David Sackris

We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts that we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. We argue that if these findings are correct, this is plausible reason for doubting that all moral judgments necessarily share common features: if diverse brain processes give rise to what we refer to as “moral judgments”, then we have reason to suspect that these judgments may have different features. After advancing this argument, we show that giving up the unity of moral judgment seems to effectively dissolve the internalism/externalism debate concerning motivation within the field of metaethics.

In this paper, we consider Noël Carroll’s Content Theory (CT) (2015) and argue that a key problem with CT is that it can be interpreted in two distinct ways: as a descriptive theory of aesthetic experience and as a normative prescriptive theory. Although CT is presented as a descriptive theory of experience, much of what Carroll says implies that CT can also be understood as a theory about how one ought to look at artworks. We argue that when understood as a descriptive theory, CT fails to qualify as a meaningful theory of aesthetic experience. We then interpret the theory prescriptively. Ultimately, this second interpretation is also found lacking: if the aim of the theory is to instruct one on how to view art, it is no longer an attempt to characterize the experience of art. We conclude by arguing that the main flaw in CT is its approach: we cannot meaningfully characterize an experience by enumerating the objects that supposedly cause said experience, and any theory that takes such an approach is likely to be unsuccessful.

In the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Lauren Freeman (2014) advocates that faculty turn their classrooms into “safe spaces” as a method for increasing the diversity of philosophy majors. The creation of safe spaces is meant to make women and minority students “feel sufficiently comfortable” and thereby increase the likelihood that they pursue philosophy as a major or career. Although I agree with Freeman’s goal, I argue that philosophers, and faculty in general, should reject the call for turning classrooms into “safe spaces.” I begin by distinguishing extra-curricular safe spaces from the classroom as a safe space. I then argue that although faculty should not object to extra-curricular safe spaces, they should reject curricular ones. I argue that the classroom as a safe space is currently an impractical and inappropriate goal given the nature of academic philosophy, and that encouraging students to think of classrooms as safe/unsafe does not facilitate learning. Nonetheless, I agree with Freeman that faculty should take steps to ensure that students from all backgrounds have the tools they need to be successful in the classroom. I further argue that faculty calls for safe spaces creates confusion concerning the educative environment one should expect to find at the majority of America universities.

Since the 18th century, one of the key features of diagnosed psychopaths has been “moral colorblindness” or an inability to form moral judgments. However, attempts at experimentally verifying this moral incapacity have been largely unsuccessful. After reviewing the centrality of “moral colorblindness” to the study and diagnosis of psychopathy, I argue that the reason that researchers have been unable to verify that diagnosed psychopaths have an inability to make moral judgments is because their research is premised on the assumption that there is a specific moral faculty of the brain, or specific “moral” emotions, and that this faculty or set of emotions can become “impaired”. I review recent research and argue that we have good reason to think that there is no such distinct capacity for moral judgment, and that, as a result, it is impossible for someone’s “moral judgment faculty” to become selectively disabled. I then discuss the implications of such a position on psychopathy research, the coherence of the disorder, and the moral responsibility of psychopaths.

One of the most difficult issues to sort out morally is our obligation to future generations. Most individuals feel that they do indeed have some kind of obligation, but face difficulty in explaining the exact nature of the obligation. For one, it seems impossible to know the wants and desires of future generations, and furthermore the existence of the persons we are obligated to is entirely dependent upon the choices that we in fact make. In essence, we could shape future generations so that they desire exactly what we provide for them. It seems that no matter what principle we adopt that is based upon these potential individuals we are led to absurd conclusions. Gregory Kavka calls this moral grappling the Paradox of Future Individuals. I believe that the ethical concerns surrounding genetic engineering should be seen as a specific instantiation of this Paradox and that by examining both we may be able to come up with some sort of working solution. Derek Parfit pleads ignorance as to a solution to this Paradox after an extensive exegesis on the issue, but as we may not be that far from shopping a genetic supermarket to determine the characteristics of our children I don’t believe we can settle for that conclusion. We will begin by examining the Paradox and suggested solutions to the Paradox. Next I will address how the Paradox relates directly to genetic engineering and discuss how rights-based arguments aimed against genetic engineering fail because of the nature of identity. Then I will consider how David Heyd’s Genero-centric principle applies to genetic engineering specifically and how a modified version of that principle may guide us out of the Paradox of Future Individuals in general. This solution may not be acceptable to utilitarian sensibilities, but it is because the numbers don’t add up that we may need to appeal to a different principle entirely

Realists about aesthetic judgment believe something like the following: for an aesthetic judgment of be correct, it must respond to the intrinsic aesthetic properties possessed by the object in question (e.g., Meskin et al., 2013; Kieran 2010). However, Cutting’s (2003) empirical research on aesthetic judgment puts pressure on that position. His work indicates that unconscious considerations extrinsic to an artwork can underpin said judgements. This paper takes Cutting’s conclusion a step further: If philosophers grant that it’s possible to appreciate artwork on the basis of unconscious biases, then we never can be fully confident that our aesthetic judgment is undergirded by the intrinsic aesthetic properties of an artwork. Furthermore, if judgment on the basis of unconscious, external reasons cannot be ruled out, we cannot be confident that our aesthetic judgments are ‘correct’. I argue that Cutting’s research is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the extrinsic, unconscious factors that influence aesthetic judgment. Expectation bias formed via social influence and context greatly influence aesthetic judgments and are unavoidable: we inevitably form expectations based on all kinds of contextual cues independently of any actual exposure to the item in question. Such factors make it terribly difficult to be confident in our aesthetic judgments. Even if there are objective properties that mark out some items as aesthetically superior to others, we cannot be sure that our judgments are responding to those properties.

In this paper I seek defend the view that fictional characters are author-created abstract entities against objections offered by Stuart Brock in his paper “The Creationist Fiction: The Case against Creationism about Fictional Characters.” I argue that his objections fall far short of his goal of showing that if philosophers want to believe in fictional characters as abstract objects, they should not view them as author-created. My defense of creationism in fiction in part rests on tying the act of creating a fictional character more closely to the act of story-telling. Ultimately I aim to show that the creation of abstract entities is not as problem-laden as some may think, and that such a view is coherent.

Sentimentalist aesthetic theories, broadly construed, posit that emotions play a fundamental role in aesthetic experiences. Jesse Prinz has recently proposed a reductionistic version of sentimentalist aesthetics, suggesting that it is the discrete feeling of wonder that makes an experience aesthetic. In this contribution, we draw on Prinz’s proposal in order to outline a novel version of a sentimentalist theory. Contrasting Prinz’s focus on a single emotion, we argue that an aesthetic experience is rudimentarily composed of a plurality of emotions. We acknowledge and discuss significant problems that follow from such a theory, arguing that a pluralist version of sentimentalism is nonetheless the soundest position within sentimentalist aesthetics.

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation, may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot.

Given the extremely tight job market for professional philosophers, more Ph.Ds. are beginning to consider jobs at the community college level. There are good reasons for considering this avenue: if you enjoy teaching, the job focus is on teaching, and you evaluation and tenure depend primarily on your performance in the classroom; if the prospect of working with a very diverse student body, both in terms of background and skill set, appeals to you; if the location in which you live is large part of job satisfaction, there is a far greater ability to get a job in an urban area via the community college track. However, to get a job at a community college, one thing is prized above all: teaching experience. Yet this is where the newly minted graduate student may well be at a disadvantage in the community college hiring process. In this article I seek to address the issue of how to become a strong candidate for a community college position right out of graduate school.

In philosophy of aesthetics, scholars commonly express a commitment to the premise that there is a distinctive type of judgment that can be meaningfully labeled “aesthetic”, and that these judgments are distinctively different from other types of judgments. We argue that, within an Aristotelian framework, there is no clear avenue for meaningfully differentiating “aesthetic” judgment from other types of judgment, and, as such, we aim to question the assumption that aesthetic judgment does in fact constitute a distinctive kind of judgment that is in need of, or can be subject to, distinctive theorizing. We advance our argument primarily through demonstrating that leading contemporary accounts of aesthetic judgment do not successfully distinguish a type of judgment in that they do not tell us how making an aesthetic judgment differs substantially from judging that 2 + 3 = 5, that football is entertaining, or that today is Tuesday.

We demonstrate that many philosophers accept the following claim: When an aesthetic object is apprehended correctly, taking pleasure in said object is a reliable sign that the object is aesthetically successful. We undermine this position by showing that what grounds our pleasurable experience is opaque: In many cases, the experienced pleasure is attributable to factors that have little to do with the aesthetic object. The evidence appealed to is a form of Higher-Order Evidence (HOE) and we consider attempts to overcome said evidence. We argue they are unsuccessful. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making aesthetic judgements.

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general.

Recent contributions in moral philosophy have raised questions concerning the prevalent assumption that moral judgments are typologically discrete, and thereby distinct from ordinary and/or other types of judgments. This paper adds to this discourse, surveying how attempts at defining what makes moral judgments distinct have serious shortcomings, and it is argued that any typological definition is likely to fail due to certain questionable assumptions about the nature of judgment itself. The paper concludes by raising questions for future investigations into the nature of moral judgment.

Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art” seeks to situate aesthetic properties contextually. As such, certain knowledge is required to fully appreciate the aesthetic properties of a work, and without that knowledge the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ aesthetic properties of a work cannot be appreciated. The aim of this paper is to show that the way Walton conceives of his categories and art categorization is difficult to square with certain kinds of aesthetic experience—kinds of experience that seems to defy this claim of category-dependence for aesthetic properties. The argument will be advanced for category-free aesthetic experience by considering Barry C. Smith’s account of wine-tasting and his description of his wine drinking ‘epiphany’.

I propose and defend an account on which the semantic content of propositions expressed by utterances making use of modals epistemically is constant; i.e., invariant. Although such proposals are typically considered non-starters, I aim to show that combining such a semantics with a performative account in which such utterances perform two speech acts is quite promising. I argue that a performative account, when combined with an invariant semantic content theory, does a good job of accounting for ordinary intuitions in some of the standard test cases discussed in the literature. I further show that the contextualist has a little noticed problem with how a single speaker is able to consider the same epistemic possibility proposition over time. An invariant position has no such problem, and I argue that this counts strongly in its favor.

A position has been advanced by a number of philosophers, notably by Burnham and Skilleås, that certain knowledge is required to aesthetically appreciate a fine wine. They further argue that pleasure is not an integral part of aesthetically appreciating wine. Their position implies that a novice cannot aesthetically appreciate a fine wine. This paper draws on research into tasting and psychology to rebut these claims. I argue that there is strong evidence from both the average consumer and from wine experts that they are unable to separate enjoyment from aesthetic evaluation; secondly, I argue that wine knowledge may actually preclude tasting of the wine as it exists in the glass due to perceptual bias. I conclude by arguing that it is unclear how exactly knowledge of things like terroir is supposed to affect the taste, as well as question what role conforming to a certain style plays in aesthetic success, as arguments that require knowledge for appreciation typically emphasize knowledge of styles of wine.

There is an array of resources on how to write a philosophy paper, both in print and online. However, the existing resources rarely discuss writing a research paper within the discipline of philosophy. What is typically missing from philosophical writing instruction is the point made by Richard Watson: a philosopher should seek to “enter the dialogue—the conversation—that is the lifeblood of philosophy.” Philosophical writing happens within a community, and what occurs in journals and monographs is the continuation of a conversation that has been going on for over 2000 years. Here I argue for the merits of encouraging students to think of philosophy scholarship as an ongoing conversation, as this will help them to discover significant problems to write on and form more manageable theses; I also describe specific methods for helping students to find scholarly conversations on topics that interest them and enter into that dialogue.

In this paper I take a careful look at Nathan Salmon’s translation argument from his paper “The Very Possibility of Language: A Sermon on Missing Church” to see if it proves as much as Salmon claims. In particular, should we consider the translation argument conclusive evidence that belief ascriptions must be relations between individuals and propositions and that a sentential account is completely inadequate? I don’t think so. Salmon is too quick to dismiss the sentential account on the basis of the translation argument. I will argue that for Salmon to truly give a convincing argument, he needs to give a more complete defense of his intuitions concerning translation and quotation. I aim to accomplish this by re-examining the work of Steven Leeds and Tyler Burge, whose arguments Salmon writes off without adequate grounds.

Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies have proposed a revised contextual analysis of sentences that make use of “might” epistemically. On their view, when a speaker uses an epistemic modal term, several propositions are made available to his conversational partners and, as a result, there are several propositions that may be picked up on by those partners. Because there is no concrete “context of utterance,” there is no one proposition that the speaker could be said to have asserted. This is meant to resolve conflicting truth evaluations by different speakers of a single utterance. I argue that the position is unworkable for two reasons: First, on their view there is no single proposition that counts as being asserted or semantically expressed by a “might” utterance; this has several counterintuitive consequences. Second, their position does not address several of the original problems that led many to abandon a contextual account.

Several authors have turned to a semantic analysis that renders truth relative to a point of assessment in order to explain speaker intuitions concerning the truth-value of certain kinds of statements. On the surface, it appears as if a truth-relative semantics is able to account for ordinary speaker exchanges that involve the problematic terms. However, what about the truth-predicate itself—how exactly are we to understand its use on a relative semantics? Although John MacFarlane offers an analysis of the truth-predicate as used by ordinary speakers, I aim to show his analysis has several counter-intuitive results. I argue that on relativism different uses of ‘is true’ will have differing extensions, and hence differing conditions for application. As a result, it becomes unclear if speakers can faithfully disquotationally report another speaker’s use of sentences of the form ‘P is true’ or predicate truth of contents that contain the truth predicate themselves.

In this article I argue that the best way to ensure that students engage with assigned reading is by having open-ended questions that require textual interpretation to accompany every class session. Although this runs contrary to a recent trend of using multiple-choice questions or true/false questions to ensure reading compliance, using questions that require written responses has four key benefits: (1) such questions result in 75 percent of students completing the assigned reading; this leads to more successful class discussions, and a deeper dive into the course material. (2) Daily assignments can be used to develop specific skills that the instructor would like students to demonstrate. (3) When students come to class having completed the reading, it is much easier to assign productive group assignments. (4) When students engage in significant reading and writing tasks within a semester, critical thinking, reading and writing skills are more likely to be improved.

We demonstrate that many philosophers accept the following claim: When an aesthetic object is apprehended correctly, taking pleasure in said object is a reliable sign that the object is aesthetically successful. We undermine this position by showing that what grounds our pleasurable experience is opaque: In many cases, the experienced pleasure is attributable to factors that have little to do with the aesthetic object. The evidence appealed to is a form of Higher-Order Evidence (HOE) and we consider attempts to overcome said evidence. We argue they are unsuccessful. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making aesthetic judgements.