Hud Hudson

In a very influential paper, Abortion, Joel Feinberg offers a series of arguments against four popular proposals for the criterion of moral personhood and defends a fifth proposal. In this paper, I demonstrate that two widely‐accepted arguments employed by Feinberg against the modified species criterion and the strict potentiality criterion, respectively, are unsound. Moreover, I argue that there is a general feature of his inquiry into the criteria for moral personhood which undermines his efforts to argue convincingly either in favour of his own candidate or against other candidates.

Three Dimensionalists and Four Dimensionalists are engaged in a debate on the topics of persistence and mereology. In this paper, I explore implications of Four Dimensionalism for the formulation of the criterion of personhood and on the question of which individuals satisfy that criterion. In my discussion I argue that the Four Dimensionalist has reason to identify a human person with a proper part of a human organism, and that the Four Dimensionalist has reason to believe that if there is something morally wrong with human abortion or infanticide, it cannot be grounded in claims about the moral status of persons

Recently, Judith Jarvis Thomson has offered a definition of the constitution relation against the backdrop of a robust ontology of objects she calls all‐fusions. Despite finding her reasons to believe in all manner of all‐fusions intriguing, in this paper I note an unsatisfactory consequence of her position for constitution‐theorists. I argue that an unrestricted commitmentto all‐fusions should lead the constitution‐theorist to reject her definitionof the constitution relation, on the grounds that by choosing our all‐fusionscarefully, we can secure the unpalatable result that two different all‐fusionsconstitute the same thing, even though neither one ofthem constitutes the other

Despite its first page this paper is not yet another piece on Kant! Rather, the paper is a contribution to the literature on incongruent counterparts. Specifically, it concerns the question of whether we can construct a temporal version of the puzzle of incongruent counterparts—a question which (as far as 1 can tell) has been thoroughly neglected. I maintain that we can construct such a version of the puzzle, and that this temporal variant on the phenomenon has something to teach us about popular arguments for the possibility (or even actuality) of four‐dimensional space.

Anyone who endorses Universalism and Four Dimensionalism owes us an argument for those controversial mereological theses. One may put forth David Lewis’s and Ted Sider’s arguments from vagueness. However, the success of those arguments depends on the rejection of the epistemic view of vagueness, and thus opens the door to a fatal confrontation with one particularly troubling version of The Problem of the Many. The alternative for friends of Universalism and Four Dimensionalism is to abandon those currently fashionable arguments in favor of others which are consistent with the epistemic view of vagueness and with the elegant solution it furnishes to that problem.

Despite an impressive tradition, modern literalists about the Garden of Eden have come under severe criticism and ridicule on the grounds that contemporary science has thoroughly discredited such a view. Accordingly, the prevailing trend in modern theology is to dehistoricize the Fall. I am no fan of literalism, but in this paper I argue that these grounds are in need of supplementation by a piece of metaphysics that has not been adequately defended. Absent the additional metaphysical thesis, it is possible to grant all the alleged implications of our modern worldview informed by physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and biology and nevertheless remain a proponent of literalism—without becoming a proper object of ridicule. Or, if still ridiculous, this status will have to be established by discrediting a piece of metaphysics and not by admiring the fruits of empirical science.