In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion— ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues (...) are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends (...) to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion—ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues are (...) partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

"Gill's and Ryan's Parmenides is, simply, superb: the Introduction, more than a hundred pages long, is transparently clear, takes the reader meticulously through the arguments, avoids perverseness, and still manages to make sense of the dialogue as a whole; there is a fine selective bibliography; and those parts of the translation I have looked at in detail suggest that it too is very good indeed." --Christopher Rowe, _Phronesis_.

In this article, an account of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system is offered, according to which the contamination system can generate contamination represen- tations in circumstances that do not satisfy the norms of contamination, including in cases of mere visual contact with disgusting objects. It is argued that this architecture is important for explaining the content, logic, distribution, and persistence of maternal impression beliefs – according to which fetal defects are caused by the pregnant mother’s experiences and actions (...) – which in turn provide important evidence of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system. (shrink)

It is widely held that agent-neutral consequentialism is incompatible with deontic constraints. Recently, Kieran Setiya has challenged this orthodoxy by presenting a form of agent-neutral consequentialism that he claims can capture deontic constraints. In this reply, we argue against Setiya's proposal by pointing to features of deontic constraints that his account fails to capture.

Business and Economic textbooks warn against committing the Sunk Cost Fallacy: you, rationally, shouldn't let unrecoverable costs influence your current decisions. In this paper, I argue that this isn't, in general, correct. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to wish to carry on with a project because of the resources you've already sunk into it. The reason? Given that we're social creatures, it's not unreasonable to care about wanting to act in such a way so that a plausible story can be told (...) about you according to which your diachronic behavior doesn't reveal that you've suffered, what I will call, diachronic misfortune. Acting so as to hide that you've suffered diachronic misfortune involves striving to make yourself easily understood while disguising any shortcomings that might damage your reputation as a desirable teammate. And making yourself easily understood to others while hiding your flaws will, sometimes, put pressure on you to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, a growing philosophical literature has subjected virtue ethics to empirical evaluation. Drawing on results in social psychology, a number of critics have argued that virtue ethics depends upon false presuppositions about the cross‐situational consistency of psychological traits. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue has been a prime target for the situationist critics. This essay assesses the situationist critique of MacIntyre’s account of virtue. It argues that MacIntyre’s social teleological account of virtue is not what his situationist critics (...) take it to be. Virtues, for MacIntyre, are not reducible to psychological traits. They are qualities of one’s socially constituted character, and their intelligibility as virtues derives from their role in the narrative of one’s life. Recognizing this both clarifies and complicates debates about the implication of situationist social psychology for virtue ethics. It also grants a new significance to MacIntyre’s attention to the socio‐historical context of virtue, a significance that should be especially interesting to religious ethicists. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that we have a non-inferential way of knowing particular explanations of our own actions and attitudes. I begin by explicating and evaluating Nisbett and Wilson’s influential argument to the contrary. I argue that Nisbett and Wilson’s claim that we arrive at such explanations of our own actions and attitudes by inference is not adequately supported by their findings because they overlook an important alternative explanation of those findings. I explicate and defend such an alternative explanation (...) of how we can know such explanations in a non-inferential way, drawing on recent work in the philosophy of self-knowledge. (shrink)

Beginning with an analysis of the problematic relation of ‘the particular’ to ‘the universal’ in canonical political texts, this paper explores a variety of frameworks for the study of classical Greek political thought. Specifically, after investigating the influence of Quentin Skinner’s contextualism, the paper examines the ideas, approaches, and methods of Bernard Williams, Leo Strauss, and Josiah Ober. I draw attention to each figure’s distinctive motivations for returning to ancient Greece and to the influence of particular political ideals on those (...) motivations. I also assess their strengths and weaknesses and offer a critical commentary on their chief ideas. Toward the end of the paper, I outline a novel dialectical framework for the study of classical Athens – one that emphasizes the remoteness of the ancient past and the contribution that our studies might make to self-knowledge. In sketching this framework, I focus on what I call ‘ethical Athens’, ‘philosophical Athens’, and ‘critical Athens’. (shrink)

Using newly uncovered archival sources, this essay traces the meteoric rise and fall of the peculiar interdisciplinary German scientific journal Physis, founded by the physicist Pascual Jordan and the biologist Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1941. Launched when victory for Nazi Germany seemed certain, Physis was intended by Jordan and Meyer-Abich to be a premier international journal for all sciences suitable for the new “German-led Europe” forged by conquest. Yet the journal was simultaneously a vehicle for institutionalizing Jordan’s remarkably prescient vision of (...) the future of the scientific enterprise in Hitler’s state—a vision nearly identical to what is now termed “big science,” yet suitably “Nazified” for wartime Germany. Behind the scenes, Physis was accompanied by a campaign of intrigue, through which Jordan and Meyer-Abich hoped to find a patron for the journal and big science among the various power centers of the Nazi state. These efforts failed, yet they nevertheless demonstrate that big science is not inherently democratic. (shrink)

Some interpreters have ascribed to Wittgenstein the view that mathematical statements must have an application to extra-mathematical reality in order to have use and so any statements lacking extra-mathematical applicability are not meaningful (and hence not bona fide mathematical statements). Pure mathematics is then a mere signgame of questionable objectivity, undeserving of the name mathematics. These readings bring to light that, on Wittgenstein’s offered picture of mathematical statements as rules of description, it can be difficult to see the role of (...) mathematical statements which relate to concepts that are not employed in empirical propositions e.g. set-theoretic concepts. I will argue that Wittgenstein’s picture is more flexible than might at first be thought and that Wittgenstein sees such statements as serving purposes not directly related to empirical description. Whilst this might make such systems fringe cases of mathematics, it does not bring their legitimacy as mathematical systems into question. (shrink)

When a symbol is a marker of a primary bearer of value and, secondarily, a bearer of value itself, then it has symbolic value. Philosophers have long been suspicious of symbolic values, often regarding them as illusory or irrelevant. I suggest that arguments against symbolic values either overgeneralize or else require premises that can only be supported if the normative significance of some symbolic considerations is presupposed. Humans need symbols to represent identity facts to themselves and others. Symbolic values thereby (...) contribute to individuals’ control over their own agency. (shrink)

I argue, contra Mohan Matthen, that at least some aesthetic pleasures arising from the appreciation of aesthetic features of artworks are what he calls ‘r-pleasures’ as opposed to ‘f-pleasures’—and moreover, that the paradigm aesthetic pleasure appears to be an r-pleasure on Matthen's terms. I then argue that talk of r- and f-pleasures does not distinguish different kinds, but two different features of pleasure; so this supposed distinction cannot be used to characterize a sui generis aesthetic pleasure.

Being open to persuasion can help show respect for an interlocutor. At the same time, open-mindedness about morally objectionable claims can carry moral as well as epistemic risks. Our aim in this paper is to specify when there might be duty to be open to persuasion. We distinguish two possible interpretations of openness. First, openness might refer to a kind of mental state, wherein one is willing to revise or abandon present beliefs. Second, it might refer to a deliberative practice, (...) according to which one is willing to engage with opposing reasons. We suggest these two interpretations are conceptually and empirically distinct. Once disambiguated, we suggest that different contexts may make different forms of openness appropriate as expressions of respect. (shrink)

Many of the most pressing moral problems that face our world are structural problems. Problems of this nature present difficulties for Christian ethicists because structural features tend to undermine conditions for the attribution of individual moral responsibility. This essay proposes an approach to this problem that reconciles a social account of sin with individual moral responsibility. Two key moves drive this proposal. First, I argue for a sharper distinction between sin and moral wrongdoing than is common. Second, I argue that (...) both sin and individual moral responsibility ought to be understood socially. This proposal addresses deep conceptual problems and points practical efforts in a new direction. (shrink)

Polybius’ Histories, written in the mid—second century BC, offers an authoritative account of Rome’s rise to uncontested imperial supremacy. The work has been highly influential among political thinkers because of its theory of the “mixed constitution.” This essay proposes to return Polybius’ mixed constitution to its proper location within the narrative of the Histories. This interpretative approach enables us to appreciate Polybius’ frequently neglected emphasis on the connections between republican politics and Roman imperial power. These connections shed light on recent (...) developments in republican political theory. They also lead to an investigation of the didactic purposes of the author, who intended to educate the Roman aristocracy in the virtues necessary for exercising hegemonic power successfully in the ancient Mediterranean world. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's conception of infinity can be seen as continuing the tradition of the potential infinite that begins with Aristotle. Transfinite cardinals in set theory might seem to render the potential infinite defunct with the actual infinite now given mathematical legitimacy. But Wittgenstein's remarks on set theory argue that the philosophical notion of the actual infinite remains philosophical and is not given a mathematical status as a result of set theory. The philosophical notion of the actual infinite is not to be (...) found in the mathematics of set theory, only in a certain associated philosophy – what Wittgenstein calls a certain kind of “prose”. (shrink)

This article sets out an argument from legitimacy for the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia. The article first sets out an understanding of political legitimacy and of legitimacy deficits and argues that the Australian Government faces a legitimacy deficit with respect to its exercise of political power and authority over Indigenous Australians. The deficit arises, it is argued, because Indigenous Australians face significant structural injustice and there is little hope of redressing this injustice within the prevailing governing conventions. (...) The article then argues that the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament ought to be seen as part of a package to address this legitimacy deficit by resetting the governing conventions of Australian society. The argument from legitimacy is then compared favorably with more familiar arguments from sovereignty and the right to self-determination. (shrink)

Scholars generally agree that, according to Aristotle, factionalizers are motivated by a sense of injustice (the ‘first cause’) to redress imbalances in wealth and honor (the ‘second cause’). Recent discussions, however, have offered a misleading interpretation of Aristotle’s third cause, which he identifies as the origin of the factionalizers’ sense of injustice. It involves, most importantly, greed, hubris, and other factors such as fear and ‘disproportionate growth’. In conversation with a recent publication in Polis, this article restores the third cause (...) to its proper place in Aristotle’s account. Abusive power holders, driven by greed, hubris, and overreaching, oppress their fellow citizens – following in the tradition of Homer’s Agamemnon, Hesiod’s basileis, and Solon’s aristocrats. These power holders prompt a sense of anger, indignation, and injustice in their fellow citizens, who ultimately form factions and take action on their own behalf. (shrink)

While it is widely held that normative reflection is an effective means of controlling our emotions, it has proven to be notoriously difficult to provide a plausible model of such control. How could reflection on the normative status of our emotions be a means of controlling them? Higher-order models of reflective control give a special role to higher-order beliefs and judgments about the normative status of our emotions in controlling our emotions, but in doing so claim that higher-order beliefs and (...) judgments have more control over our emotional lives than they in fact have, and fail to explain some of the central features of reflective control. First-order models of reflective control give a special role to first-order evaluative beliefs and perceptions about the objects of our emotions in controlling our emotions, but in doing so fail to explain how normative reflection could be a distinctive means of controlling our emotions at all. In this essay, I defend a model of reflective control which avoids the twin pitfalls of the higher-order and first-order models of reflective control, while learning from them both. I defend a model according to which normative reflection is a means of bringing our emotions under the control of reflective reason, where an emotion’s being under the control of reflective reason is to be understood in terms of its being under the control of one’s first-order evaluative beliefs and perceptions in accordance with one’s reflective commitments. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relationship between Simmel and Heidegger. Scholars commonly argue that Simmel’s work on the topic of death and mortality influenced the early Heidegger’s work on the same topic, as evidenced in Being and Time. I argue however that Simmel’s work particularly in the Lebensanschauung should be read as challenging the basic presuppositions of Heidegger on death. I then compare the two on the issue of immortality in order to show that Simmel is much closer to the subsequent (...) critics of Heidegger than he is to Heidegger himself. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson is often seen as the early American prophet of autonomy. This essay suggests a perhaps surprising fellow traveler in this prophetic call: Joseph Smith. Smith opposed religious creeds for the same reason that Emerson denounced them, namely that creeds represent a threat to the autonomy of a person's beliefs. Smith and Emerson also forward similar defenses of individual autonomy in action. Furthermore, they encounter a shared problem: how can autonomy be possible in a society where other individuals (...) hold some kind of authority? I propose that each thinker resolves this tension through an insight with a Kantian echo. A suitably qualified version of authority can sometimes count as an expression of, rather than hindrance to, autonomy. I describe the overlap in Emerson and Smith as a “frontier” version of Kantianism. They favor determining one's own beliefs and actions in a way that looks forward to an open future of possibility. (shrink)

It will be argued that Wittgenstein did not outright reject the law of excluded middle for mathematics or the proof-techniques that constructivists reject in connection with the law of excluded middle. Wittgenstein can be seen to be critical of the dogmatic claims of Brouwer and Weyl concerning how proofs should be constructed. Rather than himself laying down a requirement concerning what is and is not a proof, Wittgenstein can be read as exploring the differences between constructive and non-constructive proofs. I (...) will read Wittgenstein as arguing that Brouwer’s rejection of excluded middle is based upon an over-extension from examples that Wittgenstein reads as special cases. Wittgenstein is certainly interested in the difference between constructive and non-constructive proof but only for the purposes of exploring the easily-missed differences between the two, not in order to reject non-constructive approaches. (shrink)

Decisions made by supply chain managers have a far-reaching impact on the economic, environmental, and social performance of entire supply chains, even though many activities in the supply chain occur beyond the direct control of those managers. Some firms establish a line of moral disengagement, beyond which they distance themselves from the impact of the activities of the supply chain. This research addresses the question of why some managers choose to take responsibility for the sustainability of their supply chain, while (...) others do not. We argue that the ethical predisposition and moral complexity of the individual employee moderates the interpretation of the drivers of sustainability, increasing or decreasing their ability to build a business case for supply chain responsibility. We also argue that ethical predisposition moderates the likelihood of a business case being enacted. We then discuss theoretical and managerial implications resulting from this finding. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Achilles, Agamemnon, and Fair Distribution Justice as “Distinctively Human” Institutions and Values of the Early Polis What is Justice? The Voice of the Oppressed and the Origins of Political Thought The Egalitarian Response The Elitist Response Case Study: Sparta and the Politics of “Courage” A Second Case Study: Archaic Athens and the Search for Justice.

This chapter contains section titled: Civic Conflict, Emotion, and Injustice: Observing the Polis as It Is Exploring What Ought To Be: Aristotle's Naturalism Aristotle on the Good Life Nature in the Politics Aristotle on Slavery Polis and Citizenship in General Aristotle's Best Polis Political Possibilities in Existing Cities The Best Constitution in Relation to Existing Conditions Classification of Constitutions The Power of the Masses Conclusion.

This chapter contains section titled: The Ancestral Republican “Solutions” The Monarchic “Solution” Plato's “Solutions” Criticizing Contemporary Politics Plato on Rhetoric and Order in the Gorgias The Priority of Reason in City and Soul: Plato's Republic Educating Citizens in the Classical Context Politics and Ethics Philosophical Rulers Platonic Political Philosophy after the Republic.

This chapter contains section titled: Theory of Kingship The Traditional Schools New Directions: Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans The Politics of Cynicism? Stoicism and Epicureanism.

This chapter contains section titled: Aristotle Analyzes Imperialism Definitions and History Monarchic Imperialism Natural Superiority? Debating Athenian Imperialism Final Thoughts.

Recent scholarship has followed Glenn Morrow in seeking to understand Plato’s politics in light of his cosmology. This essay takes a different tack and interprets the theology and cosmology of the Laws as an outgrowth of the Athenian Stranger’s conversation with Kleinias, which focuses on politics and warfare. In that sense the arguments of Book 10 are closely tied to the context of the dialogue. The Athenian Stranger’s religious ideology is not designed to be permanent or universally applicable. Rather, it (...) is intended for an audience that finds itself immersed in an unhealthy world of motion, disorder, and antagonism. (shrink)

Two critical yet comic elements, beyond the more obvious narrative of persecution, reveal themselves in Adorno's recorded nightmare. The first is comic because it so aptly displays his relentless critical impulse despite himself, the way in which theory invades the private sphere of his dreams: even in sleep, Adorno finds himself at once reading phenomena and on guard against a false transcendence from which they could, in the last instance, be deciphered.1 The second is more patently absurd, yet perhaps more (...) difficult to assess: that he should gain permission to interrupt an unspeakably cruel and final punishment, an essentially hopeless…. (shrink)

Kazimir Malevich’s style of Suprematist painting represents the inauguration of nothing less than a new form of culture premised upon a demolition of the Western tradition’s reifying habits of objective thought. In ridding his canvases of all objects and mimetic conventions, Malevich sought to reconfigure human perception in such a way as to open consciousness to alternative modes of organization and signification. In this paper, I argue that Malevich’s revolutionary aesthetic strategy can be illuminated by a return to the very (...) basis of this tradition, namely by a reconsideration of Aristotle’s account in De Anima III.2 of the initial possibility of objective perception as such. (shrink)

Whereas the entrance of the monochrome into modern art has typically been understood in light of movements in contemporary art and aesthetic theory following in its wake, this essay seeks to understand the motivations for, and the effect of, the monochrome in the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1921 in reference to Plato's analysis of pure pleasure and absolute beauty in the Philebus . I argue that Rodchenko and Plato were motivated by a shared project to contend with the aesthetic (...) and psychological effects of figurative semblance, or what Socrates calls the phantasm, in order to harmonize human perception with the world of sensuous material objects. It is in this shared project, I contend, that Rodchenko's strategy is to be understood as a kind of materialist Platonism that, when viewed phenomenologically, reveals Plato's objects of absolute beauty to be, in the context of industrial capitalism and the crisis of perception that Benjamin, among others, saw as its consequence, sites of loss and meaninglessness for modern consciousness, yet sites which nonetheless contain emancipatory potential for a social order that has been systematically alienated from itself and its environment. (shrink)

Representations of breast cancer are examined in three popular women's periodicals targeting African American readers: Ebony, Essence, and Black Elegance. The researcher focuses specifically on representations that reflect certain ideas/ideals about the sharing and creating of information about the disease and related issues, such as health care and body image. Magazine selections are analyzed and critiqued according to the epistemological principles outlined by Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought. The author calls for further research into how and why particular (...) social and cultural groups consume information about health and illness in particular ways. (shrink)

The Protagoras features the first known venture into detailed textual interpretation in the Western intellectual tradition. Yet if Socrates is to be taken at his wordat the close of his hermeneutic contest with Protagoras, this venture is to be regarded as a playful demonstration of the worthlessness of texts for aiding in the pursuit of knowledge. This essay is an attempt to view Socrates’ puzzling remarks on this point within their dramatic and historical contexts. I argue that, far from having (...) us lay our inherited texts aside, we can find in the Protagoras a reorientation to the linked activities of reading and dialogue, where we need not be forced to choose between merely using our own unaided voices and relying upon the (textual) voices of others in the project of philosophic education. (shrink)

Social egalitarianism holds that individuals ought to have equal power over outcomes within relationships. Egalitarian philosophers have argued for this ideal by appealing to features of political society. This way of grounding the social egalitarian principle renders it dependent on empirical facts about political culture. In particular, egalitarians have argued that social equality matters to citizens in political relationships in a way analogous to the value of equality in a marriage. In this paper, we show how egalitarian philosophers are committed (...) to psychological premises, and then illustrate how to test the social egalitarian’s empirical claims. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we find that citizens will sometimes prioritize equality over competing values, but that the weight of social equality diminishes when moving from personal to political cases. These findings raise questions for thinking about how to explain the normative significance of social equality. (shrink)

We can imagine agents who would have the moral status to demand contractualist justification but still lack an especially strong claim against interference. In contrast, agents who can conceive of their lives in a temporally unified way have a distinctive, strong interest in non‐interference. This contrast helps illuminate the moral importance of self‐authorship. The upshot is that ordinary persons have a more general and less variable right against interference than is often supposed. Self‐authorship can also help appreciate the sense in (...) which the value of persons may be characterized as ‘self‐existent’. (shrink)