John N. Williams

The preface paradox strikes us as puzzling because we feel that if a person holds a set of inconsistent beliefs, i.e. beliefs such that at least one of them must be correct, then he should give at least one of them up. Equally, if a person's belief is rational, then he has a right to hold it. Yet the preface example is prima facie a case in which a person holds an inconsistent set of beliefs each of which is rational, and thus a case in which that person has a duty to relinquish what he has a right to keep.

A central feature of Confucianism is the doctrine that an adult child has, for want of a better word, the ‘duty’ to care for his elderly parents1. Whether this doctrine should be framed in terms of an ethic of duties as opposed to an ethic of virtues is a vexed question. It might be argued that the doctrine is best framed in terms of the behaviour and dispositions appropriate to an agent who is, within the Confucian moral vision, good. Nonetheless, in both popular discourse and in much the secondary literature, the doctrine is characterized in terms of a moral ‘ought’. We will adopt this perspective, and talk of the ‘filial duty of care’. We investigate the empirical question of whether Chinese communities still have a strong sense of this duty. We conclude that although there is a widespread perception among Chinese communities that their sense of filial duty of care has been eroded, in fact the adherence to it remains robust.

Chalmers and Hájek argue that on an epistemic reading of Ramsey’s test for the rational acceptability of conditionals, it is faulty. They claim that applying the test to each of a certain pair of conditionals requires one to think that one is omniscient or infallible, unless one forms irrational Moore-paradoxical beliefs. I show that this claim is false. The epistemic Ramsey test is indeed faulty. Applying it requires that one think of anyone as all-believing and if one is rational, to think of anyone as infallible-if-rational. But this is not because of Moore-paradoxical beliefs. Rather it is because applying the test requires a certain supposition about conscious belief. It is important to understand the nature of this supposition