By Lucas Miotto and Himani Bhakuni

When shadow-library giant Library Genesis temporarily went offline in August 2024, it triggered an immediate panic across online discussion groups. Amid the flurry of “Is it really down?” and “Are there alternative ways to access it?” one Facebook reply laid bare the harsh reality of academic inequity:

“It’s down, yes. If it remains down permanently, I think I’ll need to find a new career or a job in the global north. Or just never read any new books from now on.”

For countless researchers worldwide, academic access is not a given. For them, access is possible only thanks to shadow libraries and anonymous sharing networks. However, because these platforms violate copyright and licensing restrictions, they operate illegally and face frequent blocks and takedowns.

In our paper In the Shadows: Academic Knowledge and Remedial Action, we discuss the moral permissibility of sharing academic research illegally. While the practice appears to be highly endorsed (at least informally) by academics, we provide a more systematic case for its justification. We show that the actions of shadow libraries and open-access activists provide a good illustration of the ethics of unilateral remedial action, which differs in important respects from the ethics of political disobedience and deserves specific treatment.

Why does the practice need justifying at all?

Many academics express informal sympathy for illegal sharing. But this does not eliminate the question of whether it is a practice that requires justification. What we need to know is whether there is something genuinely wrong with it; some moral consideration weighty enough to ground the actions of publishers and the courts that order shadow libraries to be blocked and taken down. So, the real question is whether illegal sharing breaches important moral considerations. We think it engages at least four, which are all, in one way or another, tied to copyright and licensing restrictions: first, that the practice breaks the law; second, that it may undermine the interests copyright is meant to protect, such as authors’ creative work, attribution, and a fair reward for their efforts; third, that it interferes with the contractual agreements that authors enter into with publishers; and fourth, that it may erode the coordinating role that the copyright system, imperfect as it is, plays for scholars, libraries, and funders who have organised their activities around it. Each of these gives illegal sharing a case to answer.

The first consideration – that it simply breaks the law – is one that many reach for in debates around law-breaking, usually via a general duty to obey the law: the idea that in a reasonably just society we have a standing pro tanto obligation to obey the law simply because it is the law. We deliberately do not build our case on this. For one, we are sceptical that any such general duty exists; the objections to it are strong and, to our minds, largely persuasive. For another, orienting the whole debate around the duty to obey would prove far too much: given how vulnerable that duty is to objections, resting permissibility on it would make almost any act of law-breaking easy to justify — illegal sharing included — and a victory won that cheaply is perhaps not worth having.

The more promising route, and the one we favour in the paper, is to set the general duty aside and look instead at the specific considerations that give particular laws their moral force. Even with no blanket duty to obey, there are good reasons to take copyright seriously: it protects interests that matter, structures the agreements authors make with publishers, and underpins a system of dissemination that the academic community relies on. Breaching it is therefore not morally trivial. Of course, none of this makes copyright sacrosanct. What it shows is that illegal sharing genuinely calls for justification. The rest of the paper tries to provide such justification.

Not Disobedience, but Remedy

How should we understand what shadow libraries are doing? The most natural answer, and the one open-access activists, such as Aaron Swartz, themselves have reached for, is civil disobedience. In his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, Swartz placed the movement squarely within “the grand tradition of civil disobedience”.

We think, however, that this characterisation is inaccurate. Civil disobedience (and political disobedience more generally) is essentially communicative. It is a public act addressed to the political community: it aims to voice a wrong, to appeal to a shared sense of justice, and to persuade a majority to change the law. Its whole character is dialogical. But this is not what shadow libraries do. They operate covertly and anonymously; they do not try to send a message, engage with the reasons of public actors, or shame anyone into reform. Their aim is more direct: to put a good that is being unjustly withheld straight into the hands of the people denied it. Nor does broadening the label to “uncivil disobedience” help. Accounts of that kind — Candice Delmas’s, for instance[i] — rightly recognise that principled lawbreaking can be covert, disruptive, or coercive. But the category casts its net too wide: it bundles together acts as different as offensive protest, vigilantism, and running an underground abortion network, as though they raise the same moral questions. They don’t, and treating them as a single phenomenon (i.e. uncivil disobedience) blurs important distinctions. (We say more about this in the paper’s section II.)

What shadow libraries are doing belongs to a different moral category altogether, one we call unilateral remedial action: lawbreaking that aims not to persuade institutions but to directly repair an injustice those institutions have failed to fix. Its natural companions are cases like maintaining underground abortion networks where access is denied, breaking a blockade to deliver medicine, or redistributive theft. Separating such acts from acts of political disobedience (civil or uncivil) matters because acts of this kind answer to a different set of justificatory conditions: ones closer to the ethics of defensive or rescue action than to the ethics of dissent. On our account, an act of unilateral remedial action is permissible only if it (a) responds to a real injustice, (b) genuinely remedies it, (c) is necessary, and (d) is proportionate. The paper works through these four conditions in detail.

Response to a Real Injustice

The first condition asks whether there is a real injustice to remedy. Here the answer is “Yes”. Access to academic research is restricted mainly through price, and those prices are not incidental. They are set within a publishing market dominated by a small number of large commercial firms (e.g., Elsevier is alone responsible for 17% of the global articles published)[ii], which sell access to work that is largely funded by the public and is produced, edited, and peer-reviewed by academics. We do not deny that publishers provide real services. They help with hosting, formatting, archiving, and managing submissions, amongst other things. These services, however, do not explain the scale of the fees charged to universities and libraries.

The problem, then, is not that academic research may never be priced. Some costs may be justified (though, of course, there is a further question about the just allocation of such costs). The problem is that current pricing practices impose disproportionate and avoidable barriers to participation in academic life. Those barriers, we explain in the paper, produce three connected injustices: they violate a defeasible right to access knowledge; they marginalize research communities that cannot afford full participation, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); and they give rise to epistemic injustices.

The Remedial Condition

The remedial condition asks for more than good intentions: the act must not simply protest injustice, but actually deliver the good that is being withheld. This is where unilateral remedial action shows its teeth. Contrasting sharing academic research illegally with two other practices may help us illustrate this point.

Consider first redistributive theft (i.e., Robin Hood-like cases). It too aims at remedying a real injustice. However, it is harder to justify, because taking money from one person to give to another deprives the first of something, and whether such unilateral redistribution actually remedies anything is both contested and empirically uncertain (see, pp 270-271). Illegal sharing of academic research is different: digital duplication (much like photocopying) an article doesn’t take it away from anyone, and it puts the withheld good directly into the hands of those denied it. On the remedial test, it does much better.

The second contrast cuts against shadow libraries. Many of them don’t restrict themselves to sharing academic research; they also share trade books, fiction, and other cultural works. But the case we have made is specifically about academic knowledge, and it does not automatically extend to these other materials (many of which are primarily for entertainment purposes). The relevant injustice and the interests at stake may simply be different: the deprivation that makes restricting research an injustice is not obviously present when what is shared is a novel, so a separate argument would be needed. Besides, at face value, it is not clear that depriving someone from certain forms of entertainment is an injustice that needs remedying. The remedial condition, therefore, allows us to justify the sharing of academic knowledge, but it does not hand shadow libraries a blanket permission for everything they happen to host.

Necessity

For illegal sharing to be necessary, there must be no less harmful alternative that is both feasible and just as remedial. We consider four main alternatives — the “gold” and “green” routes to open access, public libraries and inter-library loans, sharing pre-prints through academic networks, and wholesale reform of publishing. We then argue that none of them clears the bar. The golden route, the model formally favoured by many journals and funders, actually compounds the problem, as it funds open access through article processing charges (APCs) that can run into thousands of dollars per paper, paid on top of existing subscriptions, and is out of reach for LMIC researchers and for researchers without an institutional affiliation. Both the gold and green routes are also radically incomplete: they do little for older research, or for work by authors who are unwilling or unable to publish via these routes.

Nor do public libraries, inter-library loans, or academic networks solve the problem. Public libraries are themselves constrained by budgets and licensing agreements, and in many cases users must be physically present to access subscription databases. Inter-library agreements are valuable, but they are often limited to physical collections and commonly exclude online databases and e-books. Private academic networks such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and SSRN help in some cases, but they are incomplete (e.g., they do not allow for the sharing of books), uneven, and dependent on what authors choose or are able to upload. They also do not reliably provide access to the final, peer-reviewed version of the record. These routes, we argue, are better than nothing, but they still leave a large portion of the injustices unremedied (and sometimes compound them).

Reform is welcome but slow, and it is no answer to a researcher who needs an article today to carry on their research. Shadow libraries, by contrast, already deliver immediate and near-universal access; their continued existence under sustained legal pressure is itself evidence of how feasible they are. (We develop these comparisons in detail in the paper.)

Proportionality

Finally, the harms. Here a distinction matters: between the harm done to those responsible for the injustice (publishers, states) and the harm done to those who aren’t, or are only marginally so (individual authors, third parties).

Here our arguments supported a somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion. One might expect the lone academic emailing her own paper to a colleague to be on the safest moral ground, and a sprawling shadow library to be on the shakiest. We argue that it can be the other way around. The individual author is a party to the publishing contract she is breaching, so she carries promissory obligations that a shadow library – a third party to that contract – never undertook; and she shoulders personal legal and professional risks from which the library’s anonymity insulates it. The intuitively “small” act can therefore be harder to justify than the large one.

The broader picture, however, favours illegal sharing. Most authors are barely harmed at all: few earn meaningful royalties from research, most are salaried to produce it, and there is evidence that freely circulating work through shadow libraries actually increases citations, which serves authors’ interests. As for the publishers themselves, it is far from clear that they are meaningfully harmed. The decisive point is empirical: shadow libraries have operated at scale for some fifteen years, and academic publishing has not collapsed into disorder. On the contrary, major publishers have gone on to posting record profits in the last few years, which puts pressure on the claim that illegal sharing is doing them grave damage.

Conclusion: The Remedial Gap

Illegal sharing of academic research responds to a real injustice, genuinely remedies it, is necessary, and is proportionate — and, perhaps surprisingly, it is often compatible with the very values copyright is supposed to serve. On those grounds, we conclude that it is morally permissible.

There is a further thought we want readers to take away. Shadow libraries do not merely break rules; in delivering the goods, they also expose what we call a “remedial gap”. By showing that academic knowledge can be made immediately available and at scale, they demonstrate that the deprivation was never inevitable. The barriers that keep research out of reach are not a fact of nature. They are sustained by lagging institutions and extractive actors who could make this knowledge available on fair terms but insist on refusing to do so. Justified unilateral remedial action thus has a diagnostic value beyond the relief it provides: it reveals which injustices persist primarily because no one with the power to fix them has chosen to.

Permissibility is not obligation, and we stop short of insisting that everyone ought to share — though we think that open access activists, like Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan, who supported a duty to share academic knowledge may well have been right. We also think that illegal sharing is a provisional remedy: it can patch the gap, but it cannot close it. Closing it means repairing the deeper injustices that plague academic publishing — the unpaid labour, the double payment for publicly funded work, the oligopoly. Repairing such injustices, we claim, calls for a different kind of responsibility, one that falls partly on us as researchers. It is exercised in ordinary professional choices: publishing in diamond open-access journals (even when they are less prestigious), prioritising reviewing for them, joining their editorial boards, declining exploitative review requests where we can, and lending our prestige to non-extractive publishing models. These steps are modest on their own, but together they are how remedial action becomes remedial reform. The aim, ultimately, should be to make shadow libraries unnecessary.

[i] Candice Delmas, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil (Oxford University Press, 2018).

[ii] About,” Elsevier, accessed January 31, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250131232938/https://www.elsevier.com/about

By Christian B. Miller, Meghan Sullivan, Devin Gouvêa, Gregory Robson, Matthew Frise, and Philip Swenson

It has been 40 years since the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s highly influential, “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Many Christian philosophers are indebted to Plantinga for inspiring them to think more deeply about the form that Christian philosophy might take in their scholarship, and especially about the importance of scholarly autonomy and integrity.

The goal of this paper is to follow in Plantinga’s footsteps by setting out advice for the next generation of Christians taking up the vocation of philosophy. We have in mind especially Christians who are in graduate school, post-doctoral positions, or early career faculty. We are also hopeful that much of what we say will be of value to Christians still struggling to live out their vocation in the profession (like us), and to non-Christians who teach or mentor Christian students or take Christianity seriously as a meritorious subject of teaching and research.

In his article, Plantinga focused on case studies involving verificationism, the problem of evil, and personhood. So one thing our project could do is simply extend Plantinga’s advice to topics more prominent in the Christian philosophical literature today, such as faith, cognitive science of religion, religion in the public square, and atonement.

Such a project is no doubt important. But our goal is far more ambitious – it is to dramatically broaden the scope of Plantinga’s advice. He focused on thinking about how best to carry out academic research in philosophy as a Christian. But research is only one component of the lives of Christian philosophers. Indeed, for many it is a secondary or even marginal component of their lives in the profession. In our careers, we must consider all their components. Hence this paper explores the life of a Christian philosopher in the context of the profession, the classroom, public philosophy, and, yes, research as well. We end by thinking about the next forty years, and what Christian philosophy might look like in the future.

Anger-Management for Philosophers

By Daphne Brandenburg

One reason to worry about the free will problem is that persons do not deserve to be blamed for their bad actions when they are not free to do otherwise. And if our universe is a determined one, persons may never be free to do otherwise. Many philosophers respond to this problem by explaining how or why determinism does not exclude the possibility of free choices for which persons may deserve to be blamed.

I have sympathy for this response, but it has failed to convince everybody. Many of my students, for example, aren’t convinced by it. The free-will debate continues to rear its head in different places. It sometimes does so within my own head too. There will be days when I balk at the suggestion that some nasty person does not deserve to be blamed for what they did. Then, with time, or in a different mood, doubts creep in. Did they really know what they were doing? If they could choose to do better, then why didn’t they do better? What explains why they acted as they did? Does this explanation also excuse them?

An appealing intervention in this debate is to simply change the question. What, if anything, is the (further) point of blame? Does blaming a person bring about something else that is valuable?

The term blame may refer to a range of phenomena, but let’s focus on anger that manifests as an accusation. Although I do not think that blame always manifests as anger nor that anger is always a form of blame, the two often coincide. Let’s call such anger: accusatory anger. What is good about accusatory anger, besides the (contested) fact that a person may be deserving of it?

In my paper in the Journal of the APA, I critique a currently popular answer to this question. An increasing number of philosophers maintain that such anger renders its subject more sensitive to the considerations which they should have responded to. On this account the value of deserved blame can be found in its expression or communication to the person whom you blame. The idea is that doing so will bring home to the person how bad their action really was and why, and that resulting feelings of remorse tend to motivate the person to make amends and do better. In other words: blame will teach them!

I question whether such moral cultivation through communication is really the paradigmatic function of accusatory anger.

There is a tension between this particular position in philosophy, and a commonly held position in conflict-resolution studies and mediation therapy or counselling. According to this latter position, there is good reason to doubt that expressing or communicating blame will improve moral agency.

One worry is that expressing your anger as blame, rather than helping a person fully see how they’ve hurt or harmed others, instead motivates them to protect themselves from blame. They may do so by, for example, avoiding the issue, rationalizing what happened, or seeking appeasement for the wrong reasons. It is worth noting that deterrence is different from improved moral understanding, and does not always lead to it.

Another worry is that you yourself do not have the best access to the considerations that matter when you are angry. Anger requires interpretation in order for a person to get clear on the reasons for their anger and on how best to address them. This may be difficult when you are actively angry. It is also, importantly, further complicated by the fact that your anger is accusatory, because this outward direction discourages you from investigating your own perspective. For all those reasons, accusatory anger is typically considered to get in the way of improved moral understanding.

None of this takes away from the fact that anger is only human, that we should regulate it wisely, and that doing so may sometimes cost too much energy or may not be reasonable to ask of a person. Note also that this position implies anger has value insofar as it tells you something about what you care about and what you can and cannot put up with.

But this position does imply that, when you want to achieve shared moral clarity, it would be wise to reappraise your anger before you communicate about it. It recommends that you investigate what your anger tells you about what really matters to you and why, and what you —for that reason— would want to ask of the other person. This form of communication appeals to the other person’s capacity for empathy and perspective taking. When successful the other person also sees what matters and cares about that, because they care about you.

If this position is right, and there is empirical evidence that speaks in favour of it, then the philosophical position has to be reconsidered. Blame’s vindication cannot be found in the purported paradigmatic moral improvement that it brings about when it is expressed to the blamee. This is not to say that blame will never teach them, but moral education is unlikely to be the typical or even constitutive function of blaming.

So where does this leave us? Is there no point to blaming others at all? That conclusion would be too quick. Finding fault with someone may still be valuable for reasons that go beyond the (contested) reason that the person simply deserves it. But I think we have to look further in order to get a clearer picture of what those reasons are.

By Abraham Mathew

In E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Margaret Schlegel discovers that her unwed sister Helen is pregnant and without a place to stay the night. She begs her husband Henry Wilcox to let Helen stay the night at their estate. Henry, however, is angered when he hears that Helen’s pregnancy resulted from an affair with a married man. Instead of letting her stay the night, he demands that Helen leave Howards End at once. Margaret is stunned. She reminds Henry of his own past: he had himself kept a mistress when they were engaged, and she had chosen to forgive him rather than end things.

“Will you forgive her,” she begs, “as you would hope to be forgiven, and as you have actually been forgiven? Forgive her for one night only. That will be enough.” Henry remains unmoved, angering Margaret:

“Not any more of this!” she cried. “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry. You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? […] Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent. Only say to yourself: “What Helen has done, I’ve done.” (Forster 2000, 262-3)

I suspect you share Margaret’s view that Henry’s refusal to forgive is a moral failure on his part. What’s more, the reason it seems so is precisely because he was previously forgiven himself. But that’s a striking thought when you think about it. Why should what happened between Henry and Margaret have any bearing on what Henry now owes Helen? How does being the recipient of forgiveness in one relationship make it wrong not to forgive in another—generating a requirement to ‘pay forgiveness forward’, as it were?[1]

In this paper, I offer an answer in three steps:

Step 1: Forgiveness can be more or less gracious

When you offer to forgive someone, you offer to treat them better than their wrongdoing strictly merits: to cease the resentment, reproach, withdrawal of fellowship, and other forms of blame that their behaviour warranted. In this sense, forgiveness is an extension of unmerited goodwill or grace. What’s more, some offers of forgiveness are more gracious than others. For instance, forgiving my parent’s murderer is far more gracious than forgiving a minor slight. In general, how gracious an offer of forgiveness is depends on a variety of factors, like the severity of the wrong, whether the wrongdoer has repented, and the prior relationship between wrongdoer and victim.

Step 2: How we forgive is governed by a consistency norm

Being blamed involves social burdens like the ones listed above: being resented, reproached, and losing the warmth and fellowship of your peers. Forgiveness lifts these burdens. This fact, I argue, requires that we be consistent in a certain way when we forgive. Suppose Philippa forgives Iris for accidentally breaking a vase at a party. Shortly after, Betty breaks a vase of equal value under analogous circumstances and apologizes just as sincerely. Neither is a closer friend of Philippa’s than the other, neither has a history of carelessness, and neither has any excuse. In short, forgiving Betty would require no more gracious an offer of forgiveness than forgiving Iris did. But Philippa refuses to forgive Betty, for no good reason. Betty can rightly complain, “Why does Iris get relieved of the burdens of blame but not me, given that our situations are relevantly identical? Why am I being made to bear costs that Iris was spared, for no good reason?”

What makes Philippa’s refusal objectionable, I argue, is a consistency norm that governs how we forgive. All else equal, if you extend a gracious offer of forgiveness to one person, you cannot without adequate justification withhold an equally or less gracious offer from someone in a relevantly similar position. To do so would be to treat the person left bearing the burdens of blame unfairly, thus wronging them.

Step 3: Accepting forgiveness generates a parallel consistency requirement

Whether or not you accept forgiveness matters, or so I contend: you could decline it, say, because you don’t think you are ready for it yet, or because you dispute you’ve done anything wrong in the first place.[2] But if you accept forgiveness, you voluntarily allow the burdens of blame to be lifted from you, and this generates a consistency requirement parallel to the one in step two. If you have accepted a gracious offer of forgiveness for yourself, you cannot subsequently withhold an equally or less gracious offer from someone in a relevantly similar position, without adequate justification. To do so is to avail yourself of a reprieve you are unwilling to extend to another who is no more deserving of blame, without adequate justification, and this is to treat them unfairly.

This is where Henry goes wrong. Margaret’s forgiveness of him is remarkably gracious. She commits to spending the rest of her life with him despite his infidelity. What he is asked to extend to Helen is considerably less gracious—merely to let her stay one night—and Helen’s moral situation is arguably no worse than Henry’s was. Having accepted a gracious offer of forgiveness for himself, he withholds a less gracious offer from Helen without adequate justification, treating her unfairly and thus wronging her.

Implications

If successful, my argument has important implications for our thinking about forgiveness. Here are two:

a) Forgiveness is not always discretionary: The standard view in the literature on forgiveness has been that forgiveness is always discretionary: a victim may always permissibly withhold forgiveness, it is never wrong not to forgive.[3] One motivation for this is that there is something essentially gift-like about forgiveness: it is to be accepted with gratitude rather than as something one is owed. And since gifts are products of unprescribed generosity, not obligation, so is forgiveness. But if my argument holds, this orthodoxy is mistaken. Forgiveness is sometimes required. But this needn’t rule out the giftedness of forgiveness. I maintain that it is an act of grace—an extension of unmerited goodwill—to be accepted with gratitude rather than as something one is owed. What my argument suggests instead is that we may have to countenance the possibility of obligatory gifts—things one is required to give, but which must nonetheless be accepted with gratitude rather than as something one is owed.[4]

b) Forgiveness is a more social practice than we tend to think: We tend to think of forgiveness as a private transaction between two people, with its norms fixed entirely by facts about their relationship: what the wrongdoer did, whether they have repented, and the like. If successful, my argument shows that this picture is incomplete. Whether you are required to forgive someone today can depend on what happened between you and someone else entirely. The norms of forgiveness are partly fixed by the wider network of relationships in which victim and wrongdoer are embedded, and by the histories of giving and receiving forgiveness that have shaped their respective places within it. Forgiveness turns out to be far less individualistic and far more social a practice than philosophers have assumed.

Take a look at the paper for a more detailed defence of each of the aforementioned steps and more implications!

[1] A similar puzzle is raised by the ‘Parable of the Unforgiving Servant’ in the New Testament. (See Matthew 18: 21-35.)

[2] In the paper, I give a more detailed defence of this uptake condition on forgiveness

[3] As Per-Erik Milam notes, this ‘Essential Electivity’ thesis is often taken for granted, rather than argued for, in the literature, although he helpfully lists a few that have explicitly defended it. Milam is one of the few dissenters against this thesis in recent years, alongside others like Mario Attie-Picker and Miranda Fricker.

[4] I’m not the first to have argued for the existence of obligatory gifts on basis of obligatory forgiveness being possible. See Mario Attie-Picker’s excellent paper here.

What are we explaining, and is it what we are trying to explain?

By David Colaço

Sometimes, we try to explain one thing but end up explaining something else. In other words, the explanatory target (or explanandum) might change. Often, this change is productive. Philosophical accounts like those I review here address when targets should be recharacterized based on new evidence, including evidence about the details that explain it (or explanans). After all, we want our explanations to be as good as possible. For this reason, the target should sometimes change, so that it and its explanation fit our best evidence. Though (hopefully) intuitive, this line of reasoning raises the possibility of a more problematic outcome: that we stick with an original target, though the details better explain another.

This is the topic of “The Problem of Explaining Shifting Targets” (2026, EJPS), in which I introduce the eponymous problem, PEST for short. PEST has three steps. First, an agent articulates a target that they want to explain. How they do this can vary, but I think of articulation as characterizing the target or facts about it. Given that ‘target’ or ‘explanandum’ can be ambiguous, I coopt Hempel’s distinction between explanandum-statement and explanandum-phenomenon. My use of ‘target’ fits the former, and for those of an erotetic disposition, they can be questions. These targets stand in relation to the latter. What matters is that, however articulated, a target has specificity. It has empirical consequences. It also has contrastive foils. We can treat the target as a fact contrasted by a foil, asking why this rather than that. How we parse ‘this’ from ‘that’ reflects the specificity of the target.

Second, when explaining the original target, an agent shifts to a manifestly different target. ‘Explaining’ denotes both how one formulates the explanatory details that answer how or why a target occurs and the investigations that support this formulation. When targets are manifestly different, evidence can be provided for one that is not evidence for another. This difference can be of specificity, such as when the original target is more detailed than the shifted one. It also can be of reference, such as when the targets pick out different explananda-phenomena. These differences can be detected, and an agent’s interest is sensitive to them.

Third, an agent treats the explanatory details as explaining the original target, not recognizing the manifest difference between it and the shifted target. Rather, the explanatory details are taken to be for the original target, with the agent not considering a change, whether targets are different, or whether they are equally interesting. Because the second step is satisfied, we can grant that the details explain the shifted target. However, they are presented as details that explain the original. It is this third step that makes PEST a problem.

If PEST seems abstract, a toy example helps with its bite. Imagine that your buddy tells you that they think drinking turmeric tea prevents cancer. This is the first step. Although they do not do scientific studies, they research that a chemical in turmeric has been shown to inhibit tumor invasion and growth in the lab. They explain that this is why drinking turmeric prevents cancer. Mulling over this response, you recognize that the studies say nothing about drinking. They were in vitro. Turmeric might have some effect, but it seems like their target has become importantly less specific through their explaining. This is the second step. Say that your buddy is steadfast, treating the details as explaining what they initially stated. Doing this, without consideration that their target and what they potentially can explain might be different, is the third step. While this example is simplified, my article addresses real-world cases, in which agents are non-experts (like this example), scientific experts in different fields, or even experts within a field. For each real-world case, the consequences of PEST were quite bad, wreaking havoc on the research in which they occurred.

My anecdotes suggest that readings of examples like this are worryingly diverse, highlighting the need for more investigations into our commitments to explanatory targets. Nonetheless, a common reaction is that agents in these cases are obviously engaging in bad reasoning. Bad reasoning is worth identifying, but what makes the problem an explanatory one?

What makes PEST a problem, I argue, ties to the nature of explanation. There are three reasons why this problem is liable to occur, which link to the steps of PEST. First, agents tend to be interested in original targets. This is why they want to explain them and might be reticent to give them up, especially when alternatives are less interesting to them. Second, targets are not static. Explaining can reshape them. By devising and assessing explanatory details, we gain information, which can provide new expectations about a target. These expectations can inform new empirical consequences and contras­tive foils. Yet, consequences and foils are how we articulate targets, giving explaining the ability to reshape them. Third, agents need not recognize when explaining reshapes a target. The information acquired through explaining need not undercut empirical support for the original target, so supporters of this target may not be in any obvious way acting irrationally if they steadfastly hold on to what interests them. For these reasons, PEST should not be all that surprising.

I hope that these reasons give the reader an impression of why combating PEST can be difficult. This difficulty, unfortunately, increases when we probe what it means to not recognize a manifestly different shift of targets. A good faith reading would be one in which the agent genuinely does not realize the difference. The example does not involve your buddy having ulterior motives. However, all that is needed for my account is that the agent does not acknowledge and address the shifted target.

On this reading, PEST is more sinister. An agent could shift targets on purpose while feign­ing ignorance or simply not acknowledging it. They can “bait-and-switch” targets, implicitly shifting from a controversial target to a comparatively banal but explainable one. This tactic could be used to concoct the veneer of support for a target that we should not accept. It would be effective if people were questionable judges of explanations, which I fear they often are. This sinister character is a good reason for more research on PEST: these tactics can be used to achieve unscrupulous aims. For this reason, we always should ask: what are we explaining, and is it what we are trying to explain? When we ask this ques­tion, we acknowledge that explanatory targets can shift.

This article was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), as part of Project Number 528370787.

By Mike Cundall

We philosophers love thought experiments, so here’s another one for us. Can you imagine someone from the political left and the political right, at least in the current US political climate, getting together and sharing a laugh? Most people I ask find this a difficult thing to imagine. Laugh at the other? Sure. Laugh with? Probably not. If you responded similarly, this points out a deep problem, but the problem isn’t simply the division, though that’s also a huge issue. It’s the fractured relationships that promote the viciousness in modern political discourse.

This question provides the intuitive hook I use to explain the main argument of my book “Humor and the Common Good.” Political work, political discussion, and indeed the project of the polis, of living together in society, is often a heavy lift. We have to work with people with whom reasonable and even unreasonable disagreements arise all the time. What to do with our limited resources, what we should fund, how much, etc., are all difficult questions to tackle and that’s when we’re working with people with whom we can laugh and share humor. When we see our fellow citizens as so fundamentally other that we often find them objects of laughter, well, that work is, I suggest, infinitely harder. In order to achieve the common good, we must have certain relationships that support our coming together as people to achieve those goals. Shared humor and laughter are ways we create and maintain our relationships and are thus fundamentally basic common goods. This is the essential argument of my book.

As with any philosophical project the devil is in the details. I begin with David Sulmasy’s (2001) classificatory schema of common goods. He argues that there are four main types of common good. The first kind is what he calls the Aggregative Common Good. This is a good held by each individual because it has benefits. Clearly laughter, humor, and mirth are beneficial and people like them for not only the pleasant feeling they give, but there is much evidence to support the conclusion that these are all important for our own wellbeing—important beyond the good feelings we experience. Indeed, laughter, humor, and mirth have all been show to have benefits for our physical and mental health and chapters two and three review and discuss the variety of findings that support the claim. But to point out that laughter, humor, and mirth are goods in these aggregative ways is neither terribly original, nor is it, perhaps, philosophically interesting. It’s certainly not expanding our understanding of humor, laughter, and the common good.

But laughter, humor, and mirth are goods in ways that outstrip their instrumental utility. This project expands our understanding of the common good and of laughter, humor, and mirth, by arguing that they are also what Sulmasy identifies as Integral Common Goods. These goods are different than the thing or project sorts examples people often come across when exposed to the common good in places like textbooks. In those spaces, the common good is shown to be exemplified in things like roads, libraries, and schools. They are things or places the society creates for the betterment of its members. Integral Common Goods are common goods not because they are things or places, but rather they are goods because they are conditions upon which people come together to collaborate that makes possible the identification and achievement of certain agreed upon goals. Furthermore, it is requisite that humans be in relationship with one another in order to get together to identify and achieve goods like roads and libraries. That is, being part of a community, being in relationships and the conditions on which those relationships are built are themselves goods. Being in community is a good for both community and individual.

Laughter, humor, and mirth, are, as I argue throughout the text, important and fundamental ways in which we create, build, and reinforce relationships and community and are thus Integral Common Goods. The book is interdisciplinary at its core. It draws on a diverse range of disciplines ranging from neuroscience to biology, psychology, cognitive science, and, yes, philosophy to make the case. Chapters five through seven then undertake to provide evidence, drawing on empirical and philosophical sources, to support the idea that humor, laughter, and mirth are crucial for relationships. Chapter five begins with a look at how important laughter, humor, and mirth are for the creation and maintenance of closer interpersonal relationships. Chapter five then addresses how important laughter, humor, and mirth are at the creation and maintenance of broader relationships like the ones found in society. From the workplace, to our friend groups, to our political divisions, humor, laughter, and mirth are critical aspects of society. In chapter seven I look at the ways in which humor, laughter, and mirth, primarily through ridicule, can fracture relationships and degrade the common good. The book then closes with the obligatory look at some possible objections, which were clearly cherry-picked by the author to make the case stronger. 😉

The argument in the book isn’t Pollyannish. I don’t think that humor, laughter, and mirth are the only solution to the political divisions we encounter. But they are fundamentally important ways in which we, as humans, come to have and develop relationships. When we laugh with others, when we share our humor in the hopes of having the other enjoy, as we do, the humor, when we bond through laughter at the absurdities of the world, we are reaching out to the person in a basic and powerful way. It is, perhaps with only a little exaggeration, treating people as ends in themselves in ways only humor can.

If you would like to read more of my work you can check out my Substack where I discuss humor and philosophy.

By Josh Hunt

Across math and the sciences, there are often multiple ways to solve the same problem. Mathematicians routinely search for alternative proofs of previously proven theorems (Avigad 2006; Dawson 2015; Morris 2021). Physicists routinely construct or apply alternative frameworks for solving a domain of problems (witness the myriad formulations of classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, etc.) But what is the point or value of having multiple problem-solving strategies, especially when one already knows the answer or has an effective strategy for determining it? One thing that makes this issue particularly puzzling is that the problem-solving strategies I have in mind are not rivals. By definition, compatible formulations do not disagree about the way the world is. Questions about the value of compatible formulations thereby differ noticeably from related issues arising in the context of rival theories or rival foundations.

One particularly deflationary response cites the relative convenience of different problem-solving procedures in different contexts. Sometimes, it’s simply easier or faster to solve a problem using one method rather than another. In casual conversation, scientists have sometimes suggested this answer to me. But for a long time, I have felt that if convenience were the whole story, then this would be a fairly depressing state of affairs. Constructing alternative methods seems to be an integral part of the intellectual value of math and science—part and parcel with how we deepen our understanding of phenomena. If the value of compatible formulations is merely one of convenience, then much of what seems intellectually valuable about these methods is an illusion.

At another extreme, various inflationary answers suggest themselves. Perhaps one formulation carves reality more closely at its joints. Against Dasgupta (2018), I am inclined to agree with Sider (2011), North (2021), Wilhelm (2025), and others that such differences in joint-carving would possess objective value. Indeed, as Wilhelm suggests, it would seem to do so constitutively (2025, 632-633). Nonetheless, I remain skeptical that we will ever know that one compatible formulation is more joint-carving than another: these facts of the matter do not seem to be epistemically accessible. The argument structure I have in mind mirrors van Fraassen’s (1975) in “Platonism’s Pyrrhic Victory”: many conceptually possible worlds where Platonism is true are empirically indistinguishable from worlds where Platonism is false. In either class of worlds, we would want an account of mathematical knowledge and its value. Similarly, for any given set of compatible formulations, a world where one formulation is more fundamental than another is empirically indistinguishable from the reverse case (and also from a case where both formulations are equally fundamental).

Again, I’m happy to grant that there may well be facts of the matter regarding the relative fundamentality or naturalness of compatible formulations. What I deny is that these putative facts get us closer to resolving the initial puzzle, specifically its cognitive dimensions. Similar concerns afflict potential differences in explanatoriness. Perhaps one of the formulations better tracks the reasons why a phenomenon obtains, thereby giving a more complete or otherwise superior explanation. But how are we to ascertain which of two (or more) compatible explanations does a better job tracking ontic reasons why? We may have intuitions about explanatory relevance, but our intuitions could be misleading. Consequently, it seems to me that much of the intellectual value of reformulating floats free from these potential differences in naturalness, joint-carving, fundamentality, or ontic reasons why. If this is right, then a positive account of their intellectual value can remain agnostic about these potential metaphysical differences.

The view I defend is a kind of middle ground between the extremes of conventionalism and fundamentalism. I call it ‘conceptualism’ for the emphasis it places on the role that alter-native concepts play in changing our understanding. And like van Fraassen (1975), I welcome analogies to medieval conceptualism, as a middle ground between nominalism and realism about properties. In short, I believe it is valuable to reformulate a problem when doing so clarifies what we need to know to solve that problem. This typically involves alternative concepts, leading to an alternative problem-solving plan. By clarifying what we need to know, a reformulation provides a deeper understanding of that phenomenon.

In completing the project, the hardest part was articulating what it takes for two formulations to be intellectually distinct, in the sense of not being trivial notational variants of each other. Part of the challenge here is that even trivial notational variants are written with some differences in notation or language. Hence, applying a problem-solving plan based on one of them requires knowing something different (i.e. a different notation) than a plan based on another notation. Sorting out this issue requires something like an account either of synonymy of concepts (voiced in different languages) or epistemic equivalence of plans. I rely on an account given by Gibbard (2012).

To illustrate various responses, I’ll develop an example that complements those discussed in the paper. Most people remember the standard formula for calculating the area of a triangle, as a function of base length and height (a.k.a. ‘altitude’): A = (1/2) (bh). This formula underwrites the following problem-solving plan for determining the area of a given triangle: (i) select one side to be the ‘base’ and determine its length; (ii) determine the triangle’s height (measured by a perpendicular line through the base to the opposite vertex); (iii) apply the area formula. Steps (i) and (ii) specify the facts one needs to know in order to apply this formula, along with knowing how to multiply real numbers. In the language of the paper, these are the inputs to the inferential relation given by the standard area formula. Nonetheless, one might wonder: do I need to know the height of the triangle?

Digging deeper into our memories of high school trigonometry, one might recall that two triangles that possess the same side lengths are congruent (the “side-side-side” (SSS) test for congruency). Of course, congruent triangles have the same area. Hence, we expect there to be a formula for triangle area as a function of side-length. And indeed, there is: Heron’s formula.¹ Considering a triangle with side lengths a, b, and c, its area equals square root of [s (s-a) (s-b) (s-c)]. Here, s is the “semi-perimeter” of the triangle, defined as (a + b + c)/2. Notice how the semi-perimeter is itself wholly a function of the side lengths of the triangle. Hence, Heron’s formula tells us how to calculate a triangle’s area as a function of the lengths of its three sides. It turns out that we don’t need to know the height of a triangle to calculate its area. Knowledge of its side lengths suffices, provided we know Heron’s formula (along with knowing how to use it, e.g. knowing how to add, multiply, and calculate square roots of real numbers).

So the situation is this: we have two compatible problem-solving plans for determining the area of a triangle. These plans are not rivals: they do not conflict with each other. We are not forced to choose one plan over the other. We might use one plan for some cases, and another plan in other cases. My basic question is this: what is the value, if anything, of having these two ways of determining the area of a triangle? Conceptualism answers as follows: it is valuable insofar as these are inferentially distinct problem-solving plans, requiring different bits of knowledge (or concepts) to apply. On my view, learning a second formulation improves our understanding of triangle area by clarifying what we need to know to calculate areas. The same can be said if we started out knowing Heron’s formula instead. The standard area formula teaches us that we do not need to know the lengths of each side of a triangle to calculate its area. Knowledge of the base length and the height suffices (in other work, I refer to these facts about what we need to know or what suffices to know as ‘epistemic dependence relations.’ My basic contention is that two problem-solving plans are significantly distinct if they involve different epistemic dependence relations.)

This situation stands in stark contrast with problem-solving plans that are trivial notational variants of each other. For instance, consider a reformulation of the standard area formula where we simply replace the symbol ‘h’ for the height with the symbol ‘t’: A = (1/2) (bt). A plan using this formula requires knowing all the same inferential relations as the previous plan that uses the standard area formula. Hence, this alternative plan does not change our understanding of triangle area. As I note briefly in the paper, the extent to which two plans are trivial notational variants of each other comes in degrees.² Consider a plan based around the formula A = (hb)/2. In this plan, we divide by two rather than multiply by one-half. One can imagine implementing different algorithms for these two operations. Nonetheless, every other inferential relation remains the same. Clearly, this slight variant of the standard area formula is intellectually much further from a plan based around Heron’s formula.

To close, let’s see how various other accounts of the value of reformulating fare with this example. A conventionalist says that it is valuable insofar as one formulation is more convenient than the other. For instance, sometimes you might already know the side lengths (a, b, and c) and have a calculator to determine square roots, but lack an easy way of measuring a triangle’s height. In this context, it would be more convenient to apply Heron’s formula than the standard formula. However, I find it implausible that whether or not Heron’s formula is intellectually valuable depends on whether or not people have calculators. There seems to be some value to the formula that floats free from these contingent practical matters. Perhaps in some contexts, applying the standard formula is just as convenient as applying Heron’s. My intuition is that there remains something epistemically valuable about knowing both formulae and the distinct problem-solving plans they support. Hence, I do not view conventionalism as an adequate account of the value of reformulating.

Going to the other extreme, fundamentalism posits that it is valuable insofar as one of the area formulae is more fundamental than the other. Personally, I have no intuitions that speak in favor of one of these area formulae. Neither one seems more fundamental, joint-carving, or natural than the other. Given that I nevertheless understand triangle area differently based on which problem-solving plan I use, this difference in understanding does not seem to depend on any background metaphysical differences. Even if (unbeknownst to me) there is such a difference, we can provide a positive, non-deflationary account of the intellectual value of reformulating without taking a stand on such matters.

Relatedly, we can consider a rival middle ground position to my own: explanationism. An explanationist argues that what matters is whether one formulation provides a better explanation than the other. But in terms of explaining the area of a triangle, both problem-solving plans perform admirably. As with the case of putative differences in joint carving, I have no intuitions that speak in favor of one of these problem-solving plans being more explanatory than the other. Short of embroiling oneself in substantial metaphysical commitments, I struggle to see how one formula could better explain the area of a triangle. They both seem to provide equally legitimate explanations. If in fact only one of them gets at the actual reasons why that underlie triangle area, this fact is not epistemically accessible. Ultimately then, explanationism seems sterile without recourse to fundamentalism. The differences in understanding that interest me float free from putative explanatory differences.

Nevertheless, conceptualism does seem to have one structural disadvantage compared with the other accounts. Conventionalism, fundamentalism, and explanationism each entails an answer to a natural question about the comparative value of two formulations: if you had to pick just one formulation to understand something, which is better (or more valuable)? This comparative question is analogous to asking which of two chocolate bars tastes better, granting that all-things-considered we might still prefer to eat both. In contrast, conceptualism does not suggest an immediate answer. For instance, the positive story I have told here does not settle which area formula, viewed in isolation, provides better understanding (if either).

I decided to save this question about comparative understanding for a future paper. I believe that part of mathematical and scientific practice is the development of intellectual preferences for formulations with certain features. When mathematicians or scientists judge one compatible formulation as providing better understanding than another, they express endorsement of these intellectual preferences. Certain intellectual preferences are instrumentally valuable for achieving the constitutive aims of mathematics or science. Practitioners thereby come to intellectually prefer some concepts over others for solving a particular class of problems. In doing so, they come to see a formulation based on those concepts as providing a better understanding of the phenomenon than other compatible formulations provide.

Footnotes:

¹Thanks to Marc Lange for bringing this example to my attention. See Dunham (1990) for details.

²Talk of ‘notational variance’ may give the misleading impression that it is notations—rather than plans—that are trivially or significantly different. In fact, in the first instance it is problem-solving plans that are significantly different or not. Depending on the plan it is embedded within, a notation itself may introduce nothing of intellectual significance. More generally, we might say that two notations are trivial notational variants tout court provided that they support exactly the same set of problem-solving plans.

References

Avigad, J. (2006). “Mathematical Method and Proof”. In: Synthese 153, pp. 105–159.

Dasgupta, S. (2018). “Realism and the Absence of Value”. In: Philosophical Review 127.3, pp. 279–322.

Dawson John W., J. (2015). Why Prove it Again? Alternative Proofs in Mathematical Practice. Cham: Birkhäuser.

Dunham, W. (1990). Journey through Genius. New York: Penguin.

Gibbard, A. (2012). Meaning and Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morris, R. L. (2021). “The Values of Mathematical Proofs”. In: B. Sriraman, ed. Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice. Springer International, pp. 1–32.

North, J. (2021). Physics, Structure, and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sider, T. (2011). Writing the Book of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Fraassen, B. C. (1975). “Platonism’s Pyrrhic Victory”. In: A. R. Anderson, R. B. Marcus, and R. M. Martin, eds. The Logical Enterprise. New Haven: Yale, pp. 39–50.

Wilhelm, I. (2025). “The Value of Naturalness”. In: Erkenntnis 90.90, pp. 625–644.

The Perks of a New Acquaintance Theory of Introspection

By Matt Duncan

One of the key fault lines in debates over introspection has to do with the epistemic value of introspection—with how good an epistemic method or resource it is, with how good we are at getting knowledge from it. Some philosophers are optimistic about these things; others are decidedly more pessimistic.

Introspection is that distinctively first-personal way that we come to know our own minds. Most philosophers who have written on the topic agree that introspection is special in some ways, particularly when it comes to introspection of our own conscious minds—our visual or auditory experiences, for our example, or our sensory experiences like pains or itches. One common way to construe that specialness is epistemically. Many philosophers throughout history have held that introspection of experiences is especially likely to yield knowledge or is especially epistemically secure in some important sense.

These are the optimists. The pessimists, in contrast, say introspection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Some even say it’s not epistemically special at all. They say it’s not only fallible but unreliable, prone to error.

Among the optimists are acquaintance theorists. They vary somewhat in their commitments, but they generally agree on at least two claims. First, by introspecting, we can be, and sometimes are, directly aware of—that is, acquainted with—our own experiences. Second, this acquaintance comes with certain epistemic advantages—it puts us in a privileged position to know certain things about our experiences.

The acquaintance theory is ancient, but it began to take new shape in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. It started with Bertrand Russell’s discussion of acquaintance in the early 20^th century, but it wasn’t until the 1990s and early 2000s that philosophers such as Brie Gertler and David Chalmers started building a theory of introspection. It remains an influential theory, but it also faces several prominent objections.

It’s high time for an update. Recently, some philosophers have started thinking about knowledge by acquaintance differently. According to Gertler, Chalmers, and other late-20^th/early-21^st century acquaintance theorists, introspective knowledge by acquaintance is constituted by beliefs about our experiences, and acquaintance contributes to that knowledge by playing an essential role in giving rise to—e.g., causing, grounding, justifying—it. However, according to more recent acquaintance theorists, such as me, Emad Atiq, Anna Giustina, Uriah Kriegel, Chris Ranalli, and Jacopo Pallagrosi, acquaintance doesn’t just give rise to knowledge—it is knowledge. On our view, acquaintance is itself a sui generis, non-propositional form of knowledge. Thus, we maintain that our most fundamental knowledge by acquaintance is constituted, not by beliefs in propositions, but by acquaintance with properties and objects.

This difference matters. Here I’ll briefly explain why. I’ll describe the old acquaintance theory and the new acquaintance theory in a bit more detail, then I’ll describe some of the most prominent objections to the acquaintance theory generally and explain how each of the theories handles the objections. I’ll highlight why the new response is better than the old, and thus show why the new theory is superior.

As I said, the key difference between the Old Acquaintance Theory of Introspection (“Old Theory” for short) and the New Acquaintance Theory of Introspection (“New Theory”) has to do with what constitutes knowledge by acquaintance. On the Old Theory, it is constituted by beliefs in propositions. The most influential—and best worked out—version of this theory comes from Gertler (2001, 2012) and Chalmers (1996, 2003). Here, in brief, is how privileged introspective knowledge by acquaintance is acquired on the Old Theory. First, introspection acquaints one with a property of one’s experience—a “phenomenal property” P. Then, careful attention to P allows for demonstrative reference to P. That is, by attending to P, one can demonstrate P—one can think “thus” and thereby refer to P. Then, one can form what’s called a “direct phenomenal concept” of P. This is a concept of P that is constituted by P itself—and only P itself. The way Gertler and Chalmers put it, careful attention to P allows one to “take up” or “embed” P into the content of the concept. And because this attention is direct—that is, achieved via acquaintance rather than some indirect route—the content of this concept can be wholly constituted by the property itself. No descriptive content is required. Once a direct phenomenal concept is formed, one can then attribute it to one’s experience and form a belief like, “My experience is P.” Beliefs like this will always be true. For, given that P is a direct phenomenal concept, and so is constituted by naught but a phenomenal property that one is currently experiencing, one can’t even form the belief “My experience is P” unless it is true. So, if one succeeds in forming this belief, it’s true. Any such belief is therefore infallible. This is what constitutes our “privileged” introspective knowledge by acquaintance on the Old Theory.

The New Theory starts in the same place: acquaintance with phenomenal property P. But then it ditches the rest—i.e., formation of a direct phenomenal concept of P, attribution of that concept to one’s experience, and formation of a belief that amounts to knowledge. It doesn’t imply that we can’t do these things, or that no one ever has. It’s just that, on the New Theory, we don’t need to do them to get privileged knowledge by acquaintance, and their output—beliefs—do not constitute our most fundamental knowledge by acquaintance. On the New Theory, our most fundamental knowledge by acquaintance is constituted by acquaintance itself. Acquaintance doesn’t just give rise to—e.g., cause, ground, justify, etc.—beliefs that amount to knowledge. It is knowledge. Thus, when one is acquainted with phenomenal property P, one’s acquaintance with P will typically (if not always) amount to knowledge. And, on the New Theory, this is how we get our most fundamental privileged introspective knowledge.

This difference makes a big difference—and, in particular, it makes a big difference to the appeal of the acquaintance theory of introspection. To illustrate this, I’ll now give a brief rundown of the most prominent objections to the acquaintance theory that have emerged over the past few decades, state how Old Theorists handled them along with the lingering worries their responses generated, and then state how New Theorists can handle the objections in way that’s an improvement on the old responses.

Objection 1: Scope worries. The acquaintance theory offers a rather limited picture of our privileged introspective knowledge. The knowledge it accounts for is both hard to get and, at most, a very narrow slice of knowledge. So, it doesn’t speak to any broader “special” epistemic relationship we have with our conscious minds.

• Old response: Privileged introspective knowledge is very limited and demanding. Acquaintance is just the first step. Careful attention, demonstration, conceptualization that “takes up” or “embeds” properties, attribution, belief—there’s a lot that goes into this knowledge. The result is a belief like, “My experience is P.” It’s not clear how common—even among philosophers—beliefs like this are.

  • Lingering worries: Trivializes privileged introspective knowledge and makes it out to be a philosopher’s parlor trick that few people have completed.

• New response: Privileged introspective knowledge is not very limited or demanding. It doesn’t require careful attention, an act of demonstration, conceptualization that “takes up” or “embeds” properties, attribution, or belief. It just requires acquaintance. We may be effortlessly acquainted with most if not all our experiences, and this constitutes privileged introspective knowledge.

  • Advantages: Speaks to a much broader, substantive phenomenon—and to the idea that we each have a “special” epistemic relationship with our own conscious mind.

Objection 2: Empirical worries. People regularly make mistakes about their experiences—including mistakes in identifying the causes or effects of their experiences, predicting what they will experience in the future, and describing or categorizing their experiences. This supports a kind of pessimism about introspection, whereas the acquaintance theory is typically associated with a kind of optimism about introspection.

• Old response: Our privileged introspective knowledge by acquaintance is limited and different in important respects from what subjects report in the empirical literature. It’s not constituted by judgments about past or future experiences or their causes and effects, nor by judgments involving ordinary language concepts. It’s constituted by beliefs like “My experience is P,” which contain direct phenomenal concepts devoid of descriptive content and constituted by occurrent phenomenal properties.

  • Lingering worries: Reinforces the limitation/demandingness problems, relies heavily on weird direct phenomenal concepts, and makes privileged introspective knowledge out to be an unusual exception in an otherwise faulty domain.\

• New response: Our privileged introspective knowledge by acquaintance is expansive but also a completely different kind of knowledge than what subjects report. Subjects who make mistakes about their experiences are reporting beliefs about their experiences. Knowledge by acquaintance, in contrast, is constituted by acquaintance itself. And it is neither judgmental nor conceptual. Thus, that subjects make mistakes in reporting their beliefs about their experiences is totally consistent with their having privileged introspective knowledge.

  • Advantages: Allows for knowledge that is not nearly so limited and doesn’t rely on weird concepts, and allows acquaintance theorists to tell an empirically plausible story—based on distinctions between experience and cognition—about how privileged access is consistent with reporting mistakes.

Objection 3: Transparency. Our experiences are “transparent” in that, when we try to attend to their qualities, we end up “seeing through” them and just attending to the qualities of external objects. This is in tension with the acquaintance theory. The acquaintance theory implies that our privileged introspective knowledge comes from our awareness of our experiences, but if our experiences are in fact transparent to us, and we don’t ever attend to them, then the acquaintance theory rests on a false presupposition.

• Old response: The transparency claims are completely mistaken. We are aware of our experiences, and we carefully attend to them in order to gain privileged introspective knowledge.

  • Lingering worries: Reinforces the demandingness/limitation problems due to the emphasis on careful attention, and puts the acquaintance theory in a difficult dialectical position since a lot of people find the transparency claims plausible.

• New response: The transparency claims are only partly mistaken. We are aware of our experiences. But we don’t generally attend do them—and we don’t need to, at least not carefully, to get privileged introspective knowledge.

  • Advantages: Allows us to grant transparency theorists’ claim about what we attend to, which is the most plausible part of their claim.

Objection 4: The anti-luminosity argument. A condition is “luminous” just in case being in it automatically puts one in position to know that one is in it. The acquaintance theory seems to imply that if we just attend to our experiences, then we can know what we are experiencing. Thus, it seems to imply that experiential conditions are luminous. However, according to an influential argument from Timothy Williamson (2000), even experiential conditions—such as feeling cold or seeing red—are non-luminous.

• Old response: The best candidates for luminous conditions are not conditions like feeling cold but rather much more fine-grained experiential conditions like feeling P, where ‘P’ refers to the very specific experience one is undergoing. If one forms a direct phenomenal concept of P, then one can form a belief like “My experience is P” that is safe and reliable—one wouldn’t be able to form it unless one was experiencing P. So, when one feels P, one will automatically be in a position to know it. Feeling P is luminous.

  • Lingering worries: Makes privileged introspective knowledge seem trivial, or at least quite limited, and once again relies on weird concepts.

• New response: Many luminous conditions are very fine-grained conditions like feeling P, but our most fundamental knowledge of them is non-conceptual and non-judgmental—it’s just constituted by awareness of our experiences, which we have all the time. Luminosity may also be extended to more coarse-grained conditions. If we can be acquainted with coarse-grained properties like coldness and redness, then we can know of them. We don’t need to conceptualize, categorize, or form beliefs about them. We just need to be acquainted with them. And to be in a position to know them, we just need to be in a position to be acquainted with them—which we arguably always will be.

  • Advantages: Allows for a much more expansive (and principled) account of luminosity that doesn’t require appeal to weird direct phenomenal concepts.

The New Theory has other advantages, too. For example, a longstanding worry about the epistemic value of introspection is that attention to our experiences modifies them, so we can never really know them as they are. However, if introspective knowledge doesn’t require careful attention, as the New Theory (but not the Old Theory) suggests, then we can know our experiences without modifying them through attention.

Another example stems from a fun case introduced by Peter Unger (1966) involving a duplicate of you who (allegedly) knows all that you know without having been acquainted with anything. The New Theory handles this case better than the Old Theory. But I’ll hold off on that one here (You can read my paper!). Hopefully what I’ve said gives you some indication of how the New Theory is an improvement.

This is a boon for the acquaintance theory. And, more generally, it’s a boon for optimists about introspection—those who think we do have privileged introspective access, that our relationship with our conscious minds is special. An especially plausible, intuitive way to explain this is in terms of our being directly aware of—that is, acquainted with—our conscious minds. So, that the acquaintance theory can be updated to preserve that insight while overcoming prominent objections is a win for introspection optimists.

REFERENCES

Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chalmers, D. (2003). The content and epistemology of phenomenal belief. In Q. Smith & A. Jokic (Eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (pp. 1-54). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Duncan, M. (2026). Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance. Oxford University Press.

Gertler, B. (2001). Introspecting phenomenal states. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63 305–328. doi: doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00105.x

Gertler, B. (2012). Renewed acquaintance. In D. Smithies & D. Stoljar (Eds.), Introspection and Consciousness (pp. 89-123). Oxford University Press.

Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

By Eilidh Beaton

Our thinking about global politics is often structured by nation-state-centric frameworks. This way of seeing the world is sometimes called ‘methodological nationalism’, and it has long been criticised in the social sciences. More recently, the objection has been brought to political philosophy by folks like Speranta Dumitru and Alex Sager. They argue that the ‘cognitive bias’ of methodological nationalism is so bad for normative theorising that it should be outright rejected in favour of less state-centric ways of seeing the world.

But not everyone agrees. Gillian Brock says methodological nationalism is a justifiable starting point for theorising because reflects the (nation-state-centric) way the world actually is. Will Kymlicka suggests that responsible use of nation-state-centric categories is defensible. So, we have an impasse. And it’s unclear how to proceed, because the objection to methodological nationalism is general in nature. Critics provide a series of examples of ways in which methodological nationalist thinking might lead political philosophers astray. But the reason why methodological nationalism might be bad for normative inquiry remains hard to pin down.

In my latest paper, now out in Philosophy, I offer three increasingly-plausible interpretations of the objection to methodological nationalism, but show that none of them succeed. I then provide a diagnosis of why methodological nationalism is so difficult to object to. Specifically, I argue that methodological nationalism is not the kind of thing that can be decisively objected to in a widely-persuasive manner because it is a perspective in Elisabeth Camp’s sense. Such perspectives are difficult to deny because they are notoriously complex and open-ended.

For this reason, I argue that critics of nation-state-centric thinking in political philosophy should give up on objecting to methodological nationalism itself. However, this doesn’t mean that critics must give up on the possibility of perspectival change. Camp’s framework, I claim, not only provides us with a diagnosis of the problem—it also provides us with a way out. Even so, I argue, we can’t be confident that this method will lead to perspectival shifts of the kind methodological nationalism’s critics seek.

By Seungsoo Lee

A theory of blameworthiness articulates when and to what degree a person is blameworthy for her action. According to quality-of-will theories, a popular family of theories of blameworthiness, a person is blameworthy for her action just in case, and to the degree that, her will manifested in that action is bad. These theories are attractively simple, for they allow only one factor to affect blameworthiness: the quality of the manifested will.

Several other factors appear to affect blameworthiness however. A first such factor is certain types of incompetence of the agent: young children and mentally impaired adults appear exempt from blameworthiness, even when they can seem to manifest bad will. (Imagine a six-year-old doing things maliciously to hurt others.) A second is the outcome of the action: a reckless driver can appear more blameworthy than an equally reckless driver if the former, but not the latter, happens to injure a pedestrian unluckily. A third is the developmental history of the agent: someone’s cruel behavior would appear less blameworthy than another’s equally cruel behavior if the cruelty of the former, but not of the latter, was a product of an unfortunate upbringing (e.g., one involving serious abuse in childhood). A fourth is the time between action and blame: if Sonya was late for an appointment with Maria, it would appear much less appropriate for Maria to blame Sonya for her lateness ten years later than on the same day of lateness. This appearance, the appearance that blameworthiness varies with these four factors, is a well-known challenge for quality-of-will theories.

In “Blame and Acquiescence: How a Quality-of-Will Theorist Can Handle Exemption, Luck, and Diminution” (Philosophical Studies, 2025), I propose a novel view about the nature of blame with which a quality-of-will theorist can explain away this challenging appearance as illusory. What motivated the paper was my suspicion that the challenging appearance arises not from genuine intuitions about blameworthiness but from our habitual understanding of what blame is. Those sympathetic to quality-of-will theories could read the paper as defending my view about the nature of blame by appeal to the explanatory power it can have when combined with those theories. Those who aren’t could read the paper as defending quality-of-will theories by showing that the well-known challenge for them might be illusory.

According to my view about the nature of blame, to blame a person for an action is to be unwilling to acquiesce to that action, where to “acquiesce” to some action is to behave favorably as though that action were acceptable. For example, if you smile at, help, or hang out with someone who just murdered her neighbor, you’d thereby be acquiescing to the murder. To blame her for the murder is to be unwilling to engage in such behavior.

Here, then, is how this view allows a quality-of-will theorist to explain away the challenging appearance. Because the scope of behavior that counts as acquiescence varies with the four factors in a way isomorphic to the way blameworthiness appeared to (I argue), and because acquiescence is what a blamer is unwilling to engage in (on my view), the scope of behavior that a blamer would be unwilling to engage in—call this the content of blame—varies with those factors in a way isomorphic to blameworthiness appeared to. This allows a quality-of-will theorist to hold that what varies with those factors is not blameworthiness (i.e., whether and to what degree it’s appropriate to acquiesce) but the content of blame (i.e., what counts as acquiescence). The apparent variances in blameworthiness can thus be deemed a product of our inclination to mistake variances in the content of blame for ones in blameworthiness.

To vindicate this story, however, I should demonstrate that what counts as acquiescence (the content of blame) indeed varies with the four factors in a way isomorphic to the way that blameworthiness appeared to.

Let’s first look at two factors, the outcome of action and the time between action and blame. I observe a narrative constraint on acquiescence: an interaction with the agent can count as acquiescing to an action only if that interaction belongs to the narrative legacy of that action. Given this constraint, a wider range of interactions with the agent would count as acquiescence when the blamer is a victim (e.g., the injured pedestrian the unlucky driver’s case) or is temporally close to the action (e.g., Maria on the very day of Sonya’s lateness) than when the blamer is an irrelevant person (e.g., everyone in the lucky driver’s case) or is temporally distant from the action (e.g., Maria ten years after Sonya’s lateness). This is because a wider range of interactions with the agent would belong to the narrative legacy of the action in the former cases than in the latter cases: since the pedestrian in the unlucky driver’s case—unlike a stranger in the lucky driver’s case—is at the heart of the narrative legacy of the reckless driving, her helping the unlucky driver—unlike a stranger helping the lucky driver—would likely belong to the narrative legacy of the driving; since the narrative from Sonya’s lateness would be diluted by what happens during the ten years (as they take classes together, or as they accumulate their own life experiences, etc.), Maria smiling at Sonya would belong to the narrative legacy of Sonya’s lateness on the same day but not ten years later. Therefore, the pedestrian’s blame of the driver, unlike a stranger’s, would likely include unwillingness to help the driver; Maria’s blame of Sonya would include unwillingness to smile at Sonya on the same day but not ten years later. In this way, what counts as acquiescence (the content of blame) varies with those two factors in a way isomorphic to the way blameworthiness appeared to.

Let’s turn to the other two factors, the incompetence and developmental history of the agent. I suggest a moral constraint on acquiescence: an interaction with the agent that would otherwise count as acquiescing to an action no longer counts as such if that interaction constitutes part of fulfilling some obligation towards that agent. Given this constraint, and given our universal obligation towards young children, mentally impaired adults, and those who have suffered from an unjustly unfortunate upbringing (i.e., the obligation to be helpful, friendly, and patient), our favorable interactions with them could hardly count as acquiescing to their actions. For example, I can smile at, help, and hang out with a rude six-year-old without thereby acquiescing to her conduct, for it’s my obligation as an adult to treat young children well. My blame of a six-year-old wouldn’t, while my blame of an adult with normal intelligence would, include unwillingness to treat her well therefore. In this way, what counts as acquiescence (the content of blame) varies with the incompetence and developmental history of the agent in a way isomorphic to the way blameworthiness appeared to.

My paper reinforces many commitments that quality-of-will theorists should make in several high-profile debates. Those interested in the moral luck debate will find new cases against outcome moral luck and for constitutive moral luck. Those interested in whether blameworthiness is forever will find a case for the affirmative answer. Those interested in whether mental incompetence exempts will find a case for the negative answer.

By Gregory Robson

Capitalism versus socialism—false choice? Might distributism be an appealing “third way”? In “Distributism 2.0: Putting Holiness Back in Commercial Society,” I argue for a Christian approach to political economy that blends insights of distributist thought (Chesterton, Belloc, Pope Leo XIII, Salter, others) with insights of capitalist thought (Smith, Hayek, Röpke, others). The article first exposes inadequacies of traditional conceptualizations of distributism. Then it shows why distributist capitalism, at its best, is a political-economic system in which individuals seeking flourishing, or even holiness, can succeed. I show, for instance, that a political-economic system need not widely allocate productive property or land per se to satisfy the spirit, if not the letter, of mainline distributism. Those interested in living by and for God’s will, insofar as we can, might find here an interesting contrast to mainline, broadly secular political economy—and, in any case, helpfully provocative spurs to further thought.

What, then, are capitalism, socialism, and distributism? These terms are notoriously loaded. Perhaps a fair characterization of capitalism is as a decentralized political-economic system in which private parties own most or all of the means of production (factories, farms, mines, machines, etc.) and use them in pursuit of profit. Of course, such private groups might pursue other things as well—as when bringing to market products for the good of their communities—in addition to, or even more urgently, than they pursue profit.

In contrast to capitalism, socialism in its traditional form is a political-economic system of governmental or “public” or society-wide ownership of the means of production. In practice, this means that a government will own the factories, farms, etc., and make allocative decisions.

Distributism is a system that emphasizes broad, society-wide private ownership of the means of production, usually in close association with nature and land in particular. This political-economic view is common to much (not all) of the tradition of Catholic political economy. A key claim in this tradition is that members of a society with widespread ownership, where owners tend to operate in close connection with the land, are more likely to be able to pursue God’s calling in their lives. They are better fit to lead holy lives, or, in secular terms, lives for the good.

Might capitalism or socialism be compatible with distributism? I argue that socialism is not. Among other reasons, as rational beings, we need private property as a means by which to fulfill our natures. We must be able to make plans and have control over the material goods necessary for carrying them out.

The main task of this paper is to defend the compatibility of forms of distributism and capitalism, dispelling the myth that to be a distributist, one cannot be a capitalist. Notwithstanding the extremely sophisticated philosophical argumentation of much of the Catholic tradition, its historical understanding of capitalism has often left much to be desired. In The Outline of Sanity, the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton (2024 [1927]: 166) says that capitalism is:

The economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists, roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage.

Moreover, in The Servile State (Liberty Fund, 1977: 50), Hilaire Belloc goes so far as to characterize capitalism as

a system in which citizens are politically free: i.e., can use or withhold at will their possession of their labor, but are also divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the state as a whole is not characterized by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole, or even a small minority.

Allowing that some forms of capitalism might be aptly described thus, I argue that not all must—and even these great writers have mischaracterized this system. Among other reasons, capitalism can, in principle, allow for widespread ownership. Indeed, many have argued that the massive increase in wealth over the past 200 years under capitalist political economy has benefited the poor the most, whose net wealth has risen immensely (see, e.g., the work of James R. Otteson). In this article, I also argue that ownership of productive property is not as important for upholding the spirit of distributism as having ample resources to meet life’s necessities and pursue one’s life plans—resources which capitalism amply provides. We should not so quickly dismiss the political-economic system known as capitalism, then, warts and all. For this system has, over just a few centuries, provided numerous economic goods to billions of people that would capture the awe of even the greatest kings and queens of history. One of those goods is the very device on which you are reading this essay.

For questions or comments, reach out directly at grobson@nd.edu.

By Louis Doulas

Here’s an argument you’ve likely read about, taught, or encountered in graduate school:

I can prove now, for instance, that human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, “Here is one hand,” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, “and here is another.” And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things, you will all see that I can also do it now in numbers of other ways: there is no need to multiply examples. (1939, 165–66)

That’s G. E. Moore’s “Proof of an External World” (1939). Reactions vary, but Penelope Maddy captures it best: “Even years of familiarity hardly dim the blunt audacity of this passage. What does Moore think he’s doing?” (2022, 138). In “Moore’s Fourth Condition” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2026), I try to answer that question by drawing on new archival evidence.

What does Moore think he’s doing? He isn’t offering an argument against radical skepticism, as many readers assume.^[1] He takes himself to be offering a “perfectly rigorous proof” against a kind of idealism.^[2] The question is whether he is successful. Consider a standard reconstruction of Moore’s argument:

M1. Here are two hands.

M2. If here are two hands, then there is an external world.

M3. There is an external world.

Moore defends the success of this argument by showing that it satisfies three conditions:

1) The premises must be different from the conclusion.

2) The premises must be known to be true.

3) The conclusion must follow from the premises.

Any perfectly rigorous proof, Moore says, must satisfy these conditions. His own argument appears to check all of the boxes. It’s valid. Its premises are different from the conclusion. And even an idealist can grant that Moore knows (and doesn’t merely have a justified belief) that he has two hands. His three conditions for a rigorous proof have been met.

But even so, readers can be forgiven for feeling that something is amiss. For example, it’s hard to imagine being rationally compelled to believe Moore’s conclusion on the basis of his premises alone if (say) you already had doubts about it. It’s for precisely this reason that many believe the proof is question-begging or epistemically circular: the support Moore has for his belief that he has two hands seems to depend on whatever support he already has for his belief that there is an external world. That’s circular. And circular arguments are bad. Escaping this fate might require an additional condition on proof—a fourth condition:

4) Knowledge of the premises must be independent of the conclusion.

Call this the epistemic independence condition. Arguably, if Moore’s proof satisfied this condition, the proof would rationally persuade someone who doubted its conclusion; it would give them a new, non-question-begging reason to believe an external world exists—rather than simply displaying commitments they might have previously held.

Hands down, one of the most puzzling things about Moore’s essay is his failure to anticipate the circularity worry. Even an additional anti-circularity condition seems to elude him: “Are there any other conditions necessary for a rigorous proof, such that perhaps it did not satisfy one of them? Perhaps there may be; I do not know” (1939, 167). Yet Moore was not generally unfamiliar with the fallacy of circular or question-begging reasoning.^[3] And when the proof appeared, his contemporaries raised similar concerns, so the worry isn’t anachronistic.^[4] So, what gives?

In the archives at the Cambridge University Library, I made a discovery that changes things.^[5] While Moore is completely silent on these issues in his 1939 essay, it turns out that he was wrestling with them behind the scenes. Not only was he remarkably attentive to worries surrounding circular proof (worries which naturally extend to his own 1939 proof), but he seems to anticipate the very discussions that commentators would raise in the massive literature surrounding his proof six decades later, such as the issue of “transmission failure.”^[6]

Moore’s proof was delivered on November 22, 1939, and published shortly thereafter. Not long before that, in some lecture material from the academic year of 1938–39, he was putting his thoughts about circular proof together. There he explicitly distinguishes two senses of “begging the question” (ML, MS Add. 8875 13/38/2). The first is what he calls the “unimportant” sense. Paraphrasing Moore:

An argument begs the question in the unimportant sense when the premise is merely identical to the conclusion.

The “unimportant” sense appears in Moore’s 1939 essay in everything but name (“The premises must be different from the conclusion”). What does not appear in 1939 is what Moore calls the “important” sense:

An argument begs the question in the important sense when one’s knowledge of the premise fails to be independent of one’s knowledge of the conclusion.

In these lectures, Moore maintains that a genuine proof should avoid both kinds of circularity. That’s striking, since avoiding the “important” kind would amount to satisfying the fourth condition above. It naturally raises the question of whether Moore’s standard for proof changed in the months leading up to his 1939 proof and, if so, how this might illuminate what we think Moore is doing.

In these same lectures, we find an answer. “I’m not going to say any more about begging the question,” Moore concludes, “because I can’t find anything clear to say. I can’t see what the answer is to the following question” (ML, MS Add. 8875 13/38/2).

The question he’s grappling with corresponds to a passage that is too long to quote here and takes some effort to unpack (see my essay). But here’s the gist. Moore comes to think that the fourth, epistemic independence condition is both too strong (ruling out paradigmatic cases of legitimate, everyday proofs) and too weak (failing to capture what makes question-begging arguments defective). Because the condition cannot helpfully distinguish good proofs from bad ones, Moore ends up stuck. If the condition can’t reliably sort good proofs from bad ones, what exactly makes an argument circular? As he puts it: “one puzzle is what relation must hold between two propositions p and q, in order that we may rightfully say that: p proves r and r proves q is circular” (ML, MS Add. 8875 13/38/2).

I argue that we cannot properly appreciate Moore’s proof without taking stock of these unpublished lecture discussions. They illuminate what is otherwise a puzzling omission: why Moore never squarely addresses the worry about circularity. What we learn from my article isn’t that he was unaware of the problem, or that he took it to be insignificant—quite the opposite. He saw it clearly and was torn by it, wrestling with it intensely without ever fully resolving it: “This question is what I can’t answer” (ML, MS Add. 8875 13/38/2).

But this material also sheds light on Moore’s proof in another way: it helps explain why the proof so often strikes readers as simultaneously compelling and defective. The answer may be surprising: it isn’t simply because the proof is epistemically defective (Wright) or dialectically ineffective (Pryor). It’s that Moore was caught between two incompatible ideals of rigor and was unable to reconcile them in the months leading up to his famous 1939 performance. Moore’s proof, as I propose we read it, embodies the unresolved tension. On the one hand, he insists that his proof is “perfectly rigorous” because it meets his three stated conditions. On the other hand, he also claims that it can “settle questions as to which we were previously in doubt” (1939, 167)—a much stronger demand that seems to require the fourth condition over which he was conflicted.^[7]

Moore appears to want his proof to do both things at once, but it can’t. The air of paradox that hangs over the proof reflects these philosophical struggles—ones that remained unsettled even as he stood before the British Academy, hands raised, insisting he had proved the existence of an external world.

I’m grateful to Thomas Baldwin, literary executor of G. E. Moore’s manuscripts and unpublished papers, for permission to reproduce and quote the archival materials included here.

References

Baldwin, Thomas. G. E. Moore. Routledge, 1990.

Coliva, Annalisa. “What Do Philosophers Do? Maddy, Moore (and Wittgenstein) II.” In The Philosophy of Penelope Maddy, edited by Sophia Arbeiter and Juliette Kennedy, 299–310. Springer, 2024.

Maddy, Penelope. A Plea for Natural Philosophy and Other Essays. Oxford University Press, 2022.

———. “Reply to Coliva.” In The Philosophy of Penelope Maddy, edited by Sophia Arbeiter and Juliette Kennedy, 311–317. Springer, 2024.

Moore, G. E. “Hume’s Philosophy.” 1909. In Moore, Philosophical Studies, 147–67.

———. Philosophical Studies. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922.

———. “Metaphysics Lectures 1938–1939.” Cambridge University Library, GBR/0012/MS Add. 8875. 13/38/2. [ML]

———. “Proof of an External World.” 1939. In G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, edited by Thomas Baldwin, 147–70. Routledge, 1993.

———. “A Reply to My Critics.” In The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, 535–677. Northwestern University Press, 1942.

Morris, Kevin and Consuelo Preti. “How to Read Moore’s ‘Proof of an External World.’” Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy 4 (2015) : 1–16.

Pryor, James. “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist.” Noûs 34 (2000) : 517–49.

Wright, Crispin. “(Anti-)Sceptics Simple and Subtle: Moore and McDowell.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002) : 330–48.

^[1] So-called “epistemological” readings of the proof are legion, yet they seem to contradict Moore (1942, 674, 668). That said, there’s lively discussion about this. See especially Baldwin (1990), Morris and Preti (2015), and the exchange between Coliva (2024) and Maddy (2024).

^[2] What kind of idealism is hard to say, though I have some thoughts. For now, it’s worth noting that Moore clarifies that his target is those philosophers who think that “There are no human hands” follows from “There are no material things” (1942, 670).

^[3] See Moore ([1909] 1922, 159–60).

^[4] I’ve also uncovered a letter from the Welsh philosopher, Richard Ithamar Aaron, who raises the issue even earlier in a letter to Moore six months after the proof’s publication. See my article.

^[5] I also draw on some important passages from Moore’s posthumously published Lectures on Philosophy.

^[6] See especially Wright (2002) and Pryor (2000). Of course, it would be anachronistic to think that Moore’s discussion maps perfectly onto contemporary discussions. But there is striking overlap that my discussion makes salient, which I hope to explore more fully in future work.

^[7] This captures a distinction philosophers sometimes draw between display proofs and persuasive proofs. See my paper for discussion.

By Ebba Theorell

This text is based on the article, Transformative Aesthetic Dimensions in Young Boys’ War Play: Exploring the World Through Kinesthetic Musicality, Journal of Aesthetic Education, which is based on the thesis: Force, Form, Transformations: Kinesthetic musicality and bodyworldning in boys war play (Theorell, 2021). https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1605845/FULLTEXT02.pdf

Prologue

It took me by surprise that our sons began engaging in war play at such a young age, already when they were around two years old. Despite what we considered a peaceful and “gender-neutral” upbringing, they gravitated toward violent scenarios and toys. Initially, I attempted to stop the play, but without success.

Recurring themes included superheroes, knights, battles with different kinds of toy or fictive weapons, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Ninja Turtles, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, as well as pirates and other combat-related characters. I observed a similar dominance of play involving strong forces, particularly among boys I encountered both in my work in preschools and schools and in my free time. I was critical and sceptical of war play from several perspectives. For example, there appeared to be a commercial interplay between the toy industry and popular culture, and war play seemed to represent masculine ideals that I feared could be normalised through this violent behaviour. What seemed to unite parents and educators was that we often felt provoked, embarrassed, angry, ambivalent, and frustrated when confronted with these seemingly unstoppable games. With mixed feelings of concern and a sense that something was not quite right, I began to observe more attentively how the adult world responds to children who engage in war play.

Most educators and parents I spoke to expressed disgust toward this type of play, ignored it entirely, or communicated their disapproval in other ways. I also discovered that it is very common for preschools and schools to adopt zero-tolerance policies toward war play. Educators in one municipality where I worked for a period even told me that their social services and the police advised preschools and schools to ban war play completely for preventive purposes. On the internet, I found numerous blogs, parenting magazines, and online forums where anxious and frustrated educators and parents discussed the issue. During these early explorations, I realized that the hostility toward young children’s war play was much greater than I had expected. This harshness was mainly directed towards boys. The combined force of this adult negativity eventually became overwhelming for me and made me wonder how such attitudes might be experienced by the children themselves. I tried to imagine what it would be like to encounter this kind of response from the adult world for an entire day, a week, a year, or even several years. I could find almost no examples of anyone defending war play, apart from “let-it-be” arguments such as “boys will be boys” or claims that nothing could be done about it. Above all, I never encountered the idea that war play might contain something meaningful or interesting and began to question whether this one-sided approach overlooked important aspects of the play.

These questions led me to seek answers from the children themselves. Instead of turning away when they played war or action games, I began filming them in order to observe the play more closely. What I saw surprised me. For example, the children were extremely careful not to touch one another during jumps, kicks, and fencing movements. They seemed able to calculate the distance to a friend with a margin of only a few centimetres – or less – while performing complex and dynamic movements. Movement appeared to be the most central and attractive aspect in early childhood war play (2021).

Introduction

Rough and tumble play, action play, superhero play and war play are distinguished by children using toy weapons, powerful words and emotions, a lot of movement and by playing a war or some kind of fight. It is not about real fights, but about pretend fights. According to previous research on war play I have found, it is mostly boys who are drawn to war play and therefore it is mostly boys who encounter prohibition, disinterest and even aggression from adults (Knutsdotter Olofsson, 2003; Malloy & Mc Murray-Schwartz, 2004; Tullgren, 2004; Halvars-Franzén, 2010; Lagerström-Dyrssen, 2018;

Niu, 2018). Despite this, boys continue to play war or hero-related games, generation after generation. Why is their passion for war play so strong? In both upbringing and education, we have a hard time getting out of habitual patterns. This leads to stereotypes being maintained, no matter how much we want and try to get away from them. Does this one-sided negative adult view of war play risk alienating boys from our communities and is there a risk that something is lost if we never see any creative aspects that war play generates? War play is a complex phenomenon and there are of course aspects that can be problematic, just like with other kinds of play. It raises questions that extend from private family relationships to major societal issues that concern how destructive masculinity norms are created and maintained. War play is played from generation to generation, but the findings in these studies suggest that in each transfer, each repetition, variations of its meaning and expression are transformed. What kind of new meaning do boys three to nine years old invent in their physical war play?

Dodd (1992) warns that war play may normalize violence but also argues that children cannot be completely shielded from violent influences. Even without direct exposure, children encounter violence through the internet, movies, television, and computer games, which may lead them to incorporate aggression into their play. Therefore, teachers and parents need to understand war play better and develop strategies for managing violent elements within children’s play (Dodd, 1992). Research shows that war play is primarily practiced by boys, who therefore more often encounter adult disapproval, prohibition, or interference (Knutsdotter Olofsson, 2003). Despite this, war- and superhero-themed play continues across generations (Malloy & McMurray-Schwarz, 2004). Adults often respond in two contrasting ways: some accept it as a natural part of growing up, while others – especially in Sweden – view it as destructive and attempt to prohibit it. This raises questions about whether alternative approaches are possible and whether the creative aspects of war play are being overlooked. War play typically involves toy weapons, strong emotions, expressive language, and intense movement in simulated fights (Levin & Carlsson-Paige, 2006). Many adults in Sweden and elsewhere view such play with suspicion (Jelleyman et al., 2019). Although it involves pretend rather than real violence, it often worries parents and teachers (Rasmussen, 1992). Consequently, strict rules and zero-tolerance policies are common in schools and preschools. These restrictions partly reflect broader social concerns about violence, including the involvement of increasingly young boys in gang criminality in Sweden (BRÅ, 2024). However, such prohibitions may risk alienating boys and weakening their trust in adults and educational institutions.

Making Room for Children’s Perspectives

War play is transmitted across generations, but children reinterpret it each time. What meanings do young boys create in their physical war play in this period of time? To recognize new meanings, we must understand how they emerge. Wartofsky (1973) describes perception as plastic: representations and ways of seeing the world change over time. New worlds become visible when existing representations lose their dominance. To better understand children’s perspectives, I filmed boys engaging in war play. Early observations revealed that their movements were expressive and skilful and that they carefully avoided harming one another despite the dynamic physical activity. Because movement appeared central to the play, I chose to analyse it through a dance-theoretical framework, which revealed unexpectedly aesthetic qualities.

Movement Categories in War Play

I employed film ethnography as method, and the analysis was inspired by Grounded Theory. The filmed sequences included boys playing physical war play, influenced by fictional narratives such as Star Wars or Spiderman and games such as World of Warcraft and Minecraft. The movement patterns in these films and games are often originally inspired by movement from the Martial Arts, but the children seem to transform them further. The analysis initially produced forty-six movement categories, which were later organized into six broader categories, connected through one core concept: Kinesthetic musicality. This concept further transformed into Kinaesthetic musicality, underlining the aesthetic dimensions in children’s movement intelligence. The movement categories from war play in this study was formulated as follows:

Rhythm

Children create rhythmic patterns in their play, often imitating one another and producing short choreographies through repetition, variation, and improvisation.

Orchestrating Space

Children interact sensitively with the spatial environment. Objects and terrain become meaningful elements of play – a hole becomes a “death trap,” and a tree becomes a lookout tower. Space is not only a backdrop to the play.

Fictional Characters

Choosing a character also means adopting specific movement qualities. Characters such as old and small Yoda, the robot R2-D2, or the evil, heavily breathing Darth Vader offers distinctive, characteristic movement for children to imitate, explore and transform.

Movement Canon

Certain recurring movements form a shared repertoire, including pirouettes, fencing gestures, robot movements, playing dead, and using “the Force” (the outreached arm from Star Wars).

Phrases

When asked individually to demonstrate their actions in the play, the children transformed movements into improvised dance-like solo sequences involving jumps, kicks, and spins.

Aesthetic Attention

Children focus closely on the sensory and expressive qualities of movement, sound, and space, sometimes slowing movements down in order to refine them.

Kinaesthetic Musicality

Together, these categories contribute to a central, overlapping concept of kinaesthetic musicality. Analysing war play through dance theoretical frame, reveals a strong bodily sensitivity. The concept of kinaesthetic musicality describes children’s ability to explore and create relationships with the world through movement. It combines kinaesthesia – the sense of bodily movement – with musicality understood as an embodied awareness of rhythm, timing, and expression.

In this expanded sense, musicality is not limited to audible music but involves the coordination of sensation, movement, breath, and perception. Similar ideas appear in Ravn’s (2009) concept of “incorporated music,” in which dancers perceive music through their bodies and muscles. Children appear to use a comparable bodily awareness in everyday life. Infants rocking to the rhythm of household sounds or children moving with natural phenomena illustrate this embodied resonance with the world. Kinaesthetic musicality functions as a bridge between the child and the environment, enabling sensitive and creative interaction. In a demanding play such as war play, this sensitivity helps children coordinate movement, anticipate others’ actions, and avoid injury. To sustain the play, they must understand balance, timing, spatial relationships, and bodily limits. The tension and risk involved intensify their focus and sensory awareness.

The Aesthetic Energy of War Play

War play emerges in a threshold between violence and aesthetics. Many of its movements originate in films, games, and martial arts traditions. Martial arts such as capoeira or aikido combine physical discipline with aesthetic and choreographic dimensions. Over time, practices such as kung fu and karate have evolved from combat training into sports or artistic forms (Ölme, 2013). These aesthetic layers may resonate with children more strongly than violent intentions. The movements often begin as imitation – such as fencing – but develop into explorations of balance, rhythm, and precision. Children may transform aggressive energy into aesthetic experimentation, illustrating Corsaro’s (2012) concept of interpretive reproduction, in which children adapt cultural material to their own concerns. Understanding movement also requires examining perception. Hämäläinen (2007) argues that perception is active and connected to action. Dancers develop rapid interaction between inner sensations and external perception—what she calls “bodily wisdom.” Philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (2015) describe perception as a dynamic encounter between subject and world. Improvisation, according to Deleuze and Guattari, involves risking engagement with the world and blending with it. Similarly, Manning (2012) describes bodies as rhythms in continuous interaction with their environments. In this perspective, movement and thought are inseparable. Sensations, memory, and anticipation merge as the body responds to the world. Manning (2012) describes this process as preacceleration, the gathering momentum that precedes movement.

Force Taking Form

Such body - world interactions are particularly visible in early childhood exploration. Children appear to have a more immediate bodily connection to their surroundings. Their kinaesthetic musicality allows them to sense forces and potential movements before they fully take form – in gestures, sounds, or physical actions. War play provides an intense setting in which this sensitivity becomes especially visible. Through these interactions, children transform cultural expressions of violence into new forms of movement and meaning.

Conclusion

This study proposes kinaesthetic musicality as a theory describing young children’s embodied sensitivity to rhythm, movement, and environment. The concept highlights how children explore the world through physical and aesthetic engagement. Understanding this embodied musicality may help adults rethink their approaches to war play. Instead of focusing solely on prohibition, educators and parents might recognize how children transform cultural expressions creatively. In times marked by war and gender-based violence, I refer to hooks (2004) that calls for the necessity of creating new visions of masculinity informed by feminist perspectives, and I suggest also learning from children’s transformations of stereotyped expressions to develop these new visions. By engaging constructively with children’s embodied creativity, educators may support more inclusive learning environments and address challenges faced by many boys in educational systems worldwide (The Economist, 2022). A greater sensibility, attention and curiosity towards new generations, sometimes subtle, invitations and suggestions on how to challenge and rebuild stereotyped expressions can open for new ethical dimensions to explore together. To begin with – instead of automatically prohibiting children’s war play, we can observe it for a second longer, and try to identify what is actually being explored. A pre-school teacher that is exploring these findings together with her colleagues, recently told me that their broader, more informed gaze on physical war play, has started also to change their approaches and actions towards the war playing children, that they used to see as trouble makers.

Link to my homepage at the University of Stockholm:

https://www.su.se/english/profiles/e/etheo

ebba.theorell@buv.su.se

References

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Corsaro, W. A. (2012). Interpretive reproduction in children’s play. American Journal of Play, 4(4), 488–504.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2015). Tusen platåer: Kapitalism och schizofreni [A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia]. Tankekraft Förlag.

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hooks, b. (2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. Washington Square Press.

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Ölme, R. (2013). Functionality without function: Relating technique to choreography. In A.-K. Staåhle (Ed.), Close encounters: Contemporary dance didactics—Explorations in theory and practice (pp. 65–77). Stockholm University of the Arts.

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The Economist. (2022, November 23). Why are boys doing badly at school? https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/11/23/why-are-boys-doing-badly-at-school

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By Barry Maguire

Jerry Cohen walked like a Marxist, talked like a Marxist, and dressed like a Marxist, but he wasn’t really a Marxist, in the end. He was a liberal egalitarian. And that’s a perfectly fine thing to be. Some of my best friends are liberal egalitarians. But this confusion has led to a problem, because there are many of us out there, quietly, sharing some of the values that Cohen shared, or once shared, or might have shared. Communist values. To many of us, out there quietly, Cohen’s objections to Rawls might once have seemed very promising. But a generation of resourceful liberal egalitarians have argued convincingly that Cohen’s objections don’t really amount to a whole hell of a lot. That is, the objections of Cohen the Liberal Egalitarian don’t really amount to a whole hell of a lot. But there is still hope. I like to think there is another Cohen. Not the Cohen who leapt headfirst into equality of opportunity and never really looked back. A more radical Cohen. The one who thought that market exchange was intrinsically and not merely typically problematic. The Cohen of the camping trip, the care-based principle of community, ‘from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.’ The Cohen who sang Solidarity Forever. These traditional ideals of caring solidarity are structurally quite different from even the leftiest of egalitarianisms. We can reconstruct a more powerful version of Cohen’s ‘incentives’ objection to Rawls based on these ideals. In this essay, I attempt this reconstruction.

By Guy Crain

Pacifist Dilemma: Smith is a bystander witnessing Jones being violently threatened by Williams. It is readily apparent to Smith that there is an urgent need to do something to prevent something bad from happening to Jones at the hands of Williams. What should Smith do?

In Pacifist Dilemma, there is an agent, Smith, who is presented as needing to make the relevant moral decision in question; there is an assailant, Williams, who is the source of a looming violent threat; there is a target, Jones, who is the potential recipient of the assailant’s looming violent threats; and, insinuated by the question, “What should Smith do?”, there are options—the courses of action available to Smith. Some philosophers have argued that cases like Pacifist Dilemma show that sometimes agents ought to commit violence (though, it should be noted that sometimes the agent is presented as the target and the agent must decide whether to commit self-defensive violence). How are such cases supposed to show this? Some philosophers take it as obvious merely in virtue of presenting cases like Pacifist Dilemma that an agent’s only option for preventing something bad from happening is to commit violence against the assailant. In other words, such philosophers take it as obvious that Smith’s only options are to do nothing, thereby failing to do what Smith ought to do, or to commit violence against Williams.

Granted, such philosophers would admit that technically Smith does have other options—Smith could start dancing, tell jokes, or even join Williams in threatening Jones. Rather, in terms of what Smith ought to do, these philosophers assume that Smith has no options morally as good or better than committing violence against Williams. They do not argue this by way of exploring various alternative options available to Smith and concluding that each is morally inferior to violence. Instead, they take it as obvious by the mere description of the case that Smith’s only options are violence or nothing. Their sense of the obvious paucity of Smith’s options is taken to provide all the intuitive force necessary to conclude that agents sometimes ought to commit violence. (So much so that philosophers frequently do not describe such cases anywhere near as clearly as I have described Pacifist Dilemma but often take merely alluding to similar circumstances as sufficient to make their case.) And, given their intuitive force in support of that conclusion, cases like Pacifist Dilemma are aptly so named because they seem like decisive evidence against positions like pacifism, nonviolence, and nonresistance.

While other philosophers have challenged the intuitive force such cases provide against positions like pacifism, to my knowledge, no one has done so in the following way: by challenging the apparent obviousness of the agent having no alternative options as good or better than violence. The gap in the academic literature, then, is this: there has not been offered a set of alternative options to violence (though such options are scattered as anecdotes throughout popular and sectarian written work) nor has it been argued what exactly would make such alternative options—which I call pacifist alternatives—morally as good or better than violence. In my recent paper published online and forthcoming in an issue of the journal Theoria, I aim to fill this gap.

Here I will preview two of the ways that I argue pacifist alternatives can be as good or morally better than violence. The first is that pacifist alternatives can constitute a refusal to legitimize assailants as assailants. Consider a case that comes from the movie The Dark Knight:

Social Experiment – The Joker, a psychopathic criminal, conducts a ‘social experiment.’ There are two ferries: one carrying commuters and the other transferring prisoners. With the boats in sight of each other, The Joker disables the engines. The Joker tells both sets of passengers their boats have been rigged with explosives. On the commuter ferry, there is a device that will detonate the bomb on the prisoners’ ferry, and vice versa. If the prisoners choose to use their detonator first, The Joker will let the prisoners live. If the commuters choose to use their detonator first, The Joker will let the commuters live. If neither detonator is activated within a set time limit, The Joker will detonate both bombs.

To understand the idea of refusing to legitimize assailants as assailants, it is important to review how Social Experiment played out in the movie. A considerable amount of time passes with neither ferry’s passengers deciding to use their detonators. A large intimidating prisoner approaches the prison warden who is in possession of their ferry’s detonator. The prisoner demands that the warden hand over the detonator because the prisoner will do what the warden should have done immediately; and, the prisoner says, the warden can afterward claim that the prisoner took the detonator by force. The warden slowly hands the detonator to the prisoners, and the prisoner immediately throws the detonator out of a window into the ocean.

In Social Experiment, The Joker presumes to dictate to the people on both ferries what their options are, the associated costs of those options, and to design the environmental experience the people on the boats will have while choosing among those options. The Joker presents this choice architecture in such a way that the people on the boats appear not to have the chance either to question the legitimacy of The Joker’s presumed role or to consider their own roles in granting that legitimacy. If the people on the boats participate according to The Joker’s choice architecture, they thereby overlook this important consideration. For the people on either ferry to decide to use their detonator would be tacit acceptance of The Joker’s terms and, consequently, an act that would legitimize The Joker as their choice architect. But in the movie, the prisoner’s discarding of the detonator constituted a refusal to confer such legitimacy to The Joker.

Something similar is going on in cases like Pacifist Dilemma. The assailant acts in such a way that presumes the role of choice architect for the agent. Granted, the assailant likely hopes that the agent will not intervene violently so that the assailant can unimpededly accomplish whatever purpose the assailant had when initiating a threat of violence toward the target in the first place. But, by posing a looming violent threat, the assailant has, at least in effect, presumed to put the agent in a situation in which it appears the agent has only a certain set of options—commit violence or allow bad things to happen. If the agent were, in fact, bound by that choice architecture, then perhaps violence would likely be the agent’s morally best option. But there is something wrong with choice architecture itself. Sometimes to express how bleak a situation is, people say things like, “Why did it have to come to this?” This expresses a sense of there being something wrong with the fact that “it” has “come to this.” Another way to frame this expression is that people are judging that such situations should not happen in the first place.

If an agent faces such situations as though the only options are to commit violence or do nothing, that agent functionally grants to the assailant the role of being the agent’s choice architect. Granted, it does not seem as though there was some sort of negotiation between the agent and the assailant about whether the assailant may put the agent in that situation. The assailant’s behavior, rather, presumes this role—the assailant behaving as an assailant thereby constitutes an attempt to disempower the agent of the agency to decide whether to accept the apparent choice architecture of cases like Pacifist Dilemma. If the agent commits violence, the agent has legitimized the assailant as an assailant dictating the agent’s options.

Critics of pacifism assume that for the agent to refuse to commit violence entails accepting loss according to the choice architecture of a pacifist dilemma. This is short-sighted. Pacifist alternatives are morally better than violence because they constitute a refusal to contract into the situation—a refusal to allow the would-be assailant to put either party in situation that should not happen in the first place. Some pacifist alternatives communicate to the assailant that such situations do not merit the agent’s participation (and, when effective, that neither do they merit the would-be assailant’s initiation).

What do such pacifist alternatives look like? Here I will offer one of the examples I cover in my paper. A man appearing to brandish a gun entered an Atlanta nail salon in July of 2023, demanding that everyone get on the ground and hand over their money. The customers and employees looked at him but blatantly ignored his demands, looking directly at him as he spoke and then just turning their faces away from him (one employee even nonchalantly answered an incoming customer phone call during the attempted holdup). After repeated attempts, the thief realized none of them would cooperate. The frustrated, would-be robber left the salon.

Here the thief was the assailant. Virtually everyone in the salon was a target. The agent could have been anyone in the room other than the thief. If any of them suspected that even if they handed over money that someone might still get harmed, that person might have come to believe that violence was their best option (especially if they were armed or confident in their prowess for violence). Yet, the actual unfolding of events shows that such agents would be mistaken. The salon patrons and employees—they neither committed MCV nor did nothing. They had alternative options that not only resulted in no one being harmed but also did not legitimize the assailant’s presumption to create a situation in which they had to participate.

Another reason that pacifist alternatives are better than violence is because of the way they can weaponize civility. Amy Olberding has written about multiple examples where people have responded to hostility and incivility in ways that were civil but also disarming, where civility was deployed in such a way that brought the hostile party’s incivility sharply to their own attention. Pacifist alternatives to violence can be weapon-like in their capacity to disarm and they do so in a way that committing violence cannot. Here I will illustrate with one example.

On August 9, 1993, Sophia White entered a Los Angeles hospital looking for a nurse there named Elizabeth Staten. White found Staten and shot at her. The attack began in the hospital’s nursery. With three babies in the room, White fired six rounds. White chased Staten into the emergency room where she fired another round. Staten laid on the ground with wounds to her wrist and abdomen. Nurse Joan Black, who witnessed the interaction in the emergency room, said that White told Staten, “You took my husband; you took my kids; prepare to die.” Black immediately approached White and hugged her. Black told White, “You’re in pain. I’m sorry, but everybody has pain in their life … I understand and we can work it out.” Black clasped the gun so White could not cock it. After a few moments, White gave the gun to Black. Nurse Black said about the event, “I saw a sick person and had to take care of her.”

In this case, White was the assailant, Staten was the target, and Black was the agent. Black did not commit violence against a violent assailant, but instead responded civilly—by expressing compassion toward White. Black’s civil act of compassion presented a stark contrast to the atmosphere of threat White had created. That contrast dissipated the atmospheric threat; White seemed to sense this, was disarmed by it (even literally), and, herself, became more civil. Black’s civility functioned as a weapon not in the sense of being an instrument with which to attack the assailant, but as a weapon against White’s assailant-ness—as a civilizing contagion.

One reason acts of civility can be contagious in such situations is that underlying a lot of violence is an acute lack of social regard. If an assailant’s violence stems from an attempt to redress this in some way, pacifist alternatives offer such assailants the regard of which they are suffering deprivation. For an agent to commit violence, on the other hand, would be to simply compound that deprivation.

One objection to what I have argued is that pacifist alternatives are only morally comparable to or better than violence if they are effective. In sum, “what if they don’t work?” I will leave it to the reader to see how I deal directly with this objection in the published version of my paper. But here I will emphasize the indirect response to this objection that I think is even more important—namely, what if violence does not work? Why is it the case that this question is not given the same gravitas as asking, “What if pacifism doesn’t work?”? When ethicists wield pacifist dilemmas in arguments about the ethics of violence, there is something suspicious about the fact that not only can they not imagine a course of action other than violence for the agent, but it does not occur to them to question the efficacy of the agent’s violence. What if an agent lacks sufficient strength? What if an agent simply lacks a prowess for violence? What if an agent’s violence makes things worse? What if the agent’s violence ends up harming the assailant and the target? What if the agent is a paraplegic (there is nothing in the description of Pacifist Dilemma that expressly rules out this possibility)? Violence seems to enjoy an almost implicit presumption of efficacy in thought experiments that pacifist alternatives do not. Underlying this suspicious tendency on the part of ethicists is likely violentism—an insidious bias in favor of “righteous” violence that affects human judgment in ways not unlike other insidious biases such as sexism and ableism.

Let me be clear—my argument is not that violence is never an agent’s optimal option for dealing with assailants; it is perfectly fine for my position if something like deontological pacifism turns out to be false. What I have argued is that cases like Pacifist Dilemma lack the degree of intuitive force in favor of violence that some philosophers presume them to have because of the mistaken notion that agents in pacifist dilemmas simply have no options as good or better than violence. I have shown that there are such alternative options. Surely, this shows at least that some philosophers’ intuitions are suspect if not also that they harbor violentist tendencies perhaps at the level of the tools they are using (Pacifist Dilemma-like thought experiments).

On its surface, Pacifist Dilemma seems like an innocuous conceptual tool with which to analyze the ethics of interpersonal violence. However, it seems that Pacifist Dilemma functions more like a stereotype that skews intuitions toward the approval of more rather than less violence. This is why it is crucial to point out that pacifist alternatives exist let alone that they are morally better than violence.

By Cathy Mason

Iris Murdoch’s philosophical fortunes over the past fifty years have been volatile. Early in her career, she was received enthusiastically into the world of analytic philosophy. She was invited, for instance, to give talks at prestigious philosophical meetings such as the Aristotelian Society and gave a conference paper at the Joint Session to which Gilbert Ryle, one of Oxford’s most respected philosophers, was a respondent. After this highly successful entrance, however, she gradually withdrew from academic philosophy, and for much of the latter half of her life she occupied a peripheral position within that world. She was a passionate moral realist, a novelist, and a woman at a time when all three located her firmly outside the philosophical mainstream, and after leaving St Anne’s College in the mid-1960s, she remained influential primarily in literary circles. Over the past decade, however, her philosophical significance has once again begun to be recognised, and she now occupies an increasingly significant place within the philosophical canon, even within analytic philosophy. It would no longer be eccentric to put Murdoch on a philosophy syllabus, for instance, and her example of ‘M and D’ is well on its way to becoming a stalwart of the philosophical imagination.

However, despite this resurgence of interest in Murdoch, she remains difficult to read, and difficult to situate on philosophy syllabi. Certain key ideas she discusses such as moral vision or attention have been relatively popular within contemporary philosophical debates, but discussing Murdoch within or alongside such debates can feel jarring. Read merely as part of these conversations, some of her comments can feel random and unconnected, leaping from one seemingly unrelated idea to another.

In my book Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy: Reframing the True, the Real and the Good, I suggest that her use of the same vocabulary as many mainstream analytic philosophers belies deep differences in her philosophical and ethical outlook. This explains why reading Murdoch can be such a puzzling experience. Her notions of moral vision and attention, for example, are located within a complex metaethical outlook which is at odds with many of the basic assumptions that metaethicists standardly make. Murdoch, I argue, is not merely a philosopher with a novelist’s eye, offering us picturesque and provocative isolated thoughts on love and the ego. Nor is she simply a morally serious person exhorting us to be less selfish and attend more carefully to reality. Rather, she is an ambitious and systematic thinker for whom these thoughts are part and parcel of a sophisticated story about reality as a whole. And the real interest in her thoughts on attention, love, the ego and so on can be fully appreciated only against this metaphysical backdrop.

In my book, I work to unearth the foundations of Murdoch’s ethical thought, the broad metaethical system within which her ethical thought is situated. My hope in doing so is to do greater justice to Murdoch as a thinker of real depth and ambition, and simultaneously to offer an account of metaethics that is refreshingly novel and attractive for us today. Murdoch’s metaethical theorising, as I see it, revitalises metaethics. Far from being an obscure and abstract endeavour, distant from our everyday moral lives, her framework connects it with our deepest moral concerns, offering a compelling re-configuring of some of our most important metaethical ideas.

Chapter-by-Chapter Overview

In the first chapter of the book, I consider Murdoch’s conception of the role of moral philosophy. She affirms both that moral philosophy is aimed at truth and that it should make us morally better – two commitments that can seem puzzlingly at odds. For Murdoch, I suggest, these are two faces of a single task, and the connection can be illuminated by considering her notion of truth.

In the second chapter I thus argue that Murdoch is using a non-standard conception of truth. Philosophers typically think that the fundamental truth-bearers are propositions (or something similar); that truth and falsity are binary; and that truth can be fully understood quite apart from notions of human character and activity. Murdoch, I suggest, upends all these assumptions. In their place, she instead offers a conception of truth on which it is bound up with the notion of truthfulness, a concept found within a network of ethical terms.

Where does this leave her realism? In the third chapter, I argue that Murdoch has something very different to contemporary realists in mind. Realism, for her, is an ethical ideal for human life and vision involving a kind of morally laden answerability to the world, not simply a claim about the metaphysical status of moral properties.

In what sense does Murdoch thus regard the Good as ‘real’? In the fourth chapter, I offer an interpretation of Murdoch’s ‘ontological argument’ and a discussion of the thing it is supposed to prove, the Good. Her ontological argument, I argue, is an argument from our experience of ubiquitous degrees of goodness to the reality of a perfect ideal, the Good. The Good, I argue, is an ideal, and therefore the standards for its reality are essentially moral standards.

Chapter five turns to ask how knowledge, our grasp of the truth, might be connected with motivation on Murdoch’s picture. I suggest that on her picture, knowledge can only be the result of virtuous truth-seeking, and therefore anything that counts as knowledge always already brings with it motivation to act according to what one sees.

Finally, in chapter six I turn to Murdoch’s puzzling insistence that despite the supreme importance of morality, it has no purpose and is for nothing. The Good, she suggests must be sought and loved simply for its own sake. I suggest that virtue is pointless, on her account, precisely because the Good is sovereign. To view it as serving any further purpose would be to see it as standing in need of some kind of external vindication, which would diminish it.

By Wes Siscoe

Philosophy has a “leaky pipeline” problem. Racial and gender diversity of philosophy undergraduates has been increasing, but underrepresented students are still far less likely to complete graduate work.

From 2000 to 2016, the percentage of intended philosophy majors who identify as Black rose steadily from 3% to 13%, but the percentage of philosophy PhD recipients who identify as Black only rose from 1.5% to 4%. During that same time, the percentage of intended philosophy majors who identify as women rose from 35% to 45%, but the percentage of philosophy PhD recipients who identify as women remained below 35%.

These PhD rates lag behind other disciplines. In 2016 6.5% of non-philosophy PhD recipients identified as Black, while 45% of non-philosophy PhD recipients identified as women. There is a leak in the pipeline that runs from undergraduate philosophy to philosophy PhD programs.

In order to help address this issue, we created a mentoring program for underrepresented students with four chapters – one at Florida State University, the University of Southern California, the University of South Florida, and Washington University in St. Louis. In this paper, we describe the chapters in detail, both to consider the potential usefulness of mentoring for fixing the leaky pipeline and also to provide a template for those who want to create mentoring programs of their own.

What benefits can such a mentoring program provide? While there may be more, the advantages we explicitly considered were as follows: Mentoring programs can (1) increase a sense of belonging, (2) boost academic growth, (3) encourage career exploration, and (4) promote leadership development. These benefits have both been shown in studies across academic disciplines and were confirmed by the self-reports of our student participants.

Suppose you want to start a mentoring program. Where should you start? First, identify your mission. Not all of our students will be interested in graduate school in philosophy (nor should they be!), so it is helpful to think of how your program can cater to students with a wide range of interests.

At Washington University, the program focused on providing academic and career support to students. Students were matched with mentors for assistance with assignments, career brainstorming, and writing samples. Letters of recommendation for summer seminars or internships were also provided.

On our end-of-year survey for all the programs, we had many students say that they were more likely to apply to graduate school in philosophy, but a large number also indicated that they were not.

Our more fundamental aim was to help students better understand their career options both within and outside philosophy. Graduate school can be very challenging, with diminishing job prospects, and we did not want to treat it as something that all our students should pursue. And when it came to this more fundamental aim, the majority of our students said that their mentors helped them think through their philosophy-related career options.

The second thing to consider is recruiting. How will you get the word out about your program, and what is your target audience? How will you match mentors and mentees?

At Florida State, the program was publicized at a meeting of the FSU philosophy club, a meeting of the FSU Minorities and Philosophy chapter, emailed to all of the philosophy majors, and announced through the Center for Academic Retention and Enhancement.

To match mentors and students, we then had both mentors and mentees complete an application. Along with their contact information, monthly availability, and the number of students they could mentor, mentors also described their interest in the mentoring program, any background experiences that might be helpful, and whether they had any experience applying to graduate programs in other disciplines like medicine or law.

Mentee applicants shared their year in school, previous involvement with the philosophy department, and availability, along with what they hoped to get out of the mentoring program and any plans they had for continuing their education.

Third, you will want to support your mentors. Don’t leave them to plan all the mentoring sessions, or the content that will be discussed!

We planned to have 2-3 mentoring sessions per semester to strike a balance between consistency and not overwhelming mentors and mentees. Our program directors then provided mentors with a guide containing possible icebreaker questions and discussion topics for each mentoring session, helping mentors stay on track with our larger goals for the program.

Finally, we shared best practices with our mentors. The best way to begin mentoring is by developing strong relationships. At its core, mentoring undergraduates is about accompanying students through the beginnings of their professional journeys. This means providing resources, opportunities, encouragement, and even constructive feedback throughout the mentorship to help the student accomplish their goals.

But in order for these resources and feedback to have their full effect, mentors and mentees must have a shared foundation of trust and respect for one another that can only be developed through a close, long-term connection.

We hope this serves as a valuable guide for those who are considering adding a program like this to their department offerings. Happy mentoring!

By Susumu Cato & Hun Chung

In the half-century since its publication, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) has become a pillar of contemporary political philosophy. Most scholars, however, focus their attention on the first two-thirds of the book—Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice and his famous derivation of the minimal state from a state of nature. The final section, Part III, titled “A Framework for Utopia,” is frequently treated as an inspired but somewhat underdeveloped afterthought.

In our paper, “A Formal Theory of Robert Nozick’s Framework for Utopia,” (published online in Noûs, open access), we argue that Part III is not a mere addendum but the essential logical culmination of Nozick’s project. To assess its theoretical success, we provide the very first formal model of Nozick’s “possible worlds” framework, transforming his informal intuitions into a precise mathematical formalization.

The Problem: Formalizing the Possible Worlds

Nozick’s vision of utopia is famously pluralistic. He does not propose a single vision of the “best” life; instead, he argues for a “meta-utopia”—a framework of many voluntary sub-communities where individuals can live according to their own diverse values. Nozick justifies this framework by imagining a “possible worlds” model: a thought experiment where every individual has the power to create a world of their own design by their imaginations, but where others are equally free to stay or leave for an alternate world that they can also create by their imaginations.

Nozick’s central claim is that any world that remains stable in this environment—where everyone is free to imagine and move to a better alternative—must be one where no one can be lured away by the promise of something better, and, hence, qualify as “utopia,” understood as “the best of all possible worlds.” Nozick’s “framework for utopia” is then identified as a collection of such stable worlds within this possible worlds model.

However, Nozick left the mechanics of this model informal. What are the precise conditions under which a world is “stable?” How does Nozick’s notion of stability compare with other notions of stability? Does a stable framework always exist? Would everybody (as Nozick conjectured) receive their marginal contributions from their worlds once a stable configuration is finally reached? Without formal answers, Nozick’s “framework for utopia” remains a brilliant metaphor rather than a robust theory. Our paper fills these gaps.

From Possible Worlds to Formal Model

We begin by modeling a set of possible individuals and defining a “world” as a voluntary association (a non-empty subset of individuals). A “framework” is a partition of all individuals into such worlds. Each individual has preferences over the worlds in which they might belong and possesses an imagination set specifying which worlds they can conceive as viable alternatives.

Nozick’s core idea is that a world is stable if none of its members can imagine and prefer another world that would persist under the same freedom of exit and entry. Nozick’s original definition of stability is circular: it defines stability in terms of the absence of preferable stable alternatives. However, as we argue in our previous work—”Stable Dystopia: A Critique of the Circular Definition of Stability in Nozick’s Model of Utopia” (2024, Analysis)—Nozick’s circular definition of stability has many inherent theoretical problems (that made even Nozick abandon it himself.) We therefore adopt a non-circular formulation of stability: a world is Nozick-stable if and only if none of its members can imagine a strictly preferable alternative world.

A Nozick-stable framework (Nozick’s “meta-utopia”) is then a partition of individuals into worlds, each of which is Nozick-stable. Nozick’s ultimate aim was to argue that not only does such a Nozick-stable framework exist, but such a framework is equivalent to the minimal state. This constitutes Nozick’s ultimate justification for the minimal state.

First Result: Stable Worlds Do Not Guarantee a Stable Framework

One might think that if every individual has at least one stable world available to them, then a stable framework should exist. We show that this inference is invalid. Even when stable worlds exist individually, they may overlap in ways that prevent them from forming a partition. The existence of stable components does not imply the existence of a stable global structure.

This already introduces pressure on Nozick’s project. His argument requires not merely the existence of some stable communities, but the existence of a complete and rights-respecting framework covering everyone.

Second Result: Nozick Stability Is Stronger than Core or Nash Stability

To understand how demanding Nozick’s stability notion is, we compare it with familiar solution concepts from cooperative game theory.

We show that Nozick stability is strictly stronger than both core stability and Nash stability. While core and Nash stability are logically independent of one another, Nozick stability implies both. As a consequence, many configurations that would count as stable under standard economic notions fail to qualify as Nozick-stable.

This means that even if coalition structures exist that are immune to blocking (core-stable) or to unilateral deviation (Nash-stable), they may still be destabilized by Nozick’s imaginative exit condition. The upshot is that Nozick’s concept makes stable frameworks significantly harder to achieve than standard models of voluntary association would suggest.

Third Result: Existence Requires Restrictive Conditions

Given the strength of Nozick stability, we identify a set of sufficient conditions under which a Nozick-stable framework does exist. However, these conditions turn out to be highly restrictive. Roughly speaking, they require strong alignment and independence of preferences that are unlikely to hold in pluralistic societies.

Thus, while stability is not logically impossible, it depends on structural assumptions that undermine the realism of the model. The more diversity of preferences and imaginative possibilities we allow—precisely what Nozick celebrates—the harder stability becomes to secure.

Fourth Result: Marginal Contribution and Exploitation

Perhaps most strikingly, we show that even when a Nozick-stable framework does exist, it does not guarantee (as Nozick claimed) that individuals receive their marginal contributions within their stable associations. Contrary to Nozick’s conjecture (based on analogy with competitive markets), stable worlds may systematically assign individuals less than their marginal product.

This opens the door to a troubling possibility: stable frameworks may institutionalize and perpetuate exploitation. Stability alone does not ensure fairness, reciprocity, or distributive justice. A configuration can be stable under voluntary exit and still leave some individuals structurally disadvantaged.

This finding is especially significant because Nozick’s identification of the minimal state with utopia depends not merely on voluntary stability, but on the claim that such stability embodies a morally attractive outcome that inspires.

Philosophical Implications

Nozick’s ambition in Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia was to complete his libertarian defense of the minimal state by showing that it is not merely the only morally legitimate state, but also an inspiring utopian ideal. Our analysis casts doubt on whether that argument succeeds.

If Nozick-stable frameworks frequently fail to exist, then this implies that it would be difficult to arrive at its equivalent—the minimal state—through purely spontaneous and voluntary associations. If they exist only under highly restrictive assumptions, then the success of the minimal state depends on implausible structural conditions. And if they can exist while stabilizing exploitative arrangements, then stability does not deliver the utopian property Nozick hoped for.

The broader methodological lesson is that formal modeling can illuminate the internal dynamics of normative political theories. By reconstructing Nozick’s possible worlds framework with precision, we are able to test its coherence, feasibility, and distributive implications. In doing so, we aim not merely to criticize Nozick, but to clarify the conditions under which a voluntaristic theory of political association could genuinely yield a stable and attractive social order.

Whether the minimal state remains “an inspiring vision” depends, we suggest, on questions that only become visible once the framework is formally articulated.

Conclusion

For 50 years, critics have argued that Nozick’s Part III was a detour. Our paper proves that Part III is the engine of the entire book. By defining utopia as a stable equilibrium of voluntary associations, Nozick provides the normative justification for the minimal state that Parts I and II only partially achieve.

In this sense “A Formal Theory of Robert Nozick’s Framework for Utopia” is more than just an interpretative commentary; it offers a systematic reconstruction of one of the central pillars of Nozick’s project. By developing the first fully rigorous possible-worlds model of Nozick’s framework, we identify with precision the structural and theoretical difficulties confronting his vision of meta-utopia as a robust and sophisticated response to what may be the central question of political philosophy: “how can we all live together while living differently?”

We hope this summary encourages researchers in political philosophy and PPE to read our paper and revisit Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia—not as a relic of the 1970s, but as a living, breathing model for the governance of complex, pluralistic societies. As an open access paper, our paper can be freely accessed and downloaded at: https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70036

References

CATO, S. & H. CHUNG. (2026). “A Formal Theory of Robert Nozick’s Framework for Utopia” Published Online in Nos (Open Access): https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70036

CATO, S. & H. CHUNG. (2024). “Stable Dystopia: A Critique of the Circular Definition of Stability in Nozick’s Model of Utopia.” Analysis 84 (3), 465-475, Jul 2024 (https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anad091)

By Laura Wildemann Kane

The way that family is defined profoundly impacts many political, social, and economic practices within an organized state. When the term family is applied to a group of persons, it picks out those persons as having a particular kind of relationship to one another that may ground claims for special privileges and protections that are otherwise absent in non-familial relationships. Individuals who are recognized as being members of the same family are often eligible for a bundle of relational rights, privileges, and protections that pertain to the relations between those individuals because they affect the functioning of those relations. Examples of this include tax credits and exceptions, visitation and decision rights in hospitals and prisons, shared healthcare plans, and immigration eligibility. Significant social esteem also accrues to individuals who are recognized as being members of a family, including respect by peers and increased career potential. Definitions of the family that omit or ignore many of the various potential configurations of human relationships may disadvantage or exclude those who are not able to create or maintain families from obtaining those benefits.

At the same time, it seems problematic to think that all kinds of familial arrangements should be entitled to receive those benefits, especially when there is a chance that they may be used inappropriately or toward harmful ends. The same benefits that can enhance relationships may also strain them: families with members who neglect, oppress, control, or verbally, physically, or emotionally/psychologically abuse other members may utilize familial privileges and protections to avoid or escape accountability. To be sure, it is no easy task to define a family. Yet, because states recognize only certain kinds of groups as families—conferring privileges and protections upon them—while excluding others, it is crucial to ensure that the definition of family being used by the state to identify familial groups is the best one to warrant such a distinction.

A definition of the family should be flexible enough to include the many diverse groups who consider themselves to be families, yet it must also be firm enough to avoid potentially tethering people in perpetually harmful arrangements with limited recourse. In this book, I argue that a definition of the family must consider the qualitative aspects of familial relationships in an effort to determine the criterion that best captures what it is that families do that other kinds of groups do not.

The social family account that I present in this book advances a normative conception of the family that is based upon the qualitative aspects of familial caregiving relationships. I argue that families are best situated for intimate caregiving relationships because of the inevitability of caregiving needs and the moral characteristics of effective caregiving. An important part of this account involves recognizing families as social groups engaged in active caregiving. This means, at minimum, moving away from designating biological ties as a determining criterion for familial relationships. It also means moving away from existing social frameworks for designating familial status: specifically, states must move away from frameworks of monogamous marriage and adoption as the paramount means for establishing familial ties for non-biologically related individuals. A family can be comprised of any group of individuals who uphold a joint commitment to reciprocally work together toward the mutual well-being of one another and the group as a whole. My normative conception of the family does not incorporate any gendered or intergenerational roles or relations and is premised only on the kinds of activities and attitudes of its members. In short, I argue that the family is a unique social group with a particular primary purpose: to provide care in intimate settings for the mutual flourishing of all family members.

To build out my account, I clarify what comprises caring activity and why care is so important for families. I propose a taxonomy of needs and care that specifies the content of familial obligation (the kinds of needs that intimate caring behaviors meet) as well as the content for other institutional obligations (the kinds of needs that civic institutions and governments meet). The distinction I draw between primary needs and secondary needs, as well as corresponding primary caring activities and secondary caring activities, establishes where the responsibility to meet needs is situated. Ultimately, I argue that primary needs can only be met by primary caring activities, which should be performed by family members, while secondary needs can only be met by secondary caring activities, which may be performed by a variety of institutions or through the regulatory power of the state.

I argue that governments are obligated to meet the needs of families because of the unique role that governments play in creating and perpetuating specific needs that may become obstacles to effective care. I then contend that when governments and institutions respond to secondary needs, they engage in secondary caring activities which many include the direct provision of care or the provision of resources that make care more accessible. Conceiving of secondary caring activities as forms of care is crucial for articulating the moral imperative to provide such care and makes it possible to evaluate systems of secondary care activities in different socio-political communities.

The social family account maintains that states ought to recognize that intimate care and caring activities comprise the primary purpose of families and so should recognize groups that are engaged in intimate, interdependent caregiving activities as families. Crucially, this also means that states may stop recognizing a group as a family if it is no longer engaged in intimate, interdependent caregiving activities. Through policies, actions, and protections decreed by its governing body, the state shapes permissible relations within the family by setting thresholds that warrant intervening or abstaining from intervention. To this end, I provide a framework for state intervention into family life that aims to restore, as best as possible, interdependent caring relations within families.

The social family account ultimately aims to shift how we view the family as a constitutive element of social and political theory. Rather than starting with a political definition of the individual, the social family account begins by acknowledging that interdependent, intimate caregiving relationships are fundamental to human experience—we are all members of these relationships from the beginning. As such, the account structures our social and political duties around nurturing these vital relationships and the caregiving that defines them.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Identifying Family Through Purpose

Chapter Two: What We Can Expect From One Another: Examining Social Groups and Obligations

Chapter Three: The Social Family and the Obligation to Care

Chapter Four: An Institutional Obligation to Care

Chapter Five: Relational Thinking and the Family-State Relationship

Routledge link: https://www.routledge.com/The-Social-Family-Sociality-and-the-Ethics-of-Supporting-Families/Kane/p/book/9781041112013

Email: laura.kane@worcester.edu

Website:

https://www.laurawkane.com

By Netanel Ron

Did you ever wonder if someone you met is a real person or just some character that God animates? Did you ever wonder if there is someone who is living life as your neighbor, experiencing your neighbor’s life “from the inside,” or if your neighbor is more like a non-conscious robot who acts and looks like a human but is really just a puppet playing their role?

“NPC” is a term used in video games and in tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. While some characters in these games are controlled by real-life human players, in some video games there are characters who are controlled by the game itself, and they operate upon a preprogrammed set of behaviors. Likewise, in tabletop role-playing games, sometimes there are characters who are controlled by the storyteller, rather than by one of the players. These characters are called “non-player characters”, or “NPCs” for short. NPCs often serve as adversaries that players must contend with, or as allies that assist players in their quests, but in many games there are also countless NPCs designed simply to populate the game’s virtual environment and make it realistic.

What if there are also NPCs here in the real world? If a powerful God exists, he could make NPCs in our world, and he could either preprogram their behavior or animate them himself as time goes along. In this paper, I discuss this possibility and show how it bears on theorizing about the existence of God and God’s relation to the evil and suffering in our world.

Theodicies are philosophical arguments aimed at explaining why a very powerful (maybe even “all-powerful”), very knowledgeable (maybe even “all-knowing”), and very (maybe even perfectly) good God would let there be so much evil and suffering in our world. One of the most popular strategies for theodicies is to try to point out good things that the existence of evil and suffering is necessary for, good things that might make it all worthwhile in the long run. In the paper, I show that some theodicies face a problem because the good things that they argue that evil and suffering are necessary for are really things that can come about even if real people and real animals hardly ever suffer and bad things mostly happen only to NPCs. I call these theodicies “NPC-inviting theodicies” since they invite the thought that God should make NPCs exist in the real world to bring about plentiful goods with hardly any real suffering.

A lot of so-called “free-will theodicies” are NPC-inviting theodicies. These theodicies argue that evil and suffering are a result of human free will, and they argue that God gave us free will, despite the bad things it leads to, because it is also necessary for some very good things. For example, people freely choosing to love God and people freely choosing to act virtuously. Now imagine a world where God created only one real person – “Player One” – and the rest of the world is filled with NPCs. In this kind of world, Player One can exercise their free will to freely choose to love God and freely choose to act kindly towards others (NPCs who Player One does not recognize as such), all without anyone being harmed if Player One chooses to act evilly once in a while. If God repeats this in many worlds, with a different person being Player One and living among NPCs in each world, many people can freely choose to love God and freely choose to act virtuously without anyone else being harmed when they don’t. This makes these free-will theodicies NPC-inviting.

In the paper I discuss a few more NPC-inviting theodicies, including the “soul-making theodicy” famously championed by John Hick, and I present a threefold problem for these theodicies which I name the “NPC problem.” The most obvious aspect of the NPC problem is probably what I call “the bizarre aspect,” which simply points out that it is quite bizarre, even unpalatable, for a theodicy to imply that we should expect for there to be many real-life NPCs among us, disguised as fellow conscious creatures. Yet this is what we should expect if we take an NPC-inviting theodicy seriously.

Another, more subtle aspect of the NPC problem is what I call “the refutation aspect.” God presumably aims to minimize unnecessary pain and suffering, so it would be natural for God to protect the Player One of each world and keep them away from harm. This should be easy for God, since there is only one person for God to focus his providence on in each world. Now, if someone is very unfortunate and they live a wretched life full of suffering, they know they can’t possibly be the Player One of their world. This means, however, that if an NPC-inviting theodicy is correct, that person must be an NPC. We cannot know for sure about other people whether they are real people or NPCS, but people do know this about themselves. If someone knows that they are not an NPC, yet they suffer far more than they might have suffered if they were Player One, they have first-person access to evidence that refutes NPC-inviting theodicies.

In the paper I also discuss a “dark aspect of the NPC problem” and show how NPC-inviting theodicies harbor a dangerous potential to provoke dark thoughts that smack of racism, classism, and ableism. Afterwards, I consider four possible responses to the NPC problem, one aimed at showing why God wouldn’t fill the world with NPCs even if an NPC-inviting theodicy is true, and the rest aimed at resolving only the refutation aspect and the dark aspect of the NPC problem. One response argues that God wouldn’t create NPCs because that would be deceitful on God’s part, and another response argues that God wouldn’t place Player One in a world full of only NPCs because God would want Player One to have “real friends” and not just relationships with NPCs. I argue that these responses can only help NPC-inviting theodicies if the value of God being not deceitful or the value of “real friendships” is so high that it outweighs the enormous amounts of suffering that God can prevent if he utilizes NPCs, and this seems unlikely.

I should note that the NPC problem does not doom the project of theodicy, as there are plenty of theodicies that are immune to it (I list many in footnote 8 in the paper). In fact, I myself am a theodicist, not just a critic pointing out problems from the sidelines, and elsewhere, I develop a “world-building theodicy” that is not NPC-inviting. The main idea is that God enabled evil and suffering to exist to leave it to us to turn the world into a utopia through our own hard work and manifest ourselves as godlike mini creators. With that said, I take the NPC problem to be serious problem that theodicists should to take into account when constructing theodicies, and those who adopt NPC-inviting theodicies seem to have some rethinking to do.