This dissertation extends John Rawls’s mature theory of justice out to address the environmental challenges that citizens of liberal democracies now face. Specifically, using Rawls’s framework of political liberalism, I piece together a theory of procedural justice to be applied to a constitutional democracy. I show how citizens of pluralistic democracies should apply this theory to environmental matters in a four stage contracting procedure. I argue that, if implemented, this extension to Rawls’s theory would secure background environmental justice. I explain (...) why the theory can be viewed as a partially specified political conception of environmental pragmatism, and how it relates to public environmental policy and discourse. While the framework is anthropocentric, it is one that reasonable non-anthropocentrists can endorse. Using this theory, I argue that liberal democracies must take measures to secure basic environmental rights for all presently existing and future citizens. Measures must also be in place to secure a minimum of social goods (including environmental goods) that guarantees that all citizens (present and future) can exercise their basic rights and liberties. Moreover, disparities in environmental goods should only be tolerated if they arise in accord with Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity. I discuss carbon taxes, as well as carbon allocation trading schemes. I also argue that free democracies should employ precautionary reasoning when attempting to meet the demands of background environmental justice. (shrink)

This dissertation defends and develops the thesis that some instances, or tokens, of dispositional properties are pure. A pure disposition has no causal basis in any further properties beyond the disposition. A causal basis typically consists of some set of properties underlying a disposition that enables the disposition to manifest when stimulated in the appropriate circumstances. For example, a vase is fragile because it is disposed to break when a hammer or other suitable object strikes it, where the causal basis (...) for fragility is the underlying micro-structure of the vase. Moreover, micro-structural properties of the vase seem to anchor the continuous existence of the vase’s fragility when the vase is not actually breaking. In contrast to the neo-Humean metaphysical assumption that any disposition requires a causal basis in further properties, as in the example of fragility, the Pure Dispositions Thesis denies this. This dissertation achieves four goals. First, it defends the Pure Dispositions Thesis from notable objections: the Powers Regress Argument, the Insufficient Causal Basis Argument, the Argument from the Identity Thesis, and the Argument from Spatial Occupation. Second, it evaluates several theories of the continuous existence of pure dispositions, and argues that some pure dispositions are self-grounded via a minimally sufficient occurrence of their own power. Third, it presents two arguments that some pure dispositions are extrinsically grounded, the Argument from the Higgs Field and the Argument from Priority Monism, and deflects numerous objections to those arguments. Finally, it develops and defends an account of systems of pure dispositions, arguing that a pure dispositional system may generate higher-level categorical and dispositional properties by way of an emergence mechanism involving the union of two pure dispositions. (shrink)

This dissertation is a defense of moderate invariantism, the traditional epistemological position combining the following three theses: invariantism, according to which the word ‘know’ expresses the same content in every context of use; intellectualism, according to which whether one knows a certain proposition does not depend on one’s practical interests; and antiskepticism, according to which we really do know much of what we ordinarily take ourselves to know. Moderate invariantism needs defending because of seemingly powerful arguments for contextualism, the view (...) that, like ‘I’ and ‘now’, ‘know’ expresses different contents in different contexts. It has been argued that only contextualism can properly reply to skeptical arguments, and that only contextualism can account for our tendency to go from judging that a knowledge claim is true to judging that it is false in response to shifts in the context of use. Moderate invariantist replies to these arguments have largely failed. I propose new replies on behalf of moderate invariantism, while critiquing earlier, less successful attempts. Chapter one is introductory. In chapters two and three, I examine contextualist replies to skeptical arguments arising from radical skeptical hypotheses (such as the possibility that one is a brain in a vat) and from considerations involving lotteries. I argue that if contextualism can adequately respond to these arguments, then there are equally effective replies available to the moderate invariantist. In the next two chapters, I examine Stewart Cohen’s “Airport Case,” which elicits intuitions about knowledge claims that supposedly only contextualism can accommodate. In chapter four, I argue that none of the invariantist replies to the case that depend on denying the intuitions succeed; in chapter five, I accept the intuitions, but argue that contextualism does not follow from them. Finally, in chapter six, I evaluate two interesting invariantist critiques of contextualism; according to the first, contextualism collapses into the radical position that every English expression is context-sensitive; according to the second, ‘know’ fails a test for context-sensitivity involving indirect speech reports. (shrink)