This paper addresses the question of whether two-way powers – powers to act in some way (to ɸ) or to refrain from acting in that way (to refrain from ɸ-ing) – are causal powers. That is, the question is whether the power to ɸ or refrain from ɸ-ing could amount to the power to cause an effect of some kind, E, or refrain from causing an E-effect. It is argued that, for the incompatibilist regarding two-way powers, though not for the compatibilist, two-way powers cannot be causal powers. But an alternative account of two-way powers as powers of non-causal determination is presented as available and favourable.

The publication of Inoue Tetsujirō’s (1855–1944) The Philosophy of the Japanese Yangming School (1900) marked the birth of ‘Japanese philosophy’. In the early exploration of Japanese philosophy, the existence of a ‘twofold other’ – the ‘others’ of ‘philosophy’ and of kanji and kango components of Chinese origin in the Japanese script and language – became an unavoidable problem. In modernizing traditional scholarship to adapt it to the Western paradigm of ‘philosophy’, the first problem was the ‘other’ of ‘philosophy’. Discussions of the kokugo reform and the nationalization of the Japanese language originated precisely from kanji and kango representing the ‘other’. Inoue actively advocated abolishing kanji and creating a ‘new national script’ (shin kokuji). Nevertheless, he took the kanbun texts of early modern Confucianism as his object, and wrote his three ‘Japanese philosophy’ books, the so-called Trilogy of Tokugawa Confucianism. We argue that Inoue overcame the inconsistency in his positions on language politics and philosophy and paved the way to construct ‘Japanese philosophy’ through his ‘pan-philosophical’ outlook while advocating the creation of a new national script only for linguistic convenience. Thus, he was able to avoid the problem of twofold ‘otherness’ and cohere his theoretical position. However, Inoue’s path was soon abandoned.

To live meaningfully, we can’t just be receptacles for the right sorts of activities – it has to matter that it’s us living our lives. Something is missing in valuable activities, if the same value could be achieved by anyone who performs the task. Meaningfulness requires that it be our own ideals, personalities, and priorities contributing to the value of what we do. Recognizing this can shed light on our relationship with meaning in three ways. First, it shows a distinctive reason that autonomy is important: what we do without autonomy will lack meaning. Second, it helps us understand a challenge we encounter when facing trade-offs between different types of meaning, navigating between opportunities to have a few of our characteristics matter widely (e.g., as a filmmaker or an activist) and intimate contexts in which much more of who we are matters to a small group of people. Finally, if living meaningfully involves our central characteristics shaping what’s valuable about our actions, then discovering pre-set purposes (e.g., from fate, God, or the cosmos) might actually undermine our capacity to live meaningful lives.

I spell out a distinctive account of what is wrong with inequalities of wealth: they constitute asymmetries of power. Two ideas lie behind this view. The first is that asymmetries of power constitute inegalitarian relationships. Think of the relationship of king to subject or master to slave: these are in part constituted by asymmetric power. The second is that wealth gives one power over people. When you have a lot of money, you can pay people to do what you want, and that gives you power over them. Inequalities of wealth, by constituting asymmetries of power, thus constitute objectionably inegalitarian relationships.

According to J. S. Mill’s liberty principle, the only legitimate justification for restricting the freedom of competent adults is to prevent harm to others. However, this is ambiguous between two interpretations. The harm causation version (Brown, 1972) has it that only conduct that is itself harmful is liable to interference. In contrast, the general prevention of harm version (Lyons, 1979) allows interference with conduct that does not itself cause harm, such as refusals to assist others, so long as this interference prevents harm from occurring.

Mark Tunick (2024) has recently offered new arguments for the harm causation interpretation, suggesting that only this can explain Mill’s resistance to legal interference with prostitutes. This paper challenges Tunick’s arguments. First, I show that Mill does not clearly restrict interference to the proximate causes of harm. While he prefers interference to focus on the clients, rather than singling out the prostitutes, he is prepared to countenance interference with the prostitutes as well. Further, his preference for focusing on the clients is explicable, even if not required by the liberty principle.

What is it for something to be sacred? What is the ethical significance of the sacred? These questions have been mostly overlooked in contemporary academic philosophy. In this paper, I will develop an account of what the sacred is and then argue that it has significant implications for several ethical issues, viz., happiness, meaningfulness, virtue, identity, and political morality.

I aim at dissolving Saul Kripke’s dogmatism paradox by defending the idea that, with respect to any particular proposition p known by a subject A, it is not irrational for A to ignore all evidence against p. Here my defence of the dogmatic attitude depends on the crucial assumption – and this is an assumption made by Kripke himself in the setting of the paradox – that A wishes above all else to avoid gaining a false belief or losing a true one. An appendix briefly examines the possibility of a knowledge version of the paradox, as opposed to Kripke’s original true-belief version.

Cosmopolitans who take principles of distributive justice to apply globally have long struggled with the legacy of Rawls. Some parts of Rawls’s view seem to support cosmopolitanism although he rejects this position himself. Samuel Scheffler and Miriam Ronzoni have each identified resources in Rawls’s work that open the door to cosmopolitan conclusions but differ from those traditionally cited by cosmopolitans. Scheffler and Ronzoni argue that changing social circumstances, like those involved in globalization, may affect the scope of principles of distributive justice. But they also both take it to be an open question whether such principles have global reach presently. I argue that this reticence is not justified. Their arguments suggest that principles of distributive justice have long applied globally. Indeed, the view so strongly favors cosmopolitanism that further argument is needed to secure any room for unique domestic principles of distributive justice. I follow Rawls’s lead and draw on Kant to indicate how such an argument might go. Finally, I argue that although the scope of principles of distributive justice is less historically contingent than Scheffler and Ronzoni suggest, there is still considerable room in this view for the evolution of institutions to shape the content of such principles.

Political philosophy has long been criticised for its state-centricity. A recent version of this objection asserts that the discipline perpetuates a problematic methodological nationalism. Critics argue that political philosophers are widely disposed to interpret political phenomena from the perspective of the nation-state, and that this is detrimental to normative theorising. In this paper I argue that the objection to methodological nationalism should be dropped, at least in its current form. Specifically, I reconstruct three variants of the objection, and – borrowing insights from the ‘hard’ sciences and Elisabeth Camp’s account of perspectives – ultimately show that methodological nationalism is not the kind of thing that can be decisively objected to in a widely-persuasive manner. Therefore, I recommend that sweeping objections to nation-state-centricity be generally replaced with traditional targeted analysis of specific claims made in specific contexts. Despite the fine-grained nature of this approach, I show that it remains a fruitful way of addressing pervasive problems in the discipline.

Most people believe that there is something particularly morally repugnant about terrorism. A number of philosophers have attempted to defend this widely held view by offering accounts of precisely what it is about terrorism that makes it morally distinctive. In this paper I raise some doubts about the accounts that have been defended by others, focusing in particular on Samuel Scheffler’s view. In light of the doubts that I raise about existing accounts, I suggest what must be done in order to arrive at an adequate account, and offer an outline of a view that seems to me promising. On the view that I suggest, terrorist acts reveal something of distinctive moral significance about the agents who perpetrate them, even if they are not in themselves morally worse than otherwise similar acts.

In this paper, I argue that we do not know how to implement abstract principles of liberal egalitarian justice. Starting with Scheffler’s Rawlsian diagnosis of the retreat of liberal democracy in the United States, I argue that it may be due to our lack of knowledge about how to institutionalize a Rawlsian just liberal society. To illustrate the difficulty or challenge, I examine several policy proposals to help build human capital for property-owning democracy and argue that they can fail for various reasons. The main problem is that the changing ways in which diverse individuals respond to policies and interact with one another affect policy consequences, but their complexity surpasses our limited knowledge. The ignorance gives us reason to be patient with the slow pace of building an ideal liberal society, tolerant of those who are sceptical about interventions to implement liberal egalitarian principles, and open to policy experimentation and learning. I further argue that we should publicly acknowledge our ignorance about policy outcomes, as it can reduce political polarization, by moderating policy positions and interpreting policy disagreements as empirical rather than moral, and counter democratic backsliding.