Alfred Archer

Attention is described as a “scarce commodity” that is traded in “a marketplace.” This, it is further claimed, contributes to a “widespread sense of attentional crisis.” But is there really an attention market, and if so, what, if anything, is wrong with it? We defend the claim that there are markets in attention. We provide an account of such attention markets and use that account to address what is morally wrong with them. Our account draws on knowledge of how attention works and what roles it plays in the mind. The attention market trades in an ability to influence our attention – somewhat (though not exactly) like the labor market trades in an ability to influence how we use our capacity for work. Specifically, the commodity it trades in is attentional landscaping potential, viz. the ability to systematically influence patterns of attention by changes to the sensory environment individuals are exposed to. Attention markets thus, we argue, commodify influence over a human capacity that plays a central role in shaping individual experience, agency, and belief formation. This feature of attention markets makes them ethically problematic. As markets in access to external influence, attention markets pose a special threat to individual autonomy and escape the classical liberal defense of free markets. Those who value autonomy should worry about the attention markets that exist today.

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system.

This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or solely subjective terms). We look at the most promising candidate theory of atmospheres, which defends that atmospheres supervene on affective affordances, and challenge it by casting doubt on how far the concept of affective affordance can stretch in order to accommodate the relevant phenomenology, and by highlighting current controversies in the ontology of affordances. We then outline a more promising theory based on recent developments in the metaphysics of potentiality. According to the proposed theory, atmospheres are high-level nested relations of agent-environment joint potentialities.

How should we investigate folk emotion concepts for the purposes of anchoring scientific emotion concepts? In this article, I expand on Mun’s ideas on what she calls the fundamental base for interdisciplinary inquiry in the science of emotion. I argue that first-person intuitions should not be part of the object of study for an adequate approach to the fundamental base. This is because they are epistemically unreliable and subject to private language arguments. I propose a pragmatic account of how to investigate the fundamental base, drawing on Haslanger’s distinction between manifest and operative concepts, as well as some of her views on social constructionism and semantics. This pragmatic account covers the relevant sources of evidence considered by Mun, but also calls for an investigation of cultural variations in emotion concepts, scripts and norms. The upshot of the pragmatic account is a more expansive research program that maintains the interdisciplinary spirit of emotion science.

This article examines the role of eco-anger in climate activism, focusing on Greta Thunberg and other young activists. The article challenges two common arguments against anger as a communicative strategy: that it is inherently retributive and counterproductive, and that it reduces the uptake of the speaker’s message. Instead, the article proposes that anger involves a triad of desires: retributive desires, recognitive desires, and desires for future change. While recognizing the potential for testimonial injustice due to stereotypes surrounding young women expressing anger, the article argues that climate anger functions as an outlaw emotion with the potential to advance testimonial justice. The article argues that climate anger offers several advantages: it can motivate people to join the climate movement, it has revolutionary potential to challenge the status quo, and it is well-suited to building community among activists. Ultimately, the article concludes that anger can be a powerful tool in addressing the climate crisis, particularly when used strategically by activists like Greta Thunberg.

While “anger” or “angry” are words often used to describe today’s societies and politics, they are not the ones commentators of Locke use when talking about his political theory. This article argues that anger is in fact at the heart of his political outlook, and that focusing on the passion helps us to see an important aspect of the state. Since little has been said in relation to Locke and anger, the article starts by examining how he defined, viewed and justified anger. The article shows how Locke conceptualized a problematic component of anger, revenge, in terms of retributive punishment, which, when proportionate, can be viewed positively. The article then shows how Locke placed and tamed anger in the hands of the state to solve the inconveniences that exist in the state of nature caused by it. The article thus sheds light on the state’s role as an anger manager.

The goal of this paper is to reconceptualise the relationship between politics and sporting practice with the aim of gesturing towards broad themes that a political theory of sport could explore. Many philosophical theories of sport, including the dominant mutualist view, are internalist: they suggest that there is some distinctive logic internal to sports that must feature in the best explanation of our sporting practices. Yet, in attempting to articulate this distinctive internal logic, mutualists quarantine sport from its wider context to understand sporting practice on its own terms. This methodological decision, I argue, invites the unwarranted assumption that sporting practice and politics constitute two separate domains bearing little to no relation to one another. Consequently, mutualism provides us with an impoverished understanding of sporting practice – especially in colonial contexts. Against this view, I use CLR James' writings to show how the internal norms and rules of cricket simultaneously perpetuate an oppressive social structure and articulate the beginnings of an emancipatory political project. This, in turn, has the potential to connect debates within the philosophy of sport to questions around resistance and oppression.

J.S. Russell’s account of broad internalism holds that the interpretation and application of rules should be guided by underlying principles aimed at maintaining and fostering sporting excellence. However, the concept of excellence that underpins this view remains insufficiently developed. This paper critically engages with Russell’s work, arguing that broad internalism requires a richer account of sporting excellence: one that incorporates moral sporting virtues. Such an account would better help adjudicate disputes over rule application and reinforce the role of sport in promoting human flourishing.

Recent work on distributed cognition and self-narrative has emphasised how autobiographical memories and their narration are, rather than being stored and created by an individual, distributed across embodied organisms and their environment. This paper postulates a stronger form of distributed narration than has been accommodated in the literature so far, which I call narrative deference. This describes the phenomena whereby a person is significantly dependent upon another person for the narration of some significant aspect of their own autobiographical self-narrative. I suggest that a person is more likely to narratively defer where they suffer a mnemonic impairment regarding some significant adverse life experience like trauma, illness or injury. Following a recent turn in the literature towards investigating the harmful aspects of distributed cognition as well as its many advantageous features, this paper explores how the benefits of autobiographical self-narrative deference within close personal relationships are complexly related to its harms.

The narratives we have about ourselves are important for our sense of who we are. However, our narratives are influenced, even manipulated, by the people and environments we interact with, impacting our self-understanding. This can lead to narratives that are limited, even harmful. In this paper, I explore how our narrative agency is constrained, to greater and lesser degrees, through a process I call ‘narrative railroading’. Bringing together work on narratives and 4E cognition, I specifically explore how using features of our socio-material environments to support and construct our narratives does not simply offer up possibilities for creating more reliable and accurate self-narratives (Heersmink 2020) but can lead to increasingly tight narrative railroading. To illustrate this idea, I analyse how digital technologies do not neutrally distribute our narratives but dynamically shape and mould narrative agency in ways that can restrict our self-understanding, with potentially harmful consequences. As such, I argue that we need to recognise that digital devices not only support narratives but work as powerful narrative devices, shaping and propagating the kinds of narratives that we self-ascribe and act in accordance with.

According to Kantian ethics, immoral actions convey disrespect. This negative attitude makes injuries inflicted by other persons worse than injuries caused by nature, ceteris paribus. As Strawson would later put it, the perpetrator’s attitude of disregard prompts in the victim the reactive attitude of resentment. But, I point out, we harbour and display plenty of other negative attitudes toward people aside from disrespect. What, if any, reactive attitudes are natural and appropriate in response to these? In unrequited love, for example, the beloved denies the lover a certain kind of recognition that she desires. I claim that this often prompts resentment in the lover, despite the fact that she has suffered no moral wrongdoing—that her injury is, as I term it, ‘tragic’. If this is so, we must reconceive the meaning of resentment, distinguishing it sharply from indignation. After offering such a reinterpretation of resentment and indignation, I show how ‘tragic resentment’ might be warranted despite lacking a moral claim. If the beloved bears a deep responsibility for not reciprocating the love, then he is subject to negative reactive attitudes for it, despite the fact that he cannot choose whom to love and has no obligation to love.

A lot of talented children aspire to be professional athletes. They spend many hours each week practicing and competing in the hope of achieving this. To what extent should a parent permit, encourage or even force them to do so? Professional sporting success provides substantial goods and rewards. However, trying to achieve it imposes many costs on children, such as the diminishment of important childhood goods. I argue that these costs outweigh the potential rewards, especially given the improbability of success, and so parents should not try to maximise their children’s talents for professional success. I also show that how one weighs up the costs and rewards depends on one’s conception of childhood. Finally, I suggest that parents, qua member of society, may well have good reason to maximise their child’s talent, given the social benefits talent maximisation provides. I conclude by arguing that this does not outweigh parents’ duty to provide a good childhood for their children, which talent maximisation undermines.

Recent years have seen various forms of honorific public art – statues, monuments, and the like – brought under renewed moral scrutiny. This scrutiny has resulted in some high-profile removals, some defacement and additional contextualization to augment existing objects, and some cases of the status quo prevailing. Scholarly treatment of the issues has similarly resulted in arguments that articulate competing values that support removal, modification or preservation. I bring the insights of these arguments to bear on specifically military commemorations, where I argue that they have ample application, but where they do not exhaust the moral complexity to be confronted. This is true first because military commemoration introduces a novel moral concern of militarism, and second because military commemoration frequently has a distinctively normative function of expressing gratitude. Both these points are most powerfully observed in collections of commemorations, rather than individual monuments, a distinction that deepens ongoing discussions about problematic commemorations.

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology.

Does remorse imply self-hatred? In this paper, I argue that self-hatred is a false response to one’s wrongdoing because it is corrupted by the vice of pride, which affects the perception of its object. To identify the detrimental operation of pride, I propose to study the process of change of heart and its impediments. I use the example of Kostelnička, from Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, to show that the impediment to remorse is active already as a source of wrongdoing and self-deception. I identify three different aspects of Kostelnička’s pride: social ambition, defensive anger, and moral ambition. I show that it is pride as moral ambition that prevents the wrongdoer’s acknowledgment of her blameworthiness by causing her obsession with her blameless self-image and corrupting her self-love. In the last part of the paper, I reject Kostelnička’s initial self-hatred before her change of heart, because it is not based on an accurate judgement of her agency. Kostelnička’s true remorse is thereupon connected with her inner transformation towards humility and with a reorientation of her attention towards the victim of her wrongdoing, as testified in her plea for forgiveness. The implied moral improvement and reconstitution of her relationship to herself and others opens the way for her coming to terms with her guilt.

Anger has potential epistemic value in the way that it can facilitate a process of our coming to have knowledge and understanding regarding the issue about which we are angry. The nature of anger, however, may nevertheless be such that it ultimately undermines this very process. Common non-philosophical complaints about anger, for instance, often target the angry person as being somehow irrational, where an unformulated assumption is that her anger undermines her capacity to rationally engage with the issue about which she is angry. Call this assumption the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger. Such a charge is pernicious when levelled at the anger of those in positions of marginalisation or oppression, where it can threaten to silence voices on the very issue of the injustices that they face. In this paper I thus provide a much-needed interrogation of this charge. Firstly, and drawing on empirical literature on the effects of anger on decision-making, I flesh out the charge and why it poses a threat to how the epistemic value of anger has been defended. Secondly, I argue that the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger can nevertheless be unwarranted, at least within a common context of political anger.

In _A Relational Moral Theory: African ethics in and beyond the continent_ ( 2022 ), Thaddeus Metz proposes an African moral theory according to which we ought to respect and honour the capacity of individuals to be party to harmonious relationship. He aims to present a moral theory that should ‘be weighed up against at least contemporary Western moral theories’ (p. 2). As Metz intends his theory to be a serious contender with other moral theories, I assess how his moral theory can be applied and contribute to contemporary moral discussions _‘beyond the continent’_, as the subtitle of the book puts it. In particular, as Metz’s relational moral theory is grounded on the value of harmony, an important question is how well his theory handles _disharmony_ especially if his theory is to have application in our non-ideal world in which disharmony is rife. And here, I hold up Metz’s account to one area of disharmony, disruptive emotions and affective injustice. By first establishing how disruptive emotions and affective injustice pose a challenge to similar relational moral theories grounded in harmony, I argue that Metz’s theory has distinct advantages in the way in which it can indeed engage with such phenomena. I close the paper by considering the objection that Metz’s account is limited in making sense of a common form of disruptive emotion in response to structural injustices where affective injustice can arise, but ultimately conclude that such a limitation is superficial.

Despite efforts to make virtue-acquisition more accessible, neo-Aristotelian accounts of virtue currently exclude those who occasionally experience depressive episodes from potentially possessing moral virtue. This problem of accessibility is especially relevant given the increased prevalence of depression due to, e.g., the COVID19 pandemic. Through an interdisciplinary analysis, I argue that one’s ability to adequately recognise and respond to virtuous possibilities for action is impoverished during a depressive episode. This is illustrated through the depressed agent’s field of affordances: the collection of possible actions an agent perceives. As moral virtues are conceptualised as stable dispositions, even a temporary yet significant decrease in moral competence excludes the agent from possessing the relevant virtue. To solve this problem of accessibility, I argue that, similar to Aristotle’s discussion of sleep, depressive episodes can be conceptualised as temporary states that cause one’s virtues to be inactive, rather than absent.

This article considers the charge that citizens of developed societies are complicit in large-scale harms, using climate destabilisation as its central example. It contends that we have yet to create a lived morality – a fabric of practices and institutions – that is adequate to our situation. As a result, we participate in systematic injustice, despite all good efforts and intentions. To make this case, the article draws on recent discussions of Kant’s ethics and politics. Section 1 considers Tamar Schapiro’s account of how otherwise decent actions can be corrupted by others’ betrayals, and hence fall into complicity. Section 2 turns to discussions by Christine Korsgaard and Lucy Allais, which highlight how people can be left without innocent choices if shared frameworks of interaction do not instantiate core ideals. Section 3 brings these ideas together in order to make sense of the charge of complicity in grave collective harms, and addresses some worries that the idea of unavoidable complicity may raise.

In view of the philosophical problems that vex the debate on situated affectivity, it can seem wise to focus on simple cases. Accordingly, theorists often single out scenarios in which an individual employs a device in order to enhance their emotional experience, or to achieve new kinds of experience altogether, such as playing an instrument, going to the movies or sporting a fancy handbag. I argue that this narrow focus on cases that fit a ‘user/resource model’ tends to channel attention away from more complex and also more problematic instances of situated affectivity. Among these are scenarios in which a social domain draws individuals into certain modes of affective interaction, often by way of attunement and habituation to affective styles and interaction patterns that are normative in the domain in question. This can lead to a phenomenon that is not so much ‘mind extension’ than ‘mind invasion’: affectivity is dynamically framed and modulated from without, often contrary to the prior orientations of the individuals in question. As an example, I discuss affective patterns prevalent in today’s corporate workplace. I claim that workplace affect sometimes contributes to what is effectively a ‘hack’ of employees’ subjectivity.

Most twenty-first century ethicists conceive of character as a stable, enduring state that is internal to the agent who possesses it. This paper argues that writers in the 17th and 18th centuries did not share this conception: as they conceived it, character is fragile and has a social ontology. The paper goes on to show that Hume’s conception of character was more like his contemporaries than like ours. It concludes with a look at the significance of such a conception for current debates about the place of character in ethics.

Praise, unlike blame, is generally considered well intended and beneficial, and therefore in less need of scrutiny. In line with recent developments, we argue that praise merits more thorough philosophical analysis. We show that, just like blame, praise can be problematic by expressing a failure to respect a person’s equal value or worth as a person. Such patronizing praise, however, is often more insidious, because praise tends to be regarded as well intended and beneficial, which renders it harder to recognize and object to. Among other things, a philosophical analysis of patronizing praise helps people on the receiving end articulate why they feel uncomfortable or offended by it, shows patronizing praisers how their praise is problematic, and provides input for further philosophical analysis of blame. In the first section of the paper, we discuss how hypocritical praise, just like hypocritical blame, can fail to respect the equality of persons by expressing that the praiser applies more demanding moral standards to the praisee than to themself. We further discuss obstructionist praise, which loosely corresponds to complicit blame, and can similarly express that certain moral standards apply to others but not to the praiser. In the second part of the paper, we discuss another variety of patronizing praise. Praise can be an inaccurate appraisal of a person based on irrelevant considerations – like race, gender, or class – and thereby constitute a failure to recognize their equal worth as a person. We identify three ways in which such praise can manifest.

There seems to be a difference between drinking coffee alone at home and drinking coffee in a café. Yet, drinking coffee in a café is not a joint action. It is an individual action done in a social environment. The café, with each person minding their own business next to others, is what I call a gregarious state of affairs. Gregariousness refers to the warmth of the social world. It is the difference between studying alone at home and studying in the library. This light form of sociality is precisely what we were deprived of during the coronavirus lockdowns. Gregariousness cannot be explained as interaction or coordination, and neither can it be grasped solely as a normative aspect of the environment. This is why gregariousness cannot be explained using the concepts of strategic equilibrium, shared planning agency, joint commitment, we-intention, or second-person standpoint. In this paper, I will also provide a prospective theory of gregariousness. The aim of this paper is not to provide a definitive theory of gregariousness, nor to demonstrate that other theories of joint action are incorrect, but rather to draw attention to this aspect of the social world that has been largely neglected.

The Case for Rage is a philosophical defense of anger, particularly anger at racial injustice. Crossing the terrain of moral psychology, ethics, philosophy of race, and social and political philosophy, the book shows anger’s varieties and cautions readers not to paint it in broad strokes. The book shows how a certain kind of anger at racial injustice is a fitting, appropriate, and correct response to racism; can motivate those who are outraged at racism by affecting their beliefs and desires; and can be productive in the fight against racism. It also explains how a person can resist white supremacy with their rage by breaking racial rules. The book also provides suggestions for how the angry might manage their anger—not through eradication or moderation, but through cultivation and community.

Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffolds not only cognition but also affect. Using various case studies, we consider some ways that we are increasingly dependent on our Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” to regulate the contours of our own affective life and participate in the affective lives of others. We argue further that, unlike many of the other environmental resources we use to regulate affect, the Internet has distinct properties that introduce new dimensions of complexity to these regulative processes. First, it is radically social in a way many of these other resources are not. Second, it is a radically distributed and decentralized resource; no one individual or agent is responsible for the Internet’s content or its affective impact on users. Accordingly, while the Internet can profoundly augment and enrich our affective life and deepen our connection with others, there is also a distinctive kind of affective precarity built into our online endeavors as well.

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance.

In this paper, I argue that we face a challenge in understanding the relationship between the ‘value-oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ dimensions of shame. On the one hand, an emphasis on shame's value-oriented dimension leads naturally to ‘The Self-Evaluation View’, an account which faces a challenge in explaining shame's other-oriented dimension. This is liable to push us towards ‘The Social Evaluation View’. However The Social Evaluation View faces the opposite challenge of convincingly accommodating shame's ‘value-oriented’ dimension. After rejecting one attempt to chart a middle course between these extremes, I argue that progress can be made if we reject the widespread assumption that the other-oriented dimension of shame is best understood primarily terms of our concern with the way we appear to others. Instead, I outline an account which treats shame as manifesting our desire primarily for interpersonal connection and which elucidates the property of shamefulness in terms of merited avoidance.

I propose a theory of domination derived from republican political theory that is in contrast to the neo-republican theory of domination as arbitrary interference and domination as dependence. I suggest that, drawing on of the writings of Machiavelli and Rousseau, we can see two faces of domination that come together to inform social relations. One type of domination is extractive dominance where agents are able to derive surplus benefit from another individual, group, or collective resource, natural or human. Another is what I call constitutive domination where the norms, institutions, and values of the community shape the rationality of subjects to accept forms of power and social relations and collective goals as legitimate forms of authority. Each of these make up two faces of a broader theory of social domination that is more concrete and politically compelling than that put forth by contemporary neo-republican theory. I argue that this understanding of domination should be seen as a kind of ‘radical...

In cases of complicity in one’s own unfreedom and in structural injustice, it initially appears that agents are only vicariously responsible for their complicity because of the roles circumstantial and constitutive luck play in bringing about their complicity. By drawing on work from the phenomenological tradition, this paper rejects this conclusion and argues for a new responsive sense of agency and responsibility in cases of complicity. Highlighting the explanatory role of stubbornness in cases of complicity, it is argued that although agents may only be vicariously responsible for becoming complicit, they can be held more directly responsible for entrenching their complicity. The complicit agent is responsible for their complicity to the extent that they fail to take responsibility for it.