I argue that if David Lewis’ modal realism is true, modal realists from different possible worlds can fall in love with each other. I offer a method for uniquely picking out possible people who are in love with us and not with our counterparts. Impossible lovers and trans-world love letters are considered. Anticipating objections, I argue that we can stand in the right kinds of relations to merely possible people to be in love with them and that ending a trans-world (...) relationship to start a relationship with an actual person isn't cruel to one's otherworldly lover. (shrink)

The paper argues that Lewis’ Genuine Modal Realism, in taking the plurality of worlds to be necessarily the way it is, implies the existence of necessary connections of the sort that contradicts the Humean thesis that Lewis endorses. By endorsing, pace Divers, a non-redundancy interpretation of advanced modalizing, we gain the means to exactly state what these connections amount to.

In this paper I argue that the growing block theory of time has rather surprising, and hitherto unexplored, explanatory benefits when it comes to certain enduring philosophical puzzles concerning death. In particular, I claim the growing block theorist has readily available and convincing answers to the following questions: Why is it an evil to be dead but not an evil to be not yet born? How can death be an evil for the dead if they no longer exist to suffer (...) it? When is death an evil for the one who dies? The ability to give such answers is a significant, but by no means decisive, advantage for the growing block view of time. (shrink)

This article offers a novel solution to the problem of material constitution: by including non-concrete objects among the parts of material objects, we can avoid having a statue and its constituent piece of clay composed of all the same proper parts. Non-concrete objects—objects that aren’t concrete, but possibly are—have been used in defense of the claim that everything necessarily exists. But the account offered shows that non-concreta are independently useful in other domains as well. The resulting view falls under a (...) ‘nonmaterial partist’ class of views that includes, in particular, Laurie Paul’s and Kathrin Koslicki’s constitution views; ones where material objects have properties or structures as parts respectively. The article gives reasons for preferring the non-concretist solution over these other non-material partist views and defends it against objections. (shrink)

Some philosophers worry that if modal realism is true, you have no reason to prevent evils. For if you prevent an evil, you’ll have a counterpart somewhere that allows a similar evil. And if you refrain, your counterpart will end up preventing the relevant evil. Either way one evil is prevented and one is allowed. Your act makes no difference. I argue that this is mistaken. If modal realism is true, you are in a variant of Newcomb’s Problem. And if (...) Lewis’ view about Newcomb’s Problem is true, then your act does make a difference and you should prevent the evil. (shrink)

If David Lewis's modal realism is true, then there are many, many people. According to Mark Heller, this is bad news. He takes modal realism (MR) to imply that "there are at least some cases in which it is permissible to let drowning children drown when it would be easy to save them." But since he holds the reasonable view that this is never permissible, he thinks that MR is false. Here, I argue that Lewis needn't be troubled by this (...) objection, and that it provides no reason to reject MR for those who share Lewis's moral outlook. Moreover, I argue that disagreement with common sense needn't be severe if we can show both (a) that there's a sense in which common sense is correct and (b) we have little reason to care about the sense in which common sense is mistaken. (shrink)

This article discusses a familiar version of trope theory as opposed to a familiar version of the theory of universals, examining how these two rivals address the problem of “attribute agreement”—a problem that has been at the root of the very reason for developing these theories in the first place. The article shows that there is not much of a difference between the ways these two theories handle the problem, and in a more general way it argues that there is (...) little reason for preferring one theory over the other. It is not interested in this claim only for the sake of the debate between trope theory and the theory of universals. Indeed, the reasons why it claims that it is so difficult to choose one theory over the other can be applied to other cases as well (where they might lead to claims of metaphysical equivalence). (shrink)

Our moral convictions cannot, on the face of it, count in evidence against scientific claims with which they happen to conflict. Moral anti-realists of whatever stripe can explain this easily: science is immune to moral refutation because moral discourse is defective as a trustworthy source of true and objective judgments. Moral realists, they can add, are unable to explain this immunity. After describing how anti-realists might implement this reasoning, the paper argues that the only plausible realist comeback turns on the (...) practical nature of moral reasoning. This comeback, however, places significant constraints on the structure of evidence for moral judgments. These constraints cannot be met by coherentist defenders of reflective-equilibrium methodology or by anyone sympathetic to bottom-up, case-driven foundationalism, including those who claim we have perceptual or perception-like access to moral truths. Unfortunately for realists in these categories, alternative realism-friendly accounts of science’s apparent moral immunity are unpromising. These neither explain nor explain away our unwillingness to infer an is from an ought, as Hume might have put it. Science’s apparent immunity to moral refutation therefore poses a serious problem for any realist unhappy with top-down, theory-driven conceptions of the structure of moral evidence. (shrink)

When a novel scientific theory conflicts with otherwise plausible moral assumptions, we do not treat that as evidence against the theory. We may scrutinize the empirical data more keenly and take extra care over its interpretation, but science is in some core sense immune to moral refutation. Can the same be said of philosophical theories (or the non-ethical, ‘metaphysical’ ones at least)? If a position in the philosophy of mind, for example, is discovered to have eye-widening moral import, does that (...) count against it at all? Actual responses by philosophers to the question of whether unanticipated moral consequences of metaphysical theories have evidential force are scattered, implicit, divergent, under-argued, and sometimes even self-undermining. The present discussion is, most immediately, an attempt to sort out the confusion. Beyond that, it exploits the new perspective this question gives us on a familiar topic: the relation of philosophy to science. (shrink)

This thesis is about the moral reasons we have to do less than best. It consists of six chapters. Part I of the thesis proposes, extends, and defends reasons to do less than best. In Chapter One (“The Conditional Obligation”) I outline and reject two recent arguments from Joe Horton and Theron Pummer for the claim that we have a conditional obligation to bring about the most good. In Chapter Two (“Agglomeration and Agent-Relative Costs”) I argue that agent-relative costs can (...) justify permissions to less than best in a far greater range of decisions contexts than we currently believe. In Chapter Three (“Risk and Aggregation”) I discuss how anti-aggregative moral theories deal with risk, whilst proposing an argument in favour of ex-post moral theories. -/- In Part II of the thesis, I discuss longtermism, presenting a series of reasons to believe we have both significant permissions and obligations to prioritise those in the short-term. In Chapter Four (“Listening to Future People”) I criticise a recent argument presented by Andreas Mogensen for the claim we cannot have obligations grounded in the wellbeing of future people. I then show that, even permitting the existence of obligations to future people, we still have significant reasons to resist longtermism on the grounds of partiality. In Chapter Five (“The Complaints of Future People”) I argue that scepticism about aggregation is inconsistent with an obligation, or indeed even a permission, to help far future people. In Chapter Six (“Leaving the Present Behind”) I explore the moral significance of “dooming”, whilst arguing that we have a pro tanto reason of fairness to prioritise aiding those currently in existence. (shrink)

It is possible that the world contains infinitely many agents that have positive and negative levels of well-being. Theories have been developed to ethically rank such worlds based on the well-being levels of the agents in those worlds or other qualitative properties of the worlds in question, such as the distribution of agents across spacetime. In this thesis I argue that such ethical rankings ought to be consistent with the Pareto principle, which says that if two worlds contain the same (...) agents and some agents are better off in the first world than they are in the second and no agents are worse off than they are in the second, then the first world is better than the second. I show that if we accept four axioms – the Pareto principle, transitivity, an axiom stating that populations of worlds can be permuted, and the claim that if the ‘at least as good as’ relation holds between two worlds then it holds between qualitative duplicates of this world pair – then we must conclude that there is ubiquitous incomparability between infinite worlds. I show that this is true even if the populations of infinite worlds are disjoint or overlapping, and that we cannot use any qualitative properties of world pairs to rank these worlds. Finally, I argue that this incomparability result generates puzzles for both consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories of objective and subjective permissibility. (shrink)

The multiverse hypothesis is the leading alternative to the competing fine-tuning hypothesis. The multiverse dispels many aspects of the fine-tuning argument by suggesting that there are different initial conditions in each universe, varying constants of physics, and the laws of nature lose their known arbitrary values; thus, making the previous single-universe argument from fine- tuning incredibly weak. The position that will be advocated will be that a form of multiverse could exist and that any level of Tegmark's multiverse does not (...) circumvent the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a fine-tuner. An argument will be presented suggesting that the multiverse could strengthen the fine-tuning argument by narrowing down the parameters of the data to a more fundamental description needed for the multiverse to function as it does since it may be the case that some physical descriptions are not the same in every universe. That is, the task of explaining how the multiverse mechanism functions cannot be accounted for by the multiverse itself. Fine-tuning by a mind serves as a sufficient and best explanation for the data. (shrink)

In most cases, we think that what settles what act it is right to perform is sensitive to what we take the facts about the world to be. But those facts include many controversial metaphysical claims about the world. I argue that depending on what metaphysical model we take to be correct, we will have very different views about what the right actions are. In particular, I argue that if a particular metaphysical model — the branching universe model — is (...) correct, then many of our ethical intuitions are false. We need to think carefully about the relation between ethical and metaphysical intuitions, and ethical and metaphysical theories. (shrink)