cognitive states can have phenomenal characters and will focus on a prominent phenomenal feature of a particular cognitive state: namely, deliberation over how to act. I aim to expose one way in which we can describe the phenomenology of deliberating, as well as its potential link to the rationality of deliberation.

This paper appeals to certain popular doctrines about human welfare and morality to offer a new response to the problem of hell. In particular, I contend that the combination of desire satisfactionism, a subjective theory about welfare, with an objective theory of morality leads to a surprisingly intuitive and compelling argument for the consistency of the post-mortem punishment of people in hell with the existence of an omniperfect God. In fact, under these conditions, the existence of such a divine being may actually require that there be at least some type of hell/post-mortem punishment. Finally, I suggest that positing the existence of hell can strengthen desire satisfactionism against an objection tied to base or immoral desires.