Forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of PhilosophyThis paper explores two ways that evaluations of an agent's character as virtuous or vicious are properly influenced by what the agent finds salient or attention-grabbing. First, we argue that ignoring salient needs reveals a greater deficit of benevolent motivation in the agent, and hence renders them more blameworthy. We use this fact to help explain our ordinary intuition that failing to give to famine relief (for example) is in some sense less bad than failing to help a drowning child right before your eyes, in a way that's compatible with the contention that there's no principled reason to see the one life-saving act as any more or less choiceworthy than the other. Second, we argue that alleged 'virtues of ignorance' (modesty, believing better of friends than the evidence supports, etc.) are better understood as 'virtues of salience'. Rather than placing demands on what we believe, these virtues place demands on what we find salient.
This chapter develops a novel non-theistic (quasi-)Berkeleyan idealism. The strategy is to peel away the attributes of God that aren’t essential for the role he plays in idealist metaphysics. Neither God’s desires, intentions, beliefs, nor his status as an agent is relevant to the metaphysical work he does in sustaining a robust reality. When we peel away these things, we’re left with a view on which reality is a vast unity of consciousness, weaving together sensory experiences into the familiar world around us. The chapter argues that if reality is fundamentally phenomenal in this way, we can give a unique account of perception that robustly captures direct realist intuitions of reality forming the ‘constituents’ of our experiences. The chapter assesses the unique virtues and challenges such a view faces, paying particular attention to the question of whether idealism entails a profligacy of physical laws.
The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between antiphysicalist arguments in the philosophy of mind and anti-naturalist arguments in metaethics, and to show how the literature on the mindbody problem can inform metaethics. Among the questions we will consider are: (1) whether a moral parallel of the knowledge argument can be constructed to create trouble for naturalists, (2) the relationship between such a "Moral Knowledge Argument" and the familiar Open Question Argument, and (3) how naturalists can respond to the Moral Twin Earth argument. We will give particular attention to recent arguments in the philosophy of mind that aim to show that anti-physicalist arguments can be defused by acknowledging a distinctive kind of conceptual dualism between the phenomenal and the physical. This tactic for evading anti-physicalist arguments has come to be known as the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. We will propose a metaethical version of this strategy, which we shall call the 'Moral Concept Strategy'. We suggest that the Moral Concept Strategy offers the most promising way out of these anti-naturalist arguments, though significant challenges remain.
I argue that we can see in a great many cases that run counter to common sense. We can literally see through mirrors, in just the same way that we (literally) see through our eyes. We can, likewise, literally see through photographs, shadows, and (some) paintings. Rather than starting with an analysis of seeing, I present a series of evolving thought experiments, arguing that in each case there is no relevant difference between it and the previous case regarding whether we see. In a sense, my arguments can be thought of as akin to the Extended Mind Hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers 1998). But instead of arguing that our minds can extend into the world, I argue that our sensory organs can extend into the world. Among the things that emerge from this discussion are (1) that-contrary to Currie (1995) and Carroll (1996)-seeing an object O doesn't require being able to locate O with respect to yourself, (2) that-contrary to Sorensen (2008)-we can see objects by seeing their shadows, and (3) that-contrary to Walton (1984)-it doesn't matter whether the causal relation between O and yourself is mediated by beliefs.
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