Much in our interior mental lives and in our exterior social structures presupposes that we, human beings, are conscious of social hierarchy, of differences in rank and status. We are ‘conscious’ of hierarchy in both senses of the word: ‘aware’ of and ‘anxious’ about. This consciousness seems rooted in our natural history. Many social animals are likewise preoccupied with ‘pecking order’. These animals include not only chickens, who literally peck, but also our closest primate relatives. And this consciousness of hierarchy, transformed by our species’ special bent for symbol and self-reflection, has driven much of our non-natural history. The main chapters of the human story might be defined by the prevailing answers to the questions of who among us, if anyone, would be above, and who, if anyone, would be below. For most of the career of Homo sapiens, we appear to have lived in societies that were predominantly and often vigilantly egalitarian, at least for adult men. At various times and places, this was eventually upended, with the great many being subordinated, in enduring ways, to the very few. The birth of enduring hierarchy was no easy delivery, apparently having to be midwifed by the coordinated manipulation of superstition and the control, by violence, of food stores. Modernity, albeit not without precedents, is in large part the tale – at times inspiring, at times cautionary – of our experiments with reconciling the equality of individuals with the differentiation of roles and concentrations of power and authority of large-scale, complex societies – with, in one sense of the word, civilization. If we take the longest historical view, therefore, the questions that this has been exploring may be among the first questions of politics. These questions are: First, what is social hierarchy? Second, do we have an objection to being set beneath another in a social hierarchy – standing in a relation of inferiority to another – as such? Third, if there is such an objection, how then do we reconcile ourselves to a social world that seems rife with hierarchy? That is, if complex, large-scale society – if, in one sense of the word, civilization – requires a differentiation of roles and a concentration of power and authority, can it be reconciled with the equality of standing that was guarded so jealously before? The Pecking Order seeks to bring these questions into more explicit, philosophical reflection. This precis tries to convey a bit of what the book has to say about these questions as well as to note some second thoughts and responses to a few specific criticisms.

This paper argues that Spinoza allows for an eternal form of consciousness, which is contrary to the common view that consciousness in his philosophy is only a temporal phenomenon of a subject existing in time. Interpreters have traditionally explained the origin of consciousness in Spinoza’s Ethics as emerging from the interaction between the external world and our body and, therefore, from the temporal changes we undergo owing to that interaction. However, I argue that Spinoza’s notion of the intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis) reveals a distinct kind of consciousness that is not grounded in our temporality but in the eternity of our essence. Drawing on the distinction between temporal and eternal essence, I argue that the amor Dei intellectualis can produce a form of consciousness independent of durational change.

Lookism, wrongful appearance discrimination, is prevalent and impactful, and yet largely neglected. This paper explores why this form of discrimination is ignored, when other forms of discrimination which have similar impacts in, for example, employment and education, are taken seriously in policy, practice, and everyday life. It offers five possible reasons for why lookism is neglected; that it is unfamiliar, that people believe lookism should not be prevalent, that people believe lookism is natural, that lookism is not legislated against and that shame attaches to experiences of lookism. The paper seeks to offer an account of the reasons that underpin the otherwise confusing neglect of lookism. The paper argues that far from being an acceptable form of discrimination, lookism is a serious form of discrimination that all, irrespective of political and ideological commitments, have reasons to address.

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) was introduced in 1956 by American mathematician and computer scientist John McCarthy, who used it in a funding proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College (McCarthy et al., 1955). AI is myriad technologies that mutate and evolve, yet both the academic field devoted to its study and the industry that aims to realize it in its multiplicity are often said to have the nebulous aim, intimated already in McCarthy’s proposal, of making machines capable of displaying human-level, intelligent activity in all or most domains.1 The history of AI is narrated as a sequence of alternating ‘springtimes’ and ‘winters’ in which an approach is supposedly made to this vague goal, then falters (e.g., Bostrom 2014, pp. 6–8; Kurzweil, 2005, 263–266). In 2022, the year chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) seized the world’s attention, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT became for many identical to all AI, a massive springtime broke out, with a small cohort of companies securing unprecedented funding while their leaderships told stories about how general machine intelligence at the human level or, to use the current jargon, artificial general intelligence (AGI), was just around the corner.

Niko Kolodny’s The Pecking Order includes a ‘book-length treatment’ of the idea of an ‘equal say’ (6) that is ubiquitous in commonplace talk and philosophical reflection about democracy.1 In this commentary I concentrate on the account of political representation that forms a main part of the ‘treatment’. That account places democratic representative institutions within a larger framework animated by the thought – a ‘positive conjecture’ – that we have non-derivative claims against being placed in ‘untempered relations of inferiority’ (126) with individuals who wield the power and authority of the state. The principal challenge is to identify conditions under which we might regard these relations as sufficiently tempered to be unobjectionable. Kolodny’s book offers a doctrine of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary tempering factors’ whose satisfaction is claimed to render hierarchical social relations like those that constitute political representation acceptable, or as much so as we might reasonably expect.

Forgiveness is sometimes treated as the only appropriate way to move on after being wronged. That is, it is often seen as the only way of moving beyond the wrong while being ‘uncompromising’, as Hieronymi (2001) puts it, avoiding both ignorance and denial of the morally relevant features of the situation. The present paper suggests that ‘letting go’ of blame can also be uncompromising and offers an explanation of how that can be so. It goes on to claim that letting go can play an important role in close relationships such as friendship. It thus defends letting go as an important and valuable part of our moral psychology.

According to Bernard Williams, philosophy is a ‘humanistic' discipline when it is dedicated to helping us make the best sense of our lives, and to do this philosophy must turn to history and to the development of our self-understanding over time. In this paper I follow Williams’ humanistic methodology by considering another kind of history and the way it informs our present self-understanding, both as persons and as philosophers. I am concerned with youth or adolescence as a kind of history with which we must try to come to terms. Looking to the Western philosophy’s origin story, of Socrates corrupting the youth, to D.W Winnicott’s writings on youth, and Williams’ own writing on shame, I ask: if we conceive of youth as a kind of history, what is involved in coming to terms with, and living well with the past of our youth, and how might reflection on youth be part of philosophy, humanistically conceived?

In ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, Bernard Williams argued that philosophy has a distinctive relationship with history, and not just the history of philosophy. He had in mind, especially, moral and political thought. For Williams, changes in ethical outlook are typically driven by social and cultural forces distinct from the power of rational argument. When an ethical idea prevails over time, holders of the outlook it supplants often have ‘have [no] reason to recognize the transition as an improvement’ (Williams 2000: 486). By their lights, the arguments for change are question-begging. In this respect, Williams believed, the history of ethics is unlike the history of modern science, whose telling typically vindicates later scientists on terms compelling to their predecessors.

Historians of philosophy widely concur that Galileo Galilei (re)introduced the metaphysical dichotomy of primary and secondary properties into philosophical discourse. However, his conceptual distinction appeared muddled, resulting in frequent misinterpretations or disregard over time. This paper aims to demonstrate that the apparent vagueness of the dichotomy stems from a common misunderstanding shaped by the subsequent distinction between two kinds of properties, primary and secondary. Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Galileo did not intend to differentiate between two kinds of properties inherent in external things. Instead, he sought to distinguish between the perception of spatial properties and the concurrent internal bodily sensations evoked by the mechanical impacts of external objects. Focusing on his isolation of an aspect of sensory experience, namely sensible qualities, it is suggested that Galileo recognised the phenomenal aspect of experience and thereby contributed to the early modern development of the concept of perceptual consciousness.

I come as an interloper in political theory, but I am honoured and excited to have been invited to interlope, and I have already learned so much from Niko Kolodny’s book. I am sure I will stumble into issues with the naivety of an outsider – but I hope that might be of some use.

Bernard Williams contends that philosophy is part of a broader humanistic enterprise of ‘making sense of’ ourselves and our activities, including the activity of science. Whereas the scientific enterprise purports to offer an absolute conception of the world as it is (independently of any local perspective on it), the humanistic enterprise cannot disengage itself from the contingent history of our ideas upon which it operates. While I agree with Williams that philosophy should be more attentive to history, his account of philosophy, from which he derives this conclusion, is fatally flawed, being unable to meet three perennial challenges to any principled defense of philosophy as a discipline: i.e., the questions of authority, incubativity and peculiarity. Those challenges can be met only if we understand philosophy not as a humanistic discipline that is part of the broader humanistic enterprise, but as a distinctively normative discipline that tasks itself with finding answers to explicitly or implicitly normative questions, in contrast to various scientific and humanistic disciplines of descriptive inquiry. In this paper, I argue for the equivalence of philosophicality with normativity, explicate the theoretical and practical implications of the normative account of philosophy, and defend it against potential objections.

According to one influential line of thought, quasi-realism is faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, if the quasi-realist project of saying everything the realist wants to say is successful, quasi-realism collapses into realism. On the other hand, if the quasi-realist stops short of saying everything the realist wants to say, quasi-realism fails to realize its explanatory ambitions. In a recent paper, Bart Streumer argues that there is a way for the quasi-realist to avoid this problem by endorsing the first horn of the dilemma. More specifically, Streumer argues that quasi-realism could be true although we are unable to believe it, and that our inability to believe it could be evidence for its truth. In this paper, we first argue that Streumer’s argument is unsuccessful. We then argue that Streumer’s argument is unsuccessful for an interesting reason; namely for how it invites the exploration of an underappreciated theoretical alternative along broadly pragmatist lines, which we outline in the final section of the paper. What hinges on this invitation is nothing less than the question of what contemporary debates in metaethics and metanormativity are all about.

I discuss three lines of thought that appear in Williams’s ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’: the idea of science as pursuing an ‘absolute conception’ of the world, the idea that ‘there is no conception of the world that is not conceptualised in some way or other’, and the idea of ‘making sense of ourselves’. I consider whether the possibility of ‘making sense of ourselves’ fits with the idea of science as providing an ‘absolute conception of the world’, and I conclude that it does not.

I present a critical review of one of the most influential trends in scholarship analysing the conceptual relationship between Freud and Kant in moral psychology. I discuss three Kantian sophisticated naturalistic approaches (KSNAs), which explore the possibility of accommodating Kantian moral imperatives within the Freudian psycho-developmentalist account, based primarily on the idea of the superego. Specifically, I examine three of their arguments about moral development that revolve around: (1) the relevance of guilt for moral orientation. The KNSAs propose that guilt is a moral feeling, the manifestation of a superego or moral conscience. I argue instead that guilt is not a moral feeling per se, although it can sometimes serve as a moral orientation. (2) The nature of our sources of moral motivation. For the KSNAs, it is irrelevant to think about the sources of our moral motivation because it is impossible to know them. I argue, however, for the relevance of the intelligibility of our moral commands, which should somehow match or resemble their moral source. (3) The concept of ideality. For the KNSAs, the superego’s commands are moral because they are ideal. I will argue that the ideality of the superego’s commands is, on the contrary, self-deceptive.

Let me take up the second of the two questions first, about whether the asymmetries associated with a representative system might answer to values other than tempering inferiority. As Beitz observes, my stance is already pluralistic. In addition to claims against inferiority, there are also rights against invasion and claims to improvement. So, it remains open to me to grant that representative institutions reflect a compromise between noninferiority and other values. The idea would be, in other words, that the move from direct to representative democracy involves some cost in terms of inferiority, but this is compensated for by the gain in noninvasion and improvement, as well as perhaps still other values. Indeed, the move from direct to representative democracy, while involving a cost in terms of inferiority along one dimension, may alleviate inferiority along another dimension, such as if representative democracy leads to better protections against discrimination.

One of Bernard Williams’ abiding aims was to reassure us in the face of what I call ‘genealogical anxiety’: the anxiety that once our cherished beliefs, concepts, values and practices have their origins revealed, we will be rationally compelled to abandon them. Williams’ treatment of genealogical anxiety rests on a deep distinction between science and ethics: while ‘our’ scientific outlook can be ‘vindicated’ by its history, ‘our’ ethical-political outlook cannot. In so arguing, Williams fails to reckon with the full force of genealogical anxiety and the problem of contingency that provokes it; he is guilty, ironically, of a kind of scientism about the natural sciences, seeing them as a form of inquiry free from historically contingent perspective. To make my case, I turn to On Certainty, in which Wittgenstein presents the Euromodern scientific outlook as no less susceptible of genealogical anxiety than any other. What’s more, Wittgenstein takes seriously a reply to genealogical anxiety – an externalist reply – that Williams dismisses as a ‘thin tune’ not ‘worth whistling’. If Wittgenstein is right that scientific and ethical outlooks are equally susceptible of genealogical critique, then it may well turn out that this ‘thin tune’ is the only one we have available to whistle.

A number of high-profile people seem to have moved from the left to the right quite suddenly, and without appearing to move through intermediate positions. Often, they do not just go right; they go right and bananas: accepting bizarre conspiracy theories and other such beliefs. This paper argues that this phenomenon can be explained by a combination of psychological pressures and genuine reasons, with the person pivoting from left to right on the fulcrum provided by a belief to which they are strongly committed and on which their side initially splits. This account explains how people go bananas while remaining rational and remaining concerned with evidence. The evidence to which they respond is provided by testimony. The pivot belief provides them with reasons to place much heavier weight on the testimony of the right, their former opponents, than on their own former side.

This paper discusses a deflationary theory of human action developed by John Hyman. His theory of human action comprises two central claims, one about the general nature of action, another about the mark of human agency. An action is the causing of a change by a substance. A human action, as opposed to sub-personal actions, is one that results from the integrated operations of our cognitive and motor systems. Taken together these two claims offer a minimalist theory of human action that does not appeal to intention, the will or the power to choose. The first claim is by now familiar in the literature, not so the second one. This paper offers a critical discussion of this second claim. I shall argue that it sits uncomfortably with certain kinds of mental action. As a fix, I argue that we should appeal to the functional role of the executive system to specify the relevant kind of integration characteristic of human action. I proceed to show how the revised proposal shares the appeal of Hyman’s view while avoiding its difficulties.

The traditional analysis of a priori warrant is negative: warrant for a belief is a priori just in case it does not depend on experience. To ward off obvious counterexamples, a standard exemption is made for learning experiences. In order to believe that the square root of two is irrational, I first needed to learn the relevant concepts, and this happened through experience. This standard exemption is not enough. I formed my warranted belief about the square root of two by reading the proof in Euclid’s Elements. This experience isn’t covered by the standard exemption, so the traditional analysis counts even basic mathematical beliefs as a posteriori. This is a disaster, but it can be fixed. The fix involves an ‘imagination test’ for determining which experiences are epistemically relevant and which are not. With the imagination test in hand, the negative approach may still provide the core of a satisfying analysis of the generative a priori, provided that various objections can be dealt with in a satisfying manner.