Ordinary thought and talk accepts epistemic evaluation as genuinely relevant to or bearing on what and how we ought to believe, all things considered. In this article, I treat our pretheoretical commitment to the normative significance of epistemic evaluation as a kind of datum that epistemic theorizing ought not merely accommodate but explain. I argue that familiar versions of two popular sorts of explanations are not well-positioned to fully vindicate our pretheoretical commitment to the genuine normative significance of epistemic evaluation. And I develop an alternative, fully vindicating explanation of this datum.

There is a straightforward conceptual distinction between “relational” and “nonrelational” obligations (obligations that are not conceived in explicitly relational terms).1 Unlike nonrelational obligations, it is intrinsic to relational obligations that they are owed to others. In addition to the person subject to the obligation, the obligor, there is also an obligee (or obligees) to whom the obligation is owed. With nonrelational obligations, there need only be an obligor; no obligee is required. Similarly, when a nonrelational obligation is violated, something wrong has been done. When, however, the violated obligation is relational, not only is a (pro tanto) wrong done, someone to whom the obligation is owed is wronged.

What is the difference between a reason to do something and a duty to do it? This paper develops a relational account of duties, locating the distinction between duties and nonduty reasons in how others should react to the agent’s will: duty-contrary willing deserves distinctively diminished respect from others, when compared to the respect owed to willing contrary to nonduty reasons. It is also a “reasons-first” account, revealing a duty (and indeed a right) to be composed of a specific nexus of reasons for the agent and for others. The account has important implications for how to understand duty-creation in promising and legislation.

This essay develops a disability-based epistemic challenge to nature-first constitutivism, a family of views on which standards of excellence and defect for (human) agents are grounded in the nature of (human) agency. The core idea of the challenge is that various culturally prevalent negative assumptions about disability, along with related phenomena such as disability invisibility, introduce ideological distortions into our assessment of what (human) capacities for agency and the associated excellences and “defects” are like, occluding from view the worthwhile hypothesis that some disabled modes of agency might be compatible with agential excellence. Such distortions may be avoidable, but only by seriously interrogating the assumptions about disability that underpin them, as well as specific disabled modes of agency. I develop this challenge in detail by focusing on one disability affecting agency: ADHD. I conclude by outlining related metaphysical questions regarding plural forms of agency, situating these questions within the emerging literature on pluralist constitutivism.

I offer an account of how a constitutivist metaphysics of capacities grounds a unique interpretation of propositions about the nature of our action, focusing on propositions about acting under the guise of the good and acting from practical knowledge. I then show that these interpretations can not only explain the possibility of cases often taken as counterexamples to these propositions but can also explain why those cases are odd or not paradigmatic exercises of the relevant capacity.

Constitutivists say authoritative practical norms are grounded in the nature of action. But how are they so grounded? I argue that there is a deep, under-appreciated division among constitutivists on this point. “Transcendental” constitutivism says all rational agents are committed to practical norms on pain of inconsistency. “Functional” constitutivism says that complying with practical norms is necessary to realize the function of action. These views come apart, and the distinction between them has important implications for both how constitutivists should defend their view and how they should respond to the most popular objections to it: the “shmagency” and “bad action” problems.

Capacity constitutivism is a recent form of constitutivism that seeks to ground normative facts in our capacities as agents and believers. Its epistemic version holds that epistemic normativity, including epistemic reasons, is grounded in our epistemic capacities. The success of this project depends crucially on how those capacities are understood. This paper clarifies the distinctive nature of epistemic capacities by contrasting them with capacities in sports, arts, and games. I then argue that this distinctiveness helps explain why the well-functioning of epistemic capacities can ground genuine normativity, while the well-functioning of other capacities cannot.

According to the legal-grammatical picture of constitutivism, the constitutive standards of a kind x carry an existential threat: abiding by them is necessary for being an x at all. But this seems to leave no room for defective x’s—the bad-x problem. A functional model escapes this problem, yet it fits structural rational agency poorly. I argue that a suitably complex legal-grammatical model—one attentive to how legal enterprises are materially realized—makes room for genuinely internal violations: intelligible fouls, correctable from a dynamic kernel of perfect compliance. The existential threat survives, yet genuine defect finds a place within it.

Recent decades have witnessed sharp disagreement about the character of Kant’s metaethical position. Constructivists have read him as thinking of moral value, against the example of his rationalist predecessors, as constructed by acts of the human mind. Realists have read him as thinking of such value, in the company of these predecessors, as constituted prior to human nature altogether. I argue that both camps have mischaracterized Kant’s position, in particular as it contrasts with that of the rationalists, and that the correct characterization depends on an underappreciated distinction between two forms of constitutivism. While the rationalists follow a medieval precedent in thinking that the human will is by nature the power to love and pursue a good constituted prior to it, so that they are aptly described as endorsing a heteronomist constitutivist conception of the relation of the will to the good, Kant defines the good in terms of the will as the object to which its internal standard directs it, thereby embracing an autonomist constitutivism.

The main idea in Daniel Sutherland’s Kant’s Mathematical World is a strong claim about the immanence of mathematics in the world: Mathematics is literally true of objects of experience because it conditions the possibility of experience, and thereby the objects of experience. Sutherland grounds this claim on an insightful treatment of the general theory of magnitude that outlines constraints on magnitude’s representation. That representational task also gives rise to a regress problem, which Sutherland addresses by appeal to continuous successive synthesis. The result bears on recent debates between conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings of Kant’s theory of cognition.

The authority—and even the relevance—of morality have come under attack recently in Ronald de Sousa’s advocacy of amoralism. I here come to morality’s defense.

According to most contemporary treatments, our faculty of reason is itself devoid of a motive force. We defend the contrary Kantian position which claims that our faculty of rationality, our Will, comes with a motive force of its own. Our argument takes outset in the experience of reflective freedom as this has been discussed by Frankfurt, Watson, Velleman, and Sartre. We argue that each of their theories is unable to account for central features of our experience of reflective freedom. We show that only if we ascribe a substantive motive to our faculty of rationality can we overcome these problems.

My aim in this paper is to offer some constructive suggestions about the deontological conception of moral value, taking the relational account as my example of a deontological approach. I identify two different kinds of moral values that might be elucidated by the relational approach, which I shall call compliance values and status values. I discuss the role that these moralized values play within the relational theory, tracing the contributions they make to the larger interpretative case for understanding interpersonal morality in relational terms.

The prospect of geoengineering the Earth—the deliberate, large-scale intervention in Earth’s climate system to help mitigate the negative impacts associated with climate change—forces us to confront more than just scientific and technological questions. It challenges us to examine questions about our character. While some scholars have argued that geoengineering the Earth would be an act of arrogance, we develop a new account of ecological humility that is grounded in evidence from environmental psychology and argue that, under some conditions, this virtue is consistent with geoengineering the Earth.

Expositions of the fine-tuning argument (FTA) typically aim only to show that cosmic fine-tuning is evidence for theism over specific versions of naturalism. But, construed as an argument for theism, that modest contention threatens the FTA with insignificance, as there may be other hypotheses that better explain fine-tuning than either theism or one’s preferred formulation of naturalism. Adopting a Bayesian framework, I assess four such possibilities: the simulation hypothesis, teleological cosmopsychism, axiarchism, and teleological laws. I conclude that theism is superior to all four.

There is a difference between doing something that is wrong and wronging someone in particular. Texting while driving is wrong; injuring a pedestrian because you were texting while driving is a wrong against that particular pedestrian. It has been common to think that wrongs just are violations of the wronged party’s rights, but recent arguments suggest otherwise: there can also be wrongs without rights violations. Supposing these arguments are correct, what is it to wrong someone?

Conciliationism holds that it is rational to modify one’s beliefs in the face of disagreement. But extant conciliatory norms yield incorrect results in cases involving excessive confidence—cases in which one’s interlocutors are sure, or almost sure, that their opinions are correct. After explaining the problem of excessive confidence, I show that a Bayesian approach to Conciliationism handles the problem elegantly and effectively. Further, it has desirable—indeed essential—features, including the ability to (i) contend with multiple interlocutors, (ii) deal with gradations in competence, (iii) incorporate ubiquitous interdependence, and (iv) account for critical contextual features of cases of disagreement.

I develop in this paper some epistemological themes inspired by the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi famously thought the method of nonviolence he’d pioneered—satyagraha, as he called it—a powerful means of effecting change in the political domain, but he also thought it a way of life, applicable in the warp and woof of everyday, interpersonal interactions. I will investigate here what it might look like to practice the way of Gandhian nonviolence in one’s everyday epistemic interactions. There will be connections between this sort of epistemic practice and some main themes in contemporary work on intellectual humility.

Despite the centrality of the achievement thesis within standpoint epistemology, thereare gaps in the literature on the epistemic significance of consciousness-raising and itsrole in providing access to knowledge that was previously inaccessible. To addressthese gaps, I argue that consciousness-raising is a transformative experience, one thatmakes us a different person. If, as the standpoint epistemologist suggests, what weknow is sensitive to facts about who we are, then to change what we know we mustchange who we are.

Neopragmatism is what local expressivism becomes when it is fully generalized and globalized. One of its attractions is its promise to demystify long-standing metaphysical puzzles by shifting the focus from ontology to language. Among current neopragmatists, there is an important divide. Members of one group hold that we cannot explain language without making use of normative notions such as reasons or entitlements. Members of the other group deny this. In this paper, I defend the naturalistic version of neopragmatism from arguments coming from proponents of the normative version.