Benjamin Robert Koons

Many recent defenders of just war theory have denied that punishment is a just cause for war. Against this consensus, I argue that punishment is a just cause for war. To defend this claim, I appeal to recent work in social ontology and social epistemology (especially the work of Christian List and Philip Pettit) that shows that groups and not just individuals can be responsible for their actions. For this paper, I defend the thesis that an international treaty organization may initiate a war against one of its member states for the purposes of punishing that member state. Many critics of punitive wars have taken the war itself to be the punishment, but I consider the war to be merely the means by which one brings an offending state to accept punitive terms. I show that punitive terms can achieve the three aims of punishment: retribution, deterrence, and reform. Finally, I respond to two objections: that no punitive war could be just because victims of aggression are never impartial in judging their aggressors and that widespread acceptance of the justice of punitive wars would return us to a more warlike and barbaric stage of human history.

Distinctively, Aristotle denies that there is a univocal definition of life, but he still offers an account of how the many different ways of being alive are related. In particular, more advanced forms of life potentially contain less advanced forms of life in them. In this paper, I defend this interpretation of Aristotle against other recent interpreters. I also set out Aristotle's account of the most general life-activity – nutrition – and show how his account doesn't fall prey to the objection that it is parochial.

Whether or not woman is a socially constructed concept, one might have taken for granted that female was not. Yet many philosophers challenge this too, claiming that the two sexes are also social constructs insofar as male and female are vague, arbitrary, and historically unstable concepts. To answer this challenge, I appeal to a four-causal analysis of the two sexes based on Aristotle but informed by contemporary biology. There are formal, material, final, and efficient causes of each individual’s having his sex. This four-causal analysis shows that the two sexes are not arbitrary. Moreover, despite significant changes in our understanding of sex over time, we have retained the same concept of sex. Finally, I consider whether sex can be a biological concept while being vague and admitting borderline cases. I conclude with an argument from the General Resurrection, showing why Catholics should consider sex to be nonvague.

Assuming that groups like individuals have doxastic states, we can apply traditional questions of individual epistemology to groups. In particular, we can ask what it is for a group to have a warranted belief. Drawing on Alvin Plantinga’s proper functionalist account of warrant for the beliefs of individuals, I provide three conditions for a group’s beliefs to be warranted: the members of the group must be (i) functioning properly (ii) in accordance with a good design plan oriented towards truth and (iii) in a social environment sufficiently similar to that for which the group was designed. I defend this account of warranted group belief by examining cases, using it to explain the roles of specialization and deliberation in increasing warrant, and showing how it can contribute to the meliorative project of social epistemology.

Extending Alvin Plantinga’s model of warranted belief to the beliefs of groups as a whole, I argue that if the dogmatic beliefs of the Catholic Church are true, they are also warranted. Catholic dogmas are warranted because they meet the three conditions of my model: they are formed (1) by ministers functioning properly (2) in accordance with a design plan that is oriented towards truth and reliable (3) in a social environment sufficiently similar to that for which they were designed. I show that according to Catholic doctrine the authoritative spokespersons of the Church—ecumenical councils and popes—meet these conditions when defining dogmas. I also respond to the objection that the warrant of Catholic dogmas is defeated by the plurality of non-Catholic Christian sects that deny Catholic dogmas.

In the De Anima, Aristotle claims that the five senses are infallible about their proper objects. I contend that this claim means that sight is infallible about its proper object in its most specific form, i. e. sight is infallible about red or green and not merely about color in general. This robust claim is justified by Aristotle’s teleological principle that nature does nothing in vain. Additionally, drawing on Aristotle’s comparison of perception and one’s understanding of the essences, I defend a conception of the senses in which the structure of their contents is simple rather than predicative and show how this coheres better with the rest of my interpretation.