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Recently T. M. Scanlon and others have advanced an ostensibly comprehensive theory of moral responsibility—a theory of both being responsible and being held responsible—that best accounts for our moral practices. I argue that both aspects of the Scanlonian theory fail this test. A truly comprehensive theory must incorporate and explain three distinct conceptions of responsibility—attributability, answerability, and accountability—and the Scanlonian view conflates the first two and ignores the importance of the third. To illustrate what a truly comprehensive theory might look like, I investigate what it would say about the difficult case of the psychopath.

In what sense are persons equal, such that it is appropriate to treat them as equals? This difficult question has been strangely neglected by political philosophers. A plausible answer can be found by adopting a particular interpretation of the idea of respect. Central to this interpretation is the thought that in order to respect persons we need to treat them as ‘opaque', paying attention only to their outward features as agents. This proposed basis of equality has important implications for the currency of egalitarian justice, ruling out a number of theequalizandafavored by contemporary egalitarians.

Nichols and Knobe present and defend a hypothesis about the processes that generate people's intuitions concerning moral responsibility. Their hypothesis is that people have an incompatibilist theory of moral responsibility that is elicited in some contexts but that they also have psychological mechanisms that can lead them to arrive at compatibilist judgments in other contexts.

The status of \"moral testimony\" is controversial. Many people believe that there are strong reasons not to form moral beliefs on the say-so of others. These people are called \"pessimists\" about moral testimony. Pessimists do not think that moral testimony is entirely worthless. They agree that it is acceptable for children to learn most of their moral beliefs through testimony. And adults may reasonably base some beliefs on testimony, for example, about relevant nonmoral issues (who did what to whom) from which they can form their own moral views. Asking for other people's advice about moral matters and taking that advice seriously is clearly legitimate. On the other hand, optimists think that trusting moral testimony is just like trusting testimony about an ordinary nonmoral matter of fact. To defend this claim, they often appeal to moral epistemology. By trusting testimony, one can gain knowledge, both moral and nonmoral. Here, Hills argues that there are circumstances in which one has no reason to trust moral testimony, even it one's interlocutor is reliable and trustworthy regarding the matter in question.

Kagan notes that it is often suggested that consequentialism still permits too much, failing to condemn acts that intuitively it ought to condemn. In one important class of cases of this sort, someone is harmed for the sake of promoting the greater overall good. Here the act is wrong even though the results are good overall. Such cases show that something else matters in morality besides results. But precisely for this reason, cases like this--cases that arouse deontological qualms--may not particularly trouble the consequentialist at all. For the consequentialist is indeed concerned solely with the production of the best possible results, and in cases of this sort, obviously enough, conformity to the consequentialist principle does result in the best outcome.

Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) are arguments that appeal to the evolutionary origins of evaluative beliefs to undermine their justification.This paper aims to clarify the premises and presuppositions of EDAs— a form of argument that is increasingly put to use in normative ethics. I argue that such arguments face serious obstacles. It is often overlooked, for example, that they presuppose the truth of metaethical objectivism. More importantly, even if objectivism is assumed, the use of EDAs in normative ethics is incompatible with a parallel and more sweeping global evolutionary debunking argument that has been discussed in recent metaethics. After examining several ways of responding to this global debunking argument, I end by arguing that even if we could resist it, this would still not rehabilitate the current targeted use of EDAs in normative ethics given that, if EDAs work at all, they will in any case lead to a truly radical revision of our evaluative outlook.

Estlund narrates that it is often supposed that a person is not required to do anything they cannot do. \"Ought\" implies \"can,\" as this is often put. Yet he states that this is not so. If there are facts of human nature of this general kind, consisting in limits to what humans will be able to muster the will to do, they are not, simply as facts, constraints on what can soundly be prescribed or morally required. The reason is that agents' abilities and inabilities to muster their will are subject to moral evaluation in their own right. Some such inabilities are morally objectionable, others are not. Here, he argues that human nature is a constraint on some tasks in political philosophy but not on others.

Nationalists hold that the state derives its territorial rights from the prior claim of a cultural nation to territory. This article develops an alternative account: the legitimate state theory. This view holds that a state has rights to territory if it meets the following four conditions: (a) it effectively implements a system of law regulating property in that territory; (b) its subjects have a legitimate claim to occupy the territory; (c) the state’s system of law “rules in the name of the people,” by protecting basic rights and providing for political participation; and (d) the state is not a usurper.

Issue Title: Special Issue : Proceedings of the 2011 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference

I present and defend an account of three-place trustworthiness according to which B is trustworthy with respect to A in domain of interaction D, if and only if she is competent with respect to that domain, and she would take the fact that A is counting on her, were A to do so in this domain, to be a compelling reason for acting as counted on. This is not the whole story of trustworthiness, however, for we want those we can count on to identify themselves so that we can place our trust wisely.