Alfred Archer

Philosophers have considered many different paradoxes concerning our emotional engagement with fiction. In this paper, we outline a new paradox in this area: the paradox of junk recidivism. The puzzle we address is why fiction consumers regularly return to familiar fictions which lacked much literary merit to begin with. This appears to be irrational, as there is no literary or aesthetic value to be gained from continued engagement with such fictions. However, we will argue that these works can be understood as affective scaffolds that people draw on to help regulate their emotions. Once we view these works in this way, then continued reengagement with such fictions is no longer puzzling. People often turn to such works to regulate their emotions because they are trusted affective scaffolds that can be relied upon to bring about the desired feelings.

How can moral theory make room for the existence of acts that are beyond the call of duty? This issue has become known as the problem of supererogation, and philosophers have provided various accounts of how to solve it. We have provided a recent answer to this question that draws on the work of the eleventh-century Persian philosopher Abū Alī Miskawayh and holds that we can make sense of supererogatory actions by appealing to a form of moral caution. In a recent response to this article, Alireza Kazemi argues that this cautionary account cannot explain the existence of supererogatory acts. In this short reply, we defend the cautionary account against Kazemi’s criticisms. We start by briefly outlining our cautionary account and Kazemi’s criticisms before providing our own arguments as to why the cautionary account should not be rejected.

This article builds upon Stephen Mumford’s observations about football and chance in his book Football: The Philosophy Behind the Game. Mumford argues that football strikes a perfect balance between skill and chance. In football, the more skilled team generally wins but not always. Mumford argues that the chanciness of football is a core part of why it is so entertaining. Moreover, it can be a useful source of two important life lessons: that we never have full control over our lives and that victory can be possible even when the odds are stacked against us. In this commentary, I explore the connections between football and chance in more detail by drawing on the work of the experimental British novelist B. S. Johnson. I will argue that Johnson’s work suggests three more lessons we can learn about life from attending to the chanciness of football. First, chance may lead events of major significance that may happen to us at any moment. Second, our lives may come to be defined by moments of pure chance over which we had no control. Third, we have a tendency to try to impose meaning on the random chaos of life at times where there is no meaning to be found.

In recent years, there has been a great deal of public debate about cancelling and cancel culture. So far though, this phenomenon has received little attention from moral philosophers. This paper addresses issue by investigating the nature of cancelling and the conditions under which it is appropriate. We begin by examining the origins of the term before investigating Linda Radzik’s account of cancelling as a form of social punishment which is morally appropriate only if the person being punished deserves it and harming them will lead to better consequences than alternative courses of action. We argue that cancelling refers to a wider range of phenomena than Radzik acknowledges. It may also be a form of reputation correction, the ending of a parasocial relationship, or a way of holding informal representatives to account. As we argue, these different kinds of moral practice call for different kinds of ethical justification.

Failures to remember the past properly can constitute a range of different wrongs. In this article, we identify a novel kind of wrong that often occurs through political apologies: consigning an injustice to history. Consigning acknowledges that a historical injustice took place but denies that it has any ongoing relevance for the present. This is sometimes justified, but it is not justified when a past injustice's moral residue has not been washed away. We suggest a conception of political apologies – political apology as political atonement – that can help to avoid prematurely consigning injustices to history.

Some AI applications are programmed to recognize people’s emotions. These can be used to help or teach people to recognize and interpret the emotions of others, as well as to monitor the performance of customer service workers. Some commentators have identified several risks with these technologies, while others highlight the positive effects of affective AI. It can, for instance, serve as a form of affective and cognitive scaffolding that helps users to recognize their own emotions and those of other people and to regulate them. However, while affective AI can be a useful tool for achieving these purposes, we will argue that the use of these applications risks bringing about two forms of affective harm. The first is the risk of alienation from our own emotions. The second risk is that of emotional imperialism, which occurs when a dominant group imposes its emotional norms and practices on a marginalized group, while marking out the emotional norms of the marginalized as deviant and inferior.

How might the virtue of integrity contribute to a process of personal transformation? While philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Cheshire Calhoun have investigated the nature of this important virtue, the issue of how this virtue may play a transformative role has been underexplored. This chapter will draw on this existing work about what integrity is to investigate how individuals may transform themselves through the pursuit of integrity. I will argue that a concern with integrity can play a transformational role in the lives of individuals. I will begin by outlining the existing work on integrity, starting with Bernard Williams’s influential work on the topic. I will then explore three existing attempts to make sense of the nature of integrity: The Identity View, The Integrated Self View, and the Standing for Something View. In the final section, I will argue that whichever of these broad approaches to integrity we accept, a concern with integrity can play an important role in transforming individuals. A concern with integrity can be deeply transformative, as it can call on us to profoundly reshape our ideals, our lives, or both. In addition, the social conditions that we live in and how people respond to us can have a major impact on our ability to live with integrity. Finally, paying close attention to the non-ideal circumstances that people live in can help to transform how we think about the nature of integrity.

Celebrities hold affective power—the ability to influence how others feel—because fans form stronger attachments, invest more affectively, and rely more on their parasocial relationship than celebrities do. While prior work highlights celebrities as emotional exemplars, viewing them through affective power reveals that they can also elicit and redirect emotions, and build communities around themselves. From this, we identify positive and negative responsibilities. Negatively, celebrities should try to not misuse their affective power in ways that emotionally harm their fans. Positively, celebrities have strong reasons to redirect affective attention and support towards those in need, especially within marginalized communities.

When people feel that their country has betrayed its core ideals, it is natural for them to consider whether they ought finally to give up on their country. Our interest is with those who sincerely love their countries, and yet who are inclined to abandon their country because they judge it to have betrayed its ideals. We consider different variants of patriotism before defending what we call critical patriotism, a stance involving a commitment to a nation’s ideals without the attendant need to love one’s country unconditionally. We further argue that even in the cases where one has good reasons to remain loyal to one’s country, doing so will typically be supererogatory rather than obligatory. The issue before us is of crucial practical significance given the current trend of people feeling justified in abandoning their country in response to feeling that their political ideals have been betrayed.

Sports fan tourism is a booming industry that is actively cultivated both by sports clubs and by national governments. However, sports fan tourism has recently been subject to significant criticism, particularly by fans of English Premier League football clubs. In this article, we will examine the ethical basis of these criticisms. We will argue that the criticisms of tourist fans can be developed into a well-grounded ethical critique of the practice, at least when it is sufficiently widespread. However, the claim that individual tourists are blameworthy is less plausible. We will begin by outlining our understanding of sports fandom as a form of love to investigate whether this understanding of fandom can support a criticism of tourist fandom as an illegitimate form of fandom. We will argue against this as a general criticism of tourist fans, as tourists can be genuine fans, just like local fans. We will then explore an alternative way of criticising the rise of tourist fandom, which is the effect on the atmosphere in sports stadiums. We will argue that fan stadium practices constitute a form of affective niche construction and that the increasing numbers of tourists in stadiums threaten to damage these affective niches and so unfairly deprive fans of affective niches that are central to their identities. We will finish by exploring the implications of this argument for how we should ethically evaluate sports fan tourists, arguing that the problem is a structural one and so appropriate responses should also be structural.

The tension in the public response to the death of a morally flawed celebrity raises ethical questions about mourning such figures. We examine three explanations for why this might be morally problematic. The first explanation emphasizes the morally flawed character of the person being mourned, suggesting that publicly mourning someone with significant moral flaws might be ethically problematic. The second explanation highlights their celebrity status, arguing that mourning celebrities might be inappropriate. We advocate for a third explanation, which considers both the person’s moral flaws and their celebrity status. We argue that publicly mourning morally flawed celebrities might be morally problematic, as it risks contributing to testimonial and affective injustice against those wronged by the celebrity (and the victims of similar wrongs) and normalizing or endorsing the wrongdoing. We conclude by considering how to respond to these situations.

Linda Zagzebski’s groundbreaking book Exemplarist Moral Theory has inspired new attention to the use of moral exemplars in moral education. Zagzebski argues that admiration for moral exemplars has a crucial role to play in the development of moral virtue. It is through admiration that we come to identify moral exemplars. Moreover, it is through our admiration for exemplars that we come to identify what moral virtue consists of and also to develop the motivation to act virtuously. My aim in this paper is not to argue against Zagzebski’s claims about these roles that exemplars play in moral education but instead to argue for an additional, important role that moral exemplars in helping to form a sense of who is and who is not a fellow member of the moral community. I will argue for this by drawing on literature from the ethics of commemoration, classics and social science. In presenting someone as a moral exemplar, we declare them to be a highly valued member of the moral community. Conversely, when members of marginalized groups are rarely presented as moral exemplars, this reinforces the idea that they are at best second-class members of the moral community. Similarly, holding up oppressors as moral exemplars also serves to reinforce the idea that victims of oppression should not be considered full members of the moral community. Despite these negative uses of moral exemplars, I will argue that exemplar narratives can also play a positive role in expanding our conception of who should be included in the moral community. I will finish by considering the implications of this argument for the use of moral exemplars in moral education.

Should celebrities act as political representatives and activists? Philosophers and political theorists have raised various general objections to celebrity involvement in politics. My focus here will be on the more specific issue of whether egalitarian political movements should make use of celebrity to advance their political ends. I will argue that while celebrities can serve several useful functions for political movements, egalitarian or not, there are important reasons for egalitarians in particular to be wary of using celebrities in their movements. I will begin by explaining the various forms of celebrity involvement in politics that have been identified in the existing literature. I will then outline three important functions celebrities involved in politics can play: providing role models for others to emulate, helping to reimagine the political community, and influencing political outlooks. Next, I will outline three reasons for egalitarians in particular to worry about celebrity politics: that it draws on inherently unequal relationships, that it risks exacerbating inequality through elite capture, and that it undermines a distinctive strength of egalitarian movements built around collective action. While these arguments do not show that egalitarian movements should avoid celebrity altogether, they do give reason to be cautious about the use of celebrity, to try to ensure that the power of celebrity within a movement is not concentrated on one individual and to seek to avoid combining the power of celebrity with formal institutional power.

This article defends the use of narratives about morally exemplary individuals in moral education and appraises the role that ‘nudge’ strategies can play in combination with such an appeal to exemplars. It presents a general conception of the aims of moral education and explains how the proposed combination of both moral strategies serves these aims. An important aim of moral education is to make the ethical perspective of the subject—the person being educated—more structured, more salient and therefore more ‘navigable’. This article argues why and how moral exemplars and nudge strategies are crucial aids in this respect. It gives an empirically grounded account of how the emotion of admiration can be triggered most effectively by a thoughtful presentation of narratives about moral exemplars. It also answers possible objections and concludes that a combined appeal to exemplars and nudges provides a neglected but valuable resource for moral education.

A commonly accepted claim by philosophers investigating the nature of evil is that the evil person is, in some way, the mirror image of the moral saint. In this paper I will defend a new version of this thesis. I will argue that both the moral saint and the morally evil person are characterized by a lack of conflict between moral and non-moral concerns. However, while the saint achieves this unity through a reconciliation of the two, the evil person does so by eliminating moral concerns from her character.

During live sporting events, fans often create intense atmospheres in stadiums, expressing support for their own local players and discouragement for the opposition. Crowd hostility directed at opposition players surprisingly elicits contrasting reactions across different sports. Tennis players, for example, have reported that hostile crowds are hurtful and disrespectful, whereas footballers often praise and encourage such hostility. What explains this tension? Why are hostile atmospheres considered wrong for some athletes, and not for others? We argue that creating hostile atmospheres for opposition players functions as a form of hostile affective scaffolding, as it scaffolds affective states in such a way that harms the interests of the opposition athletes, while promoting the interests of fans. These hostile atmospheres wrong the scaffolded insofar they constitute a form of recognition disrespect, and to the extent that they violate the formal rules and conventional norms internal to the sporting practices. Although the focus is on the sporting context, our analysis reveals significant implications for a more nuanced understanding of what hostile scaffolding is, and how we should understand its normativity. The existing literature views hostile scaffolding as constituted by a setback to the overall interests of the scaffolded, and that the wrong-making feature of this scaffolding is necessarily explained by harm. Instead, we argue that hostile scaffolding should be understood as hostile relative to a set of interests that an agent has, not just their overall interests, and that the wrong-making features of hostile scaffolding are not limited to harms.

Devoted sports fandom has been defended as a worthwhile undertaking that lends meaning to people’s lives and shapes their very identities; on the other hand, fanaticism is widely decried as morally troubling. We sketch the similarities between fandom and fanaticism and argue that sports fandom is often a form of fanaticism. We use the fact that fandom is often regarded as a valuable thing to suggest a value-neutral account of fanaticism and argue that, in cases where the object of devotion is not problematic, it is the vulnerability to exploitation that can explain some of the evils of fanaticism. Fanaticism turns sour when the devotion fans have for their team is systematically preyed upon and exploited to disastrous effect. We illustrate this with two prominent examples of the exploitation of sports fans. Firstly, fandom leaves them open to commercial exploitation. Secondly, it explains the power and prevalence of sportswashing, a moral phenomenon that has recently had a major impact on global sports. A comparison with cults helps to highlight this evil.

When an institution morally fails, what is the appropriate emotional reaction for those institution members who are causally uninvolved in bringing about this failure? Our aim in this article is to explain why it may be fitting for such people to feel ashamed about the wrongs perpetrated by the institution. We begin by explaining the main case that we focus on – the Toeslagenaffaire or Dutch Child Benefit Scandal. We then show how standard accounts of the fittingness of shame struggle to explain how it could be fitting for uninvolved members of the Dutch tax authority to feel shame in response to this failure. Next we consider three potential ways to explain this shame. The most plausible, we argue, is the identity explanation, according to which this shame is a response to the fact that the practical identity of workers is partly constituted by their (social, professional) role in the institution. We finish by arguing that this shame is also morally valuable because it can play an important role in reforming the wrongful culture of an institution that has committed an injustice.

In moral philosophy, it is common to accept that some acts are beyond the call of duty, or supererogatory. Recently, it has been argued that there are also distinctly sporting forms of supererogation (Archer 2017). These arguments have been criticized by Stefan Borge (2021), who argues that they fail to establish the need to make room for supererogation. In this paper, we will defend the existence of acts sporting supererogation against Borge’s critiques. Key to Borge’s argument are the claims that all purported acts of supererogation are luxury phenomena and that luxury phenomena cannot be supererogatory. We will argue against both claims and show that Borge’s arguments give us no reason to reject the existence of sporting supererogation.

This chapter critically analyses the ethical and political dimensions of supposedly subtle and non-coercive interventions that aim to ‘prevent crime’ through environmental designs making certain public spaces less attractive for specific groups. Examples include benches designed to discourage sleeping (targeted at homeless people), high-pitched noises or classical music played to deter lingering (targeted at youngsters), and specific lighting to prevent aggression (targeted at nightlife). While these interventions may appear less problematic than more traditional exclusionary measures, they raise ethical and political worries that come into view clearly when we analyse them as instances of nudging, on the one hand, and niche construction and affective scaffolding, on the other. Employing this approach reveals how these exclusionary environmental designs not only risk reinforcing problematic stereotypes and social inequalities and discipline rather than prevent crime, they also can alienate specific groups, constitute affective injustices, and inflexibly reduce the diverse purposes public spaces potentially have. The chapter argues that environments are never neutral as they inevitably support and encourage some bodies, behaviours, moods, and emotions while suppressing and discouraging others.

“The Descartes Lectures” is a biennial event at Tilburg University that invites a distinguished philosopher to deliver a series of three lectures, each followed by commentaries from other experts in the field. In 2022, Tilburg University had the honor of hosting Cheshire Calhoun for a series of talks on the important philosophical question of what it means to be a responsible person. The commentators for the lectures were Gunnar Björnsson, Jules Holroyd, and Heidi Maibom. This book is a compilation of the material of Calhoun’s lectures, the commentaries by Björnsson, Holroyd, and Maibom, as well as Calhoun’s replies to their critiques.

Many elite athletes find the loss of their athletic abilities due to age or injury to be a profoundly challenging experience. While talent development is a well-studied phenomenon, far less attention has been paid to the issue of talent loss. We address this gap by exploring the experience and challenges faced by elite athletes who are losing, or who have lost, their talent. Drawing on three different understandings of the nature of talent, we argue that the experience of talent loss is constituted by three distinct yet interrelated forms of disorientation. We conclude by examining how athletes and those supporting them may respond to these challenges.

This book investigates the extensive and growing economic inequalities that characterize the affluent market societies in which we currently live. It uses insights both from political philosophy and the new science of happiness to make the case for more just alternatives. We diagnose the damaging impact that existing inequalities have on our well-being. We draw on philosophical, psychological, social scientific and other insights to diagnose what has gone wrong in our highly unequal and frequently unhappy societies. Combining the approaches both of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, John Rawls and Philip Pettit and analyses from political economists, we uncover the economic, social and political mechanisms that create and perpetuate income and wealth inequality. The key claim is that wealthy elites engage in rent seeking and opportunity hoarding and shape our social, economic and political structures in ways that benefit them and harm the rest. We assess important insights from the new science of happiness to assess the impact of inequality on the well-being of the poor, the middle class and the rich. We specifically examine the role of key emotions, such as shame (amongst the poor), envy and admiration (towards and for the rich). We discuss which emotional narratives serve to justify and entrench excessive inequalities in income and wealth. The result is an explanation of the emotional regime that characterizes our capitalist societies and that perpetuates the unfair gap between the extravagance of the rich and the misery of the poor. We conclude with policies and proposals to re-shape this emotional regime in the interests of justice and solidarity.

The way we engage with each other in science matters. While some ways of engaging may facilitate interactions, others may hinder them. Trust has been identified as one of the central factors facilitating collaborations between scientific communities and lay communities, and respect has been pointed to as having a central role to play in building and maintaining this trust. But what should respecting others in the interactions between scientific and lay communities involve? What does cultivating respect involve in this context? This paper aims at addressing these questions. In particular, it focuses on the role and nature of respect in the interactions between healthcare providers and patients in order to develop an analysis of the different types of respect and their relative importance in collaborations between scientists and lay publics. Overall, we will argue that understanding the complexity of respect dynamics may help to act appropriately in scientific experts-lay people interactions.

How might people be wronged in relation to fear? Recently philosophers have begun to investigate the idea that there may be distinctly affective forms of injustice (Archer & Mills 2019; Archer & Matheson 2022; Gallegos 2022; Srinivasan 2018; Whitney 2018). Until now, though, the literature on affective injustice has mostly focused on the emotion of anger. Similarly, while philosophers have investigated both ethical (Döring 2020; Harbin 2023) and political (Ahmed 2004; Nussbaum 2019) questions related to fear, this literature has not yet drawn on the literature of affective injustice to investigate these issues. We will investigate how fear can be a site of affective injustice. We will outline three forms of affective injustice involving fear. We begin by providing an overview of the existing literature on affective injustice. We will then argue that the unfair dismissal of people’s fears can constitute a form of affective injustice. Next, we will argue that being made to live in fear can also constitute a form of affective injustice. Finally, we will outline the last form of fear-related affective injustice, which is being the target of unwarranted fear. In exploring these various forms of fear-related affective injustice we will highlight more general features of affective injustice that have hitherto been underacknowledged.

This chapter brings together important contributions from geographers, historians, sociologists and media theorists, and looks at these through the lens of social philosophy on the nature of resistance and oppression, to articulate and understand both the positive and negative ways in which industrial nostalgia shapes present-day working-class identities. Celebrations of abandoned industrial sites have been criticised by some as inflicting a form of violence on working-class people (High and Lewis 2007), transforming sites of working-class loss into objects of nostalgic appreciation in ways which marginalise those who worked there, and which close the past off from the working-class present (Lasch 1991). More positive views about industrial nostalgia argue that it provides a way to assert working-class pride in hostile environments, serving as a basis for present-day solidarity (Loveday 2014; Gibbs 2021). By examining this existing literature on deindustrialisation through a social philosophical perspective, our aim here is to shed some light on this phenomenon, in which industrial nostalgia can function both as a tool of oppression but also as a form of resistance against oppression.

Many cultural commentators and philosophers are highly critical of the pursuit of fame. We argue that pursuing fame does not always deserve this negative appraisal, and can in some circumstances be virtuous. We begin our argument by outlining three positive functions that fame can serve, providing role models, spokespersons, and hermeneutic resources. These functions are particularly valuable for those from marginalized groups, providing empowering ways to respond to and subvert social discrimination. marginalized groups, providing empowering ways to respond to and subvert social discrimination. Next, we explain the ways in which certain groups are under-represented in the public eye, resulting in a lack of recognition and respect. We argue that this under-representation ought to be mitigated. The pursuit of fame is valuable insofar as it acts a corrective to the injustice that arises because of the marginalization of certain groups from the public eye and celebrity culture. We then discuss four problems with the idea that the pursuit of fame and celebrity by members of marginalized groups may function to combat social injustice. First, celebrities from marginalized groups who are viewed as role models, spokespersons or hermeneutic resources, are especially likely to find themselves subject to judgmental and moralistic criticism from the public. Second, the pursuit of fame from members of marginalized groups runs significant risks of elite capture. Third, they are also likely to be subjected to demeaning forms of representation. Fourth, and more generally, the role of being famous can be severely psychologically damaging, causing significant personal burdens for those who pursue fame and ultimately achieve celebrity status. Taking these points together shows that while the pursuit of fame may be useful in mitigating certain forms of social injustice, there are also important reasons to worry about how effective a tool it is, and the costs that arise for those who pursue fame and become celebrities. We conclude our argument in by noting how the domain of fame and intersectionality influences the extent to which the pursuit of fame is valuable and burdensome.