Scott Hill

Deshmukh and Janssen-Lauret (2024) (hereafter D&J) show that origin essentialism, when combined with other metaphysical theses assumed by Kripke in Naming and Necessity, are together inconsistent with Hinduism. They also show that, given the way in which the seeming inconsistency arises, Hinduism, if there is an inconsistency, would be a counterexample to Kripke’s theory. I concur. But I argue that it is the auxiliary metaphysical theses, and not origin essentialism itself, that generates the inconsistency. I show that Leibniz’ philosophy shares with Hinduism the very feature that D&J use to generate the apparent inconsistency. But Leibniz’ philosophy also entails origin essentialism. Even so it is jointly consistent with origin essentialism and the Hindu doctrines D&J discuss. Furthermore, Hinduism and origin essentialism may be shown to be consistent even without auxiliary Leibnizian assumptions.

Nagasawa (2024) and (2018) argues that theism is better able to explain how an environment governed by natural selection can be good than atheism in virtue of theism having a larger ontology in some respects. Alnashi (forthcoming) objects that Nagasawa is committed to the implausible principle that a larger ontology is always better able to explain than a narrower ontology and that that principle is subject to counterexamples. I show that this objection is unsound. I construct a parody of Alnashi’s objection targeting David Lewis’ (1986) argument that concrete modal realism is better able to explain how things could have been otherwise than modal ersatzism in virtue of modal realism’s larger ontology. Just as Lewis’ argument does not depend on the implausible principle that a bigger ontology is always better, Nagasawa’s argument does not depend on the relevant principle. All that either Lewis or Nagasawa need is that the concrete ways in which their preferred ontologies are bigger enable those ontologies to better explain the relevant phenomena than their competitor ontologies. I offer on behalf of Alnashi a way of reformulating his objection that does not have this problem and I consider other concerns Alnashi raises. I explain how Nagasawa can address each of these further objections.

I make four points about Rooney’s (2026) reply to Hill (2025). First, Rooney worries that universalists cannot ground the claim that necessarily God beatifies every creature He makes. I explain how universalists can ground the relevant claim in a claim Rooney endorses in his book. Second, Rooney’s argument depends on the principle that if a property is not essential to a creature, then God cannot ensure that necessarily that creature eventually gets that property. I point out that Rooney offers no motivation for this principle and so it may be costlessly rejected by the universalist. I further explain that if atheism is true Rooney’s principle might be plausible. But, if God exists, it is easy to construct counterexamples to the principle. Third, Rooney’s argument depends on a specific, contentious interpretation of Aquinas’ understanding of the Beatific Vision. Rooney says this is acceptable because his universalist opponents also accept this understanding of the Beatific Vision. But I point out that many paradigm examples of universalists, as well as non-universalist Classical Theists, explicitly reject not only Rooney’s specific formulation but also the Thomistic understanding of the Beatific Vision more generally. This confirms that even if Rooney’s argument were not unsound for the other reasons I have identified, it would nevertheless depend on Rooney’s specific, contentious understanding of deliverances of Revelation. But the main purpose of Rooney’s argument was to convince Classical Theists who are not moved by appeals to Revelation. So Rooney’s argument doesn’t do the main thing it is advertised as doing. Fourth, Rooney claims that Hill was nonchalant about the possibility of abandoning Classical Theism. I point out that this is a misreading of Hill. Nowhere does Hill advocate abandoning Classical Theism. Instead, Hill maintains that Rooney’s argument gives the Classical Theist no reason to reject universalism.

Barry and Cullity defend a theory about when risk imposing actions are permissible. The purpose of their theory is to explain why a typical person's lifetime carbon emissions are permissible. I argue that Barry and Cullity’s (2022a) and (2022b) theory has a counterintuitive result. Then I give my own explanation of why a typical person’s carbon emitting actions are permissible. My explanation is able to incorporate and avoid criticisms of Barry and Cullity’s theory raised by Steffanson (2022) and Steffanson and Willners (2023). My explanation is independent of special considerations about offsetting and does not require invoking any new theoretical tools beyond the normal stock of moral tools.

Deshmukh and Janssen-Lauret (2024) show that origin essentialism, when combined with other metaphysical theses assumed by Kripke in Naming and Necessity, are together inconsistent with Hinduism. They also show that, given the way in which the seeming inconsistency arises, Hinduism, if there is an inconsistency, would be a counterexample to Kripke’s theory. I concur. But I argue that it is the auxiliary metaphysical theses, and not origin essentialism itself, that generates the inconsistency. I show that Leibniz’ philosophy shares with Hinduism the very feature that Deshmukh and Janssen-Lauret use to generate the apparent inconsistency. But Leibniz’ philosophy also entails origin essentialism. Even so it is jointly consistent with origin essentialism and the Hindu doctrines Deshmukh and Janssen-Lauret discuss. Furthermore, Hinduism and origin essentialism may be shown to be consistent even without auxiliary Leibnizian assumptions.

Some philosophers and theologians argue that if God will save everyone, then earthly life is pointless. No matter how good earthly life is, heaven would be far better. So we would have been better off if God had started us off in heaven. I present and defend two objections to this argument. First, time on earth does not result in a deduction from time in heaven. Pick whatever amount of time you might wish to spend in heaven. You will spend that much time in heaven whether you are on earth first or not. Second, given origin essentialism, we could not start off in heaven rather than earth. Our very existence depends on our earthly origins.

In _Not a Hope in Hell_, James Dominic Rooney argues that universalism, the view that necessarily God will save everyone, is inconsistent with classical theism. I show that Rooney’s argument is unsound. In particular, some of the premises are false, some of the premises are themselves inconsistent with classical theism, and some of the premises are inconsistent with additional views, beyond classical theism, that Aquinas holds about God and the Beatific Vision. In the end, classical theists are better off accepting universalism than the premises of Rooney’s argument.

Many philosophers and members of the public think it is wrong to procreate. If one wants children, it is permissible to adopt. But procreation is allegedly impermissible because there is some respect in which adoption is better than procreation. There are two prominent variants of such objections. First, we have a duty to help others. Adopting a child from a poor country satisfies that duty. But procreation does not. Second, adding another person to a wealthy nation through procreation contributes to climate change. But adopting does not. I show that such objections are unsound.

People who report believing in God fear death. They also experience grief when someone they love dies. Philosophers and social scientists sometimes claim that this can only be plausibly explained by the hypothesis that people who claim to believe in God do not really believe in God. I show that this is mistaken. I identify three independently plausible explanations of why people who genuinely believe in God would have these behaviors and attitudes. First, there is an evolutionary explanation of why the fear of death would be resilient even if one genuinely believes God has good things in store for us after death. Second, people often fear low probability outcomes. It may be that religious people are afraid of hell or the cessation of existence even if they judge those outcomes to have a low probability. Third, belief in God is typically combined with views according to which death is accompanied by the permanent loss and radical transformation of important relationships.

In Algorithms & Autonomy, Rubel, Castro, and Pham (hereafter RCP), argue that the concept of autonomy is especially central to understanding important moral problems about algorithms. In particular, autonomy plays a role in analyzing the version of social contract theory that they endorse. I argue that although RCP are largely correct in their diagnosis of what is wrong with the algorithms they consider, those diagnoses can be appropriated by moral theories RCP see as in competition with their autonomy based theory. Most notably, proponents of consequentialism and virtue ethics can appropriate RCPs insights. This is good news because RCP’s social contract theory is vulnerable to a well known class of counterexamples. The most significant contribution of RCP, if I am right, is in their identification, presentation, and evaluation of concrete cases involving algorithms and not in the more controversial claims about theoretical ethics that RCP themselves see as central to what they are doing.

In an important and widely cited paper, Zerilli, Knott, Maclaurin, and Gavaghan (2019) argue that opaque AI decision makers are at least as transparent as human decision makers and therefore the concern that opaque AI is not sufficiently transparent is mistaken. I argue that the concern about opaque AI should not be understood as the concern that such AI fails to be transparent in a way that humans are transparent. Rather, the concern is that the way in which opaque AI is opaque is very different than the way in which humans are opaque. What matters is the degree to which the opaque processes of a class of decision makers are stable, uniform, and safe. The degree to which such processes have these features in humans is higher than the degree to which such processes have these features in opaque AI. And therefore we should require AI to be more transparent than humans.

There is a wealth of evidence which indicates that arguments are not very efficient tools for changing minds. Against this scepticism, Dutilh Novaes (2023) presents evidence that, given the right social context, arguments sometimes play a significant role in belief revision. However, drawing on Levy (2021), I argue that the evidence Dutilh Novaes cites is compatible with the view that it is not arguments that change individual minds but instead belief outsourcing that occurs alongside the consideration of arguments.

Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility are widely associated with opposition to hard determinism. However, it is only a historical accident that these views are bundled together. I show that Strawson’s deepest commitments are perfectly consistent with, and even support, a new and improved form of hard determinism. I then discuss various ways in which the resulting view is an improvement over extant versions of hard determinism. Among these is its application to Latham and Tierney’s (2022) objection to manipulation arguments.

One might think that if the majority of virtue signallers judge that a proposition is true, then there is significant evidence for the truth of that proposition. Given the Condorcet Jury Theorem, individual virtue signallers need not be very reliable for the majority judgment to be very likely to be correct. Thus, even people who are skeptical of the judgments of individual virtue signallers should think that if a majority of them judge that a proposition is true, then that provides significant evidence that the proposition is true. We argue that this is mistaken. Various empirical studies converge on the following point: humans are very conformist in the contexts in which virtue signalling occurs. And stereotypical virtue signallers are even more conformist in such contexts. So we should be skeptical of the claim that virtue signallers are sufficiently independent for the Condorcet Jury Theorem to apply. We do not seek to decisively rule out the relevant application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem. But we do show that careful consideration of the available evidence should make us very skeptical of that application. Consequently, a defense of virtue signalling would need to engage with these findings and show that despite our strong tendencies for conformism, our judgements are sufficiently independent for the Condorcet Jury Theorem to apply. This suggests new directions for the debate about the epistemology of virtue signalling.

Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness (2018) and (2020) argue that adjuncts are not exploited. We are sympathetic to some of their points. We agree, for example, that certain ways in which adjuncts are compared to sweatshop workers are offensive. For, as Brennan and Magness point out, there are many respects in which adjuncts are much better off than sweatshop workers. However, we show that the core insights of their paper are compatible with the view that adjuncts are exploited. Furthermore, their more general views about exploitation expressed in Cracks in the Ivory Tower actually lend support to the claim that adjuncts are exploited.

Kopeikin (forthcoming a, forthcoming b) and Rachels’ (1975) bare-difference cases elicit the intuition that killing is no different than letting die. Hill’s (2018) bare-difference cases elicit the intuition that killing is worse than letting die. At least one of the intuitions must be mistaken. This calls for an error theory. Hill has an error theory for the intuition elicited by the Kopeikin/Rachels’ cases. Kopeikin and Rachels have an error theory for the intuition elicited by Hill’s cases. A natural thought is that we are at an impasse. There is no plausible basis for preferring one error theory to the other. I argue that this natural thought is mistaken. Not all error theories are equal. Preliminary considerations favor Hill’s error theory and disfavor the Kopeikin/Rachels error theory. But preliminary considerations are not decisive. The way forward in the bare-difference debate is not to evaluate intuitions. The intuitions are in. What is left to do now is evaluate the comparative status of the Hill and the Kopeikin/Rachels error theories.

Some recent psychological studies suggest that the belief that humans matter more than other animals can be strengthened by cognitive dissonance. Jaquet (forthcom- ing) argues that some of these studies also show that the relevant belief is primar- ily caused by cognitive dissonance and is therefore subject to a debunking argument. We offer an alternative hypothesis according to which we are already speciesist but cognitive dissonance merely enhances our speciesism. We argue that our hypothesis explains the results of the studies at least as well as Jaquet’s. We then respond to a series of objections. Along the way, we highlight various respects in which further stud- ies are needed to decide between Jaquet’s hypothesis and ours.

Some philosophers worry that if modal realism is true, you have no reason to prevent evils. For if you prevent an evil, you’ll have a counterpart somewhere that allows a similar evil. And if you refrain, your counterpart will end up preventing the relevant evil. Either way one evil is prevented and one is allowed. Your act makes no difference. I argue that this is mistaken. If modal realism is true, you are in a variant of Newcomb’s Problem. And if Lewis’ view about Newcomb’s Problem is true, then your act does make a difference and you should prevent the evil.