Joshua Glasgow

Contemporary Kant scholarship generally takes 'humanity' in Kant's ethical writings to refer to beings with rational capacities. However, his claims that only the good will has unqualified goodness and that humanity is unconditionally valuable suggests that humanity might be the good will. This problem seems to have infiltrated some prominent scholarship, and Richard Dean has recently argued that, in fact, humanity is indeed the good will. This paper defends, and tries to make sense of, the more conventional view that humanity and the good will are distinct

Sometimes we descriptively name that which we condemn. “Hate crime” is such a name: it not only identifies the crime, it also refers to what we think is morally unique about the crime—its hatefulness morally sets it apart from other actions. On one theory of terrorism, “terrorism” is a similar name. What is morally special about terrorism, according to this view, is built right into the name itself: it aims to terrorize. C all this the straightforward analysis of terrorism. The straightforward view is inconsistent with a number of recent attempts to identify what, if anything, is morally distinctive about terrorism. Some are skeptical that terrorism really should be thought of as morally unique, on the grounds that its morally relevant properties are exhausted by more general qualities, such as causing harm, being coercive, or violating autonomy. David Rodin, for example, believes that there is no morally relevant quality typically displayed by terrorism that is not also found in acts of conventional war. Others do think that terrorism is morally distinctive, but they nonetheless conclude that its morally distinctive feature is something other than its aim of producing fear. For example, we will see below that Robert Goodin, Jeff McMahan, and Samuel Scheffler maintain that the morally distinctive feature of terrorism is not the aiming to cause fear itself, but an intention to use that fear to bring about certain further effects. For Scheffler the unique problem lies in terrorism’s use of fear to undermine order in the society that the terrorist targets; for Goodin it is the terrorist’s use of fear for sociopolitical ends that is especially troubling; McMahan, finally, holds that the morally special aspect of terrorism is that it is the intentional harming of innocent people in order to intimidate and coerce others.

In the debate over the reality of race, a three-way dispute has become entrenched: race is biologically real, socially real, or simply not real. These three theses have each enjoyed increasingly sophisticated defenses over roughly the past thirty years, but we argue here that this debate contains a lacuna: there is a fourth, mostly neglected, position that we call ‘basic racial realism.’ Basic racial realism says that though race is neither biologically real nor socially real, it is real all the same. Our goal is to establish this theory's credentials and provide it with initial support. It appears to be in a strong dialectical position and to nicely capture what many want from a theory of race.

Supervenience has provided a way for nonreductive materialists to explain how the mental can be physically irreducible but still physically respectable. In recent years, doubts about this research program have emerged from a number of quarters. Consequently, Terence Horgan has argued that nonreductive materialists must appeal to an upgraded "superdupervenience," if supervenience is to do any materialist work. We argue that nonreductive materialism cannot meet this challenge. Superdupervenience is impossible

Many hold that ordinary race-thinking in the USA is committed to the 'one-drop rule', that race is ordinarily represented in terms of essences, and that race is ordinarily represented as a biological (phenotype- and/or ancestry-based, non-social) kind. This study investigated the extent to which ordinary race-thinking subscribes to these commitments. It also investigated the relationship between different conceptions of race and racial attitudes. Participants included 449 USA adults who completed an Internet survey. Unlike previous research, conceptions of race were assessed using concrete vignettes. Results indicate widespread rejection of the one-drop rule, as well as the use of a complex combination of ancestral, phenotypic, and social (and, therefore, non-essentialist) criteria for racial classification. No relationship was found between racial attitudes and essentialism, the one-drop rule, or social race-thinking; however, ancestry-based and phenotype-based classification criteria were associated with racial attitudes. These results suggest a complicated relationship between conceptions of race and racial attitudes.

Analyzing racial concepts has become an important task in the philosophy of race. Aside from any inherent interest that might be found in the meanings of racial terms, these meanings also can spell the doom or deliverance of competing ontological and normative theories about race. One of the most pressing questions about race at present is the normative question of whether race should be eliminated from, or conserved in, public discourse and practice. This normative question is often answered in part by appealing to the ontological status of race: if race is an illusion, then it should be eliminated, and if it is real, then it can be conserved. 1 Thus, for..

Kant's ethics is traditionally categorized and defended as deontological. Recent scholarship has left this tradition, arguing variously that Kantians should leave deontology behind, or that Kant had a teleological ethics, or that the best Kantian position is a consequentialist one. In this dissertation, I articulate and defend a middle path between these interpretations and defenses. I argue that Kant's ethics is, and Kantian ethics ought to be, a value-based deontology. In Part One, I argue that contrary to conventional discussion, deontology can be value-based. In Part Two, I interpret Kant's ethics as a value-based deontology, and I defend it as such, both against the traditional and more contemporary alternates. Finally, in Part Three, I defend Kantian value-based deontology from various attacks that might be posed against it

Moral phenomenology has enjoyed a resurgence lately, and within the field, a trend has emerged: uniform rejection of the idea that the experience of making ‘direct’ moral judgments has any phenomenal essence, that is, any phenomenal property or properties that are always present and that distinguish these experiences from experiences of making non-direct- moral judgments. This article examines existing arguments for this anti-essentialism and finds them wanting. While acknowledging that phenomenological reflection is an unstable pursuit, it is maintained here that phenomenological essentialism about a certain domain of direct moral judgment, namely direct judgment of obligation and prohibition, is more credible than has been recognized. The positive proposal is to rehabilitate something close to Maurice Mandelbaum’s essentialism, specifically to maintain that direct moral judgment ’s phenomenal essence is arguably its felt categorical demand. The key to making this argument is to assume a ‘rich view’ of moral consciousness, the view that phenomenal features of moral judgment might be present even when they are not attended to. This assumption is controversial, but it is warranted by two considerations. First, though controversial, the rich view is intuitively plausible. Second, it reveals that the existing arguments against the kind of essentialism defended here appear to tacitly presuppose an equally controversial – and arguably less intuitive – rejection of the rich view

An analysis of 'racism' in terms of disrespect. This article argues against the views that racism should be understood in reductive ways as, variously, an attitude of ill-will (Jorge Garcia), a cognitive object such as ideology (Tommie Shelby), a behavior (Michael Philips), or some disjunctive hybrid (Lawrence Blum). In fact, it argues that racism should be conceptually released from having any one location. The disrespect analysis favored here can accommodate a variety of important desiderata for a theory of racism.

Social commentators have long asked whether racial categories should be conserved or eliminated from our practices, discourse, institutions, and perhaps even private thoughts. In _A Theory of Race_, Joshua Glasgow argues that this set of choices unnecessarily presents us with too few options. Using both traditional philosophical tools and recent psychological research to investigate folk understandings of race, Glasgow argues that, as ordinarily conceived, race is an illusion. However, our pressing need to speak to and make sense of social life requires that we employ something like racial discourse. These competing pressures, Glasgow maintains, ultimately require us to stop conceptualizing race as something biological, and instead understand it as an entirely social phenomenon.