This article argues that the traditional taxonomy of doxastic attitudes leaves out an important alternative. That is the attitude of rejecting the question. Sundry examples of the phenomenon are presented and their unifying features are identified. One rejects a question when one treats it as if none of its answers were true. One can reject not only non-polar questions, but also polar ones (questions of the form whether p). The stance of rejecting a question is further distinguished from interrogative attitudes in general, and from the third stance of the traditional taxonomy in particular.

In this article, I elucidate Martin Luther King Jr.’s views on the value and function of democratic disappointment. First, disappointment is intrinsically valuable as a morally appropriate emotional response to frustrated desires and expectations. Second, it is instrumentally valuable as a necessary precondition for political action. I close by exploring King’s account of how to constructively channel disappointment into determined political action through song.

In this article, I argue that interpersonal cruelty can often be explained in ordinary moral terms in conjunction with facts about social hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that misogynistic cruelty often stems from the sense that certain women are wrongdoers; it often stems from the sense that certain, privileged men are entitled to violate women; and it often stems from the sense that, at least when they threaten such men, women simply do not matter. Misogynistic cruelty is thus more a product of moral vilification, entitlement, and devaluation than dehumanization proper. I explore the implications for the need to posit dehumanization as a mechanism to explain cruelty elsewhere.

This article will argue that Sor Juana develops a revisionary virtue epistemology in her Reply to Sor Filotea in order to counter the oppressive dogmas of her time. Sor Juana’s epistemological reorganization of Catholic Scholasticism helps her epistemically ground and morally justify her lifelong passion for learning. Sor Juana’s virtue responsibilist epistemology posits that properly oriented humility actually motivates studying, even for women; subtly reworks the scope of the supposed vice of curiositas so as to endorse curiosity about the created world as a virtue; and underscores the equal importance of moral and intellectual virtues for persons of any gender. Furthermore, Sor Juana’s system emphasizes grounds for epistemic justification that are accessible third-personally to allow her to move beyond the discriminatory debate about women’s intellectual capacities and demonstrate her epistemic agency through externally observable markers.

By allocating their attention to pieces of content, algorithmic filtering shapes the daily behavior of billions of users when they interact with a digital platform. Beyond conditioning what we do, can recommendation algorithms influence who we are? This article suggests that they do. Specifically, I contend that recommender systems affect users’ capacity to be their authentic selves in both positive and negative ways. I start by offering an account of authenticity that builds on two central concepts: volitional alignment and self-understanding. I then explain how algorithmic filtering works and impacts authenticity. While recommender systems frustrate users’ second-order desires by relying on uninformative behavioral signals, they also facilitate self-understanding by inciting users to question their identity. I end by discussing how controllable and explainable recommenders would best enable users to be authentic.

On my account, dehumanization is the act of conceiving of others as less than human creatures. When this occurs, it is never complete, because those that dehumanize others cannot avoid recognizing their humanness. Consequently, dehumanization involves regarding others as both fully human and fully subhuman beings. Inferences about dehumanizing states of mind are based on interpretations of human behavior. A Davidsonian account of interpretation has it that we interpret behavior in such a manner as to make it maximally coherent, rational, and consistent. In contrast, a Freudian account of interpretation has it that the human mind is largely incoherent, irrational, and inconsistent. The dichotomy between Davidsonian and Freudian hermeneutic strategies accounts for disagreements between realists and skeptics about dehumanization, because of dichotomous interpretations of the testimony of perpetrators and victims. Skepticism about dehumanization often invokes an Objection from Strangeness to call into question such testimony. However, Objections from Strangeness rely on questionable commonsense psychological assumptions.

Within the recent glut of philosophical work on hope, relatively little attention has been devoted to the circumstantial conditions that frustrate or accommodate hoping. In this article, I show how an individual’s spatial environment can constrain their capacity to sustain determinate hopes for the future via an extended case study: long-term refugee detention. Taking seriously refugees’ claims that a central cause of widespread hopelessness is the feeling of being in limbo, and drawing on recent work on the role of the imagination in hoping, I demonstrate how an individual’s spatial environment can limit imaginative access to the interim steps between their present circumstances and a desired future, making it difficult to see any way their hope could be realized.

This article explores the place of non-human animals in Catharine Macaulay’s understanding of moral education. Other Early Modern writers instructed parents and governors to discourage children from mistreating animals in order to prevent the development of cruelty or callousness, but said little else. Macaulay’s views run deeper. Focusing on her Letters on Education (1790), I show that Macaulay centers her view on the development of the natural capacity for sympathy, through which we discover the principle of equity, and thereby cultivate the crucial virtue of benevolence. I then show that Macaulay repeatedly connects sympathy and benevolence to the early associations formed through one’s relations to sentient creatures, revealing how her associationistic psychology grounds her views on morality and moral education.

Philosophers who write about blame tend to focus on angry confrontations, but in this article I look closely at the less visible, longer lasting, and seemingly more insidious side of blame: grudges. After offering an extended example of grudge-holding and surveying the scant literature on this topic in both psychology and philosophy, I offer an account of what it is to hold a grudge. On my account, grudges involve negative feelings toward a transgressor that are (1) antagonistic, (2) easily reactivated, (3) persistent, (4) globalist, and (5) not-yet-overcome. The article is dedicated to fleshing out and justifying these components, and showing how the account fits with existing research on forgiveness and related notions. I conclude by suggesting that theorists of responsibility would benefit from broadening their gaze beyond blame and forgiveness to the more general notions of holding against and letting go.

Conceptual improvements are a significant dimension through which local moral progress occurs, both at the individual and societal levels. Michele Moody-Adams (1999) offers a narrow view of moral progress, suggesting that only a deepened understanding of complex, existing moral concepts can constitute moral progress. Consequently, she views the role of moral philosophy as limited to constructing deeper accounts of these concepts. We broaden Moody-Adams’s (1999) account by identifying three distinct types of conceptual improvements that can constitute moral progress: deepening the understanding of existing concepts, creating new concepts, and enhancing the ability to apply concepts. We support this typology with historical examples where such improvements constituted moral progress. Based on this typology, we argue that the role of moral philosophy extends beyond developing and refining moral theories to include the active creation of new concepts and the facilitation of conceptual application.

This article identifies a novel threat to deliberative autonomy—a kind of control one has over one’s deliberative process—arising from the way agents express themselves through action. Drawing on T.M. Scanlon’s account of an action’s meaning, we argue that many actions bear expressive significance in virtue of the motivating reasons behind them. Because deliberative autonomy partly consists in one’s ability to shape a meaningful life through control over such expressions, we have a moral interest in maintaining opportunities for expressive action. We show that these opportunities can be undermined by well-meaning interventions that change the justificatory context in which others act, thereby altering the possible meanings their actions can bear. This has a surprising upshot. We sometimes act wrongly in giving someone new reasons to do what they were going to do anyway. We conclude with some brief thoughts about what this possibility means for individual morality as well as for political philosophy.

Much of the debate between naïve realism and the content view has focused on a particular aspect of perceptual phenomenology: the phenomenal immediacy that distinguishes perceptual experiences from both imagery experiences and conscious thoughts. According to a version of the argument from hallucination, we should prefer the content view to naïve realism because the former, unlike the latter, can provide a unified explanation of the fact that both hallucinatory and veridical experiences possess immediacy. However, the standard variety of the content view that can provide such an explanation is not in a position to provide a unified explanation of a distinct aspect of perceptual phenomenology: perceptual experiences possess a presentational character that they share with imagery experiences (and which distinguishes both from conscious thoughts). Accordingly, I present an argument from imagination in defense of a non-standard variety of the content view—the sensory vehicle theory. Unlike its competitors, the sensory vehicle theory can provide unified explanations of why hallucinatory and veridical perceptual experiences possess immediacy, and why perceptual and imagery experiences possess their presentational character; as such, this theory provides a better explanation of the phenomenal facts than does either naïve realism or the standard variety of the content view.

Traditional compatibilists respond to the Consequence Argument by denying either the fixity of the past or by denying the fixity of the laws, neither of which is without theoretical cost. Recently, however, several authors—Christian List (2019b), Scott Sehon (2016), and Ned Markosian (2012)—have introduced novel approaches to free will that, they claim, imply that determinism is no threat to free will and, thus, that free will and determinism turn out to be compatible. The strategies employed by these authors differ considerably, with one influenced by psychology and decision theory, another by traditional philosophy of action, and the other by the metaphysics of causation. Nevertheless, this article aims to show, first, that these approaches share a common thread and, second, that each implicitly requires us to give up either the fixity of the past or the fixity of the laws (but without making this explicit or explaining how their views are preferable to traditional compatibilist views with respect to giving up the fixity of the past/laws). The article concludes with an important lesson that may be learned from our survey of these novel and interesting, even if ultimately unsuccessful, approaches to compatibilism.

Philosophical literature on praise primarily focuses on verbal expressions of praise. But material expressions of praise are a pervasive feature of our social practices: we use cash prizes, bonuses, statues, trophies to celebrate and esteem others and their good deeds. What is the normative significance of using things to praise, when using (mere) words is an alternative? Beyond the instrumental and symbolic significance, we draw on recent literature on world-shaping and mind-shaping to explain what can be achieved by appraisive things. We point to, and illustrate, two normatively important properties that are brought to the fore by material praise: the finitude and durability of things. In light of these previously neglected dimensions of our appraisive practices, we revisit norms of positive appraisal, showing the need for a multidimensional account of apt praise.

Orthodox contractualists and rule consequentialists think that, for any action, the consequences of everyone performing that action determine whether that action is permissible. For them, “what if everyone did that?” is the fundamental moral question. By making “what if everyone did that?” the fundamental question of good moral reasoning, these moral theories can easily justify prohibitions on free-riding. But it also makes them face the ideal world problem. I argue that it was a mistake for moral theorists to generalize from an objection appropriate to cases of free-riding to all of morality. In short, we should understand the question “what if everyone did that?” to give expression to one, and only one, kind of objection to one’s action—namely, that, by performing that action, one would be making an exception of oneself. If we limit the scope of “what if everyone did that?” in this way, we can justify prohibitions on free-riding while avoiding the ideal world problem.

An agent’s epistemic prospects depend on a combination of that agent’s individual characteristics and features of that agent’s epistemic environment. Such factors cannot always be cleanly separated. Often, individual characteristics impact agents’ epistemic prospects by shaping the epistemic environments in which individuals find themselves. In particular, features of individuals often repel or attract certain sorts of information, a phenomenon I label epistemic magnetism. I argue that epistemic magnetism is a ubiquitous and underrecognized phenomenon that sometimes promotes and sometimes frustrates the achievement of positive epistemic outcomes. Then, I consider a series of simple proposals concerning what distinguishes between beneficial and harmful forms of epistemic magnetism. I argue that these proposals cannot capture the impacts of epistemic magnetism. Instead, I offer a series of principles that serve to roughly characterize the consequences of this phenomenon. I conclude with some remarks on why epistemologists have thus far tended to overlook epistemic magnetism.

Causal loops are circular chains of causally related events: each link causes others which in turn cause it. Not only are causal loops widely accepted as coherently conceivable; some are also provably self-consistent as well as seeming genuinely possible according to currently accepted laws of physics. On the common assumption that causation is transitive, each link in any causal loop would wind up causing itself; but the idea of self-causation is pretty much universally rejected as incoherent. A popular attempt to resolve this dilemma distinguishes “direct” from “indirect” self-causation: the direct variety, which operates without the aid of causal intermediaries, is claimed to be impossible even if the indirect variety isn’t. I argue against this attempted resolution on the grounds that causal loops themselves, unlike the links that compose them, should be viewed as directly self-caused; so indirect self-causation via causal loop is possible only if direct self-causation is as well. An important consequence is the availability of groundbreaking solutions to several longstanding puzzles in philosophy of mind.

It is widely held that an intellectual or epistemic vice is characterized by its negative relationship to epistemic goods. But which epistemic goods, exactly? The main answers in the vice-epistemological literature are (i) the truth and (ii) propositional knowledge. In this article, I demonstrate the need to expand vice epistemology’s axiology beyond these epistemic goods. In particular, I argue that vice epistemologists need to include knowledge-how in their theorizing if they are to provide us with a full account of the nature and development of some putative epistemic vices. First, I show that this species of knowledge can be embedded in the manifestation and development of some vices, such that agents acquire this species of knowledge in virtue of either exercising or acquiring these epistemic vices. Second, I claim that the inclusion of knowledge-how in vice epistemology has important implications for its two main theoretical camps—motivationalism and obstructivism. I end by explaining how a less popular view in the literature can possibly vindicate the relationship between epistemic vices and knowledge-how.

This article examines three recently proposed accounts of a virtue of patience, all of which agree that patience is goal-oriented and temporal. Josh Dolin and Jason Baehr’s (2025), and Christian Miller and R. Michael Furr’s (2024) accounts conceptualize patience as requiring some kind of mismatch between an individual’s urges or desires and the perceived amount of time it takes to achieve a desired end. I argue that requiring a mismatch creates problems for both accounts and defend an understanding of patience as consistent excellence in acknowledging and responding to the appropriate time needed to achieve a desired outcome (Vigani 2017). This latter account does not require any mismatch of an individual’s desires or urges, and thus, I contend, avoids the problems of the other two. It is, however, significantly revisionary of our everyday understanding of patience. Rather than being problematic, I argue that this revisionary understanding is especially informative regarding what is involved in the cultivation and maintenance of patience. Examining these accounts deepens our understanding of the psychology of patience, particularly with regard to an individual’s goals and desires. It also allows us to draw out some general lessons for developing accounts of individual virtues.

Two approaches dominate the literature on the construction of emotions: transitory role theory and the more recent Conceptual Act Theory. We identify two ways in which these approaches would benefit from correction, revision, or further development. First, they tend to downplay the body, insisting that social forces work primarily at a conceptual level. That is, culture is considered to primarily impact the conceptualization of emotion, not emotional embodiment. Second, they tend to neglect the impact social norms have on emotions. We include relevant work in traditions outside philosophy and psychology (sociology, anthropology, and queer theory) that may shed light on the impact of social norms on emotions, as well as the relationship between socialization and embodiment. We propose an account of emotions as constructs that combine sociality and corporeality—an account that understands social norms and bodily responses as interdependent. Our proposal is to understand emotions as constructed via societal norms that materialize in bodily states. This advances the debate on the nature of emotions by integrating different theoretical strands (construction and embodiment), and it also contributes to the emerging literature on emotional injustice by shedding light on the role the social plays, for example, in shaping whose body gets to express which emotions.